[orangutango]

Completely agree, and this hits close to home.

I was a very math oriented student at a high school with a heavy bias towards liberal arts ... So when it came to picking senior year electives, I was delighted to enroll in AP statistics.

The classes turned out to be tutorials on the built-in TI-83 stats functions, with step-by-step instructions on how to answer the various types of questions we would encounter on the test. I forgot everything and gained virtually no statistical intuition.

Thankfully I had a similar experience to you ("Probability and Statistics for Engineers") with a fantastic professor who researched computer networks. His lectures were sprinkled with tangents tying the current topic back to his own field / research, which to me made the biggest impact. Contextualizing a taught subject markedly improves the course experience.