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Is it truly a difficult subject that only a few people with special brains can master? Or is it just that the entire way it's taught is awful. If you don't excel at math when you are very young, can you ever "catch up" later in life? Have many adults mastered math after being terrible at it as children?
Is it truly a difficult subject that only a few people with special brains can master? Or is it just that the entire way it's taught is awful. If you don't excel at math when you are very young, can you ever "catch up" later in life? Have many adults mastered math after being terrible at it as children?
Yes, you can catch up later in life if you have a solid foundation in arithmetic as prior to puberty. Mathematics is a language and as with other languages, if the foundation is set at a young age, it's easier later.
Mathematics takes rigor. And often, young, immature people do not want to devote that type of work to its study. To many young people, mathematics is not entertaining, so they don't like it. You cannot fade in and out during instruction and expect to understand it. You must listen and make a concerted effort to understand. Many young people lack this type of focus and discipline.
I had a very solid elementary school education. Junior high school I started getting into trouble and ended up with only one year of high school. It took a long time to get my life on track, but when I did I found that I really enjoyed math once I had the maturity to sit still, concentrate, and do the practice. In high school, I remember marching down to my counselor's office and demanding to be taken out of algebra and put in a lower class because algebra was too hard for me. And it was because I daydreamed in class and had no intention of doing any homework.
There are other reasons that people struggle in mathematics, but it is rarely, if ever, a stand alone disability when no other cognitive disability is present.
I have a master's degree in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis on mathematics education and 15 years teaching it with above average results.
People sell themselves short when they think that they cannot be good in math.
Is it truly a difficult subject that only a few people with special brains can master? Or is it just that the entire way it's taught is awful. If you don't excel at math when you are very young, can you ever "catch up" later in life? Have many adults mastered math after being terrible at it as children?
As someone who was horrible at math in high school but excelled in math in college, I'm going to say it's lack of effort. I didn't like math any better in college but I was paying for the courses and had one shot at bettering my life so I made myself put the effort in. Then I started excelling in math. I have to add that I think there were some brain changes that happened between high school and college as well. I think that in high school I might not have been developmentally ready for math or maybe not developmentally ready to put the effort in to learn something that was hard for me. However, once I started putting in the effort it didn't take long before it wasn't so hard anymore. In fact, in time, math became fun. I started viewing it as puzzles to solve. I remember getting kicked out of class one day because the professor was about to show a solution to a problem that he decided I needed to figure out on my own.
The moral of my story is that if you're not good at math today, try again tomorrow. Maybe you just didn't put the effort in the first time or maybe you just weren't ready yet. I think many people get convinced they're bad at math and never try again.
Is it truly a difficult subject that only a few people with special brains can master? Or is it just that the entire way it's taught is awful. If you don't excel at math when you are very young, can you ever "catch up" later in life? Have many adults mastered math after being terrible at it as children?
I doubt it. I couldn't pass algebra in high school and had to drop out of community college because of it. Now nearly 20 years later I make $9 an hour.
Is it truly a difficult subject that only a few people with special brains can master? Or is it just that the entire way it's taught is awful. If you don't excel at math when you are very young, can you ever "catch up" later in life? Have many adults mastered math after being terrible at it as children?
It's really the way it is taught these days. Mostly, it's taught like a "language" with memorization of formulas and word problems. My brain doesn't understand that take on it, though, because, unlike a real language, it is never translated. If you really wanted to teach me math, you would need to help me conceptualize. Often, a simple algebraic operation carries with it so much complexity if spelled out in the real world that it can become powerful and difficult to forget. For me, mathematics was taught as a mysterious language the meaning of which is unknown. I learned how to form mathematical "sentences" and do mathematical operations, but I never learned what those things meant. Consequently, I forgot them the following year and had to frustratingly re-learn them. My advisor thought I would do well in math, because of my love for foreign languages; he was very wrong. I changed my major to English out of frustration after almost flunking out.
I excel at learning real languages, because I know what the words mean and how the sentences are formed and put together. I honestly think I could learn and remember how to write and recognize Chinese more quickly than I could learn mathematics because of the way I was taught it. Children usually don't just learn words in isolation, how to spell them, where to put them in the sentence, etc., without first learning what they mean and how they are used. Math, though, isn't demystified to many students until they finish college and get jobs. It's too confusing to me, but I don't think it's the way my brain works; I think it's the way it is taught. If it were taught more like a story, with the word problems first, and if students were given a chance to comprehend the formulas, I think math would become more enjoyable, and, more importantly, easy to remember.
Of the three or four responses thus far, it seems like there are four similar views - that it's the way it's taught - with four differing opinions on how or why it should be taught a certain way. That's part of the problem, I suspect. Each person learns a slightly different way than another person and it's virtually impossible to cater to each individual.
That being said, I've read some studies about, interestingly enough, language actually being a good first step towards helping children understand mathematics. In Japanese, for example, to say "twenty" you literally say "ni ju" or "two ten" or perhaps more obvious, "2 times 10." So, by the time a kid learns to count to twenty, they've already got a basis for multiplication built into their language. A lot of Asian languages are that way and there are thoughts that because of that, there may be a small hint of truth to the "Asians are good at math" stereotype. In no way am I saying that it's finite proof, just that a kid exposed to the idea of multiplication through their own basic language skills early in life may have a better shot at being good at math. As a side note, my wife is Japanese and absolutely sucks at math. I wouldn't trust her to balance a checkbook to save my life.
For me, I'm very similar to those who hated math in school but learned to love it later in life. I didn't do terrible in school with math, I just hated it. I was never bad at it, just despised it. Thought it was pointless and boring. Then, a few years ago, I began to learn that you could model real world phenomenon with amazing accuracy with math. I had a real epiphany about how math was literally describing the real world and I fell in love with it.
We're always told how math describes reality but I never saw it before. When I finally "saw" it. It blew my mind.
In High School an entire YEAR is spent on Alg 1, Alg 2, etc. Of course kids are going to get sick of it, dislike it and do poorly.
A lot of math is taught with "My way or the highway" either students do it exactly as their teachers do without question or it's wrong (the method not answer). There are almost always multiple ways to approach/solve a math problem, not just one.
The only way to get better at math is to "do math."
I was always an A to B+ math student regardless of the discipline (algebra, trigonometry, geometry, calculus, matrices & vectors/linear algebra, statistics etc.). Though math became much more challenging in college, I learned to study with greater earnest. Unlike history or English Lit/Comp, you can't absorb math by skimming through a book, taking a few notes and going to class. In math, outside of truly gifted people, you have to sit down and just work through problems. Sometimes it helps having the answers and then trying to figure out how to arrive at the answer. If you receive 10 questions for homework, do 15 or 20. Homework in math is often very beneficial in helping to learn concepts.
Default Why do so many people have a difficult time with math?
It's 50% the way it is taught, 50% innate ability, and 50% effort by the student.
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Default Why do so many people have a difficult time with math?
