OutrageousHairdo [he/him]

Maybe this is a generational thing. When I was learning in stuff like grade school or whatever you’d constantly get problems like “Sally has 3 apples. She gives 2 to Jared. How many apples does she have left?” Obviously, I didn’t get as many of those doing like diff eq, but the whole reason you learn subjects like those is to apply them in the sciences, and you just don’t take the course if you don’t intend to use the math. That said, you absolutely can apply this outside of just arithmetic - trig and calculus you can 100% turn into practical problems. Even stuff like Calc 3 and Linear Algebra you can very easily think of more physical examples for. I remember using both in Electromagnetics!

This feels pretty unsurprising to me. This is a big part of why math education involves both raw arithmetic and “word problems”.