[btilly]

Sadly, there are. Or at least were.

When I went through university the standard set of courses was a Calculus course that was mostly about derivatives, a second one that was mostly about integrals, a third Calculus course that was about multi-variable Calculus. That third course necessarily had to teach matrices, and taught it as rote calculations. There was a follow-up differential equations course which refreshed people's memories of matrices..as a rote calculation.

It was done this way because the multi-variable Calculus course was a prerequisite for a lot of physics+engineering courses. So a lot of students wanted to take that sequence. Differential equations were a prerequisite for some other advanced courses. Linear algebra was pretty much just for math majors.

[jimhefferon]

For me also. It is still that way in many programs, that I can tell.