@tigerle: thank you.
Sadly, the professor might have tried to do something in fashion nowadays: to “contextualize” calculations, to make them more real to students. In several textbooks I’ve seen this attempt spectacularly backfire. One involved counting how many limbs had been chopped off based on a literary except describing a battle. The text went all the way to printing before someone “pinged” on it. The worst part of it is that, often, the lengthy stories distract and confuse students, because they are no less abstract to them (since it’s very hard to find actual, concrete, relatable stories that match a math problem past elementary arithmetics/statistics.)
I used to have my business students read in praise of disobedience's introduction. You meet the perfect employee who becomes an executive… then realize he’s a nazi who was part of the final solution. The book goes with A specialist: portrait of a modern criminal by Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman, a documentary made entirely with footage from Eichman’s trial where Arendt coined the concept “Banality of Evil”.
http://www.eyalsivan.info/index.php?p=fichefilm&id=11#&panel1-7