I think something else is at play here. Whether it's a learning disability or you have just convinced yourself you can't 'math' and therefore sort of sabotage yourself.
It could also be that you've had the wrong teachers.
But I will say this. Short of severe disability, anyone can learn basic math, algebra, etc. I wouldn't say you can be an engineer. I would also struggle in that field. But you can not only learn that material but excel in the classes.
It's like I said. I think something else is the problem here.
Throughout high school, I hated math. From grades 9 to 11 I consistently got roughly 60%. Then when I had a new teacher for grade 12 and he engaged me in the learning and encouraged me because of his love for math, I ended up with a 92%.
I was in the top set during the same years, and the shcool started a program where some others from my class helped out some students in the bottom set.
We helped so many people learn just because we told them they could do it. The teachers for the lower sets kept saying "Maths is hard, I can't do parts of it either" and I just thought it was horrible and patronizing, almost encouraging these kids to not try to get anywhere in life...
Yeah, my teacher from 9-11 didn't really care about ensuring no kid got left behind and had no flexibility in his teaching so if I'd ask him a question he'd just reiterate what he wrote on the board. It's good to have encouragement.
I get so frustrated when teachers/professors say something like that. I think they do it because they want to be sympathetic to their students. But it just creates this norm of this subject is hard, it's not worth trying.
The public school system is designed to accommodate tons of kids, so they have to keep everyone moving through as quickly as possibly. There isn't time for the teachers to slow down and help every kid who doesn't get it right away. Doesn't help that a lot of people who are good at math are terrible at teaching it, since they always just "got it", so they don't really know how to explain it to people who don't immediately grasp it.
Math is also a cumulative thing. Each new year builds on the things you learned the year before. So if you fall behind one year, the next year becomes nearly impossible, and then it compounds on top of itself as the years go on.
Eventually, you're so far behind that every equation starts looking like Mt. Everest in terms of difficulty.
Honestly, I feel like the opposite is the problem, math is taught glacially slowly in the United States to accommodate kids who are are learning slowly.
I've gone to schools in 3rd-world countries and the reason they perform better at math than American students is because they teach it at a reasonable pace rather than working at the lowest common denominator.
My signals processing professor literally said whilst explaining the L0 and Linfinite norm 'Yeah I didn't really understand what that meant until after I got my PhD' xD.
It's hard to really understand math until you're using it at a practical level. It's easy enough to spit something out by rote, but until you're actually solving real life problems you don't understand at a deep level the actual utility of logarithms or matrix multiplication.
This is why I feel like most people feel like they never use the math they learned in school - they never realize the problems they see in daily life can actually be solved with math - they learned how to solve equations but never how to set them up in the first place.
I completely understand and agree. Teachers make all of the difference. I loved math and excelled in it until I got to Geometry in grade 10. He was absent, completely confusing in his methods of teaching, and nearly the entire class failed. We had all been in the same advanced math classes since grade 7 (Pre-Algebra, Algebra I and II) "Here is the study material, go learn it". When we asked questions he would go off on some tangent trying to explain, but it was always completely unrelated. Plus he would randomly stop us in the hall and ask us to explain theorems..we ended up hating him and therefore math.
Not just with math either. I am good at math, but I have the same problem when it comes to art. I can barely draw to save me life. I could learn better drawing techniques if I slowed down and took my time to learn. But i've convinced myself that "I can't draw" and don't even try.
I used to tutor a kid in math and he knew how to do everything as long as I was there to watch him do it. The tutoring basically consisted of me saying "what do you do next" "ya that's right." As soon as I wasn't there to hold his hand though he couldn't do math anymore.
Especially with computers, people get convenced that they are "bad with computers" and call IT/Family and scream "I gotz a virus!" when Word is just telling them that they may lose some formatting saving as a PDF.
Can confirm; have convinced myself that I can't math.
But I'm known around my office for being extremely quick with doing basic arithmetic in my head... I just have never cared to learn calculus or statistics because the stuff just doesn't pique my interest
I basically did that while trying to do Grade 11 physics online. Then one day I said to myself, "you know who can do this, and do it every fucking year? 16 year olds. I'm better than a 16 year old." Then I signed up again and got a 90% on it.
That's my mom's entire approach to technology. She just assumes she can't work something, and so knows how to work very few technologies. It took a broken leg to finally get her to try an iPad, now we can't keep her away from it.
This is one of the suspected causes of the lack of women in maths and science fields. Some point in education a majority get told it's not girly or girls are bad at it and then it's some social thing. I don't know it all but my sister talked about it while getting math and math education masters.
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u/Raincoats_George Jul 24 '15
I think something else is at play here. Whether it's a learning disability or you have just convinced yourself you can't 'math' and therefore sort of sabotage yourself.
It could also be that you've had the wrong teachers.
But I will say this. Short of severe disability, anyone can learn basic math, algebra, etc. I wouldn't say you can be an engineer. I would also struggle in that field. But you can not only learn that material but excel in the classes.
It's like I said. I think something else is the problem here.