Why is linear algebra always taught as a mess of contextless formulas and jargon?

I don't care what an eigenvalue is, because I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it.
But I do find it practical information that there's rules like representing n spatial dimensions with an (n+1) square matrix to enable spatial transformations via certain multiplications. That's one of the few bits of linear algebra that sticks for me, because I actually know something I can do with that information.
Is there anything I can read to learn practical linear algebra? Pure math is completely pointless and tends to lead to jargon being explained only with more jargon.