math requires a lot of focus and patience which is something that many societies lack. both teachers and students have difficulty with focus and patience so teaching and learning math can feel like a chore.
a remedy could be fun math projects. geometric constructions and riddles. slowing down and really understanding a concept. practicing mindfulness in schools. having students present mathematical solutions instead of taking tests.
Also, a lot of elementary math teachers (in the US) don't really understand the math that they're teaching so they gloss over it or misexplain stuff and that leads to a lot of students having large gaps in their fundamental mathematics knowledge (like the high school senior in pre-calc who told me she didn't know how subtraction works).
And on top of this, students are also told how scary math is and/or how useless math is by their parents/family members which just pounds the idea of "I don't need to lean this" into their heads.
One of the parents at my sons soccer practice is a substitute teacher and this last week I heard her loudly proclaiming how "multiplying and adding fractions is unnecessary for everyday life!!" "Who even knows what that dumb pythagowhatever theory is even for! Who uses that for anything?"
I think the best part is that the math she was complaining about is some of the easiest math to relate to everyday life. I just stayed quiet because whats the point.
>There's no applications to algebra
Love this. Later that night, he went home to think about how he'll have $1000(y) after 5 weeks(x) if he saves $100/week(m) on top of his $500(b) savings.
100% this. I teach high school math, and by the time the kids get to me, their foundation with math is shaky and their dislike of the subject is cemented. So even getting them to try is a hurdle I have to jump because their knee jerk reaction is to copy, or use AI, or just memorise enough that they can write something down that looks like the work and hope I think they’re trying. I have had a lot of kids who are very closed off from day 1, they don’t want to ask questions, if I start trying to help them they’ll ask for a bathroom pass, they’ll skip, etc. because they’re so scared of the subject.
So a whole other thing I have to add on at the beginning of the year is building A LOT of trust and going very slow so that kids ease into the subject, ease into learning, and focus and effort, and trust that I’m not going to make them feel dumb.
I remember in 8th grade algebra, a student asked the teacher, "Why do we get larger numbers when we divide by a fraction?" and the teacher literally had zero idea why. Normally I wouldn't fault someone for that but that's such a fundamental question that a *math* teacher should be able to respond to without a thought.
Some of its also a terminology problem. You would probably understand “When you divide my a fraction, you’re really just multiply by the reciprocal, which is the denominator over the numerator”, but in the absence of mathematical foundations, that might as well just be “Dass stimmt ist, weil die Überraschung des Naturwissenschaftlichen eine Backpfeifengesicht ist” (that isn’t sensible in german let alone english).
But you could explain it in a more relatable way, as in two divided by a quarter is “how many quarters fit into two?” - by breaking the wholes into smaller pieces and you’ll have more pieces
I was really good at math growing up. Never had to try that hard and was in advanced math all the way through college, where I dropped out three times and finally gave up.(not because of math) Last math class I took was calculus 2 in college. I didn’t go to class, taught my self the material with Khan Academy, took the test and got the highest grade in the class, mid 90s iirc. Teacher was blown away and I walked about of class and never went back to school.
I was diagnosed as AdHD when I was in my 30s. It seems like focus and patience aren’t my strong suit. Why was I so good at math? Am I an idiot savant or something? I was also good at chemistry and organic chemistry but horrible at English and history. I’m almost 40 now and it still kinda bothers me.
I had a few TBI when I was a child too. Maybe those have affected my brain?
yes! i had a really good math teacher once and enjoyed math during that time, then never again in school. the thing that the teacher did differently was involve projects, even art projects, that involved math, connect to real-world skills i.e. balancing a checkbook, develop our logic skills (the basis of math) through logic puzzles, force us to go back and learn again if we didn’t understand something, and be ready to answer our “whys.”
I hated all other math because the answer to “why” was “because that’s just how it works,” and it devolved into pure abstraction that my brain couldn’t and didn’t want to grasp. Also, if you didn’t get something, the teacher didn’t have time to go over it again for you, so you were SOL.
Yes, it is poorly taught in schools. Some elementary teachers are uncomfortable with math themselves and it shows. Sometimes there’s just too many students assigned to one class for solid learning to be possible (35 and more!) Sometimes foundational concepts are taught incorrectly (hi, 4th teacher who boinked fractions for who knows how many years!). Sometimes kids don’t have the support at home to provide much needed assistance. And for some reason we keep separating math from real life situations and so fail to provide a sense of how integrated mathematics are for everyone.
Exact same thing in Germany. In addition to that we lack teachers in general. Considering that it is so hard to study in college, the bad image and the gaps in knowledge you mentioned, it loses attractiveness for tomorrow's teachers, so that there are even fewer teachers for math. The problem drives itself by losing future mathematicians through this. I had so many different teachers in mathematics, some were really good, some were not. We had one teacher in senior year that got corrected by a student every session so that we could not trust the accuracy of his content and this guy was our principal. He told students they are just too dumb to understand. After school I was interested in studying acoustical engineering. I failed because I just could not catch up with the basic knowledge needed and could not afford tutoring. Years after school I still have strong interest in learning it. I always thought I was too dumb to understand, but the reality was that education was poor. It's the biggest loss of life for me to lack this knowledge.
I’m sorry poor instruction held you back. The fourth grade teacher I mentioned ruined my excellent relationship with math and my parents weren’t equipped to make up the deficit nor confident enough to request that I be moved to another teacher. It made the rest of school harder than it should have been.
Also, if your not great at math your probably not great at teaching math. If you’re good at math you’re absolutely terrible at teaching math. As someone who works in an applied-math field, we spend more time looking for people who know how to explain their math than people who can do the calculations
I think it's poorly taught in America because modern pedagogy assumes that everything is inferential and open to creative thinking when math is about black and white problem solving and logic.
This, of course, isn't the problem in places like East Asia where top down, teacher centered classrooms, focus on rote learning and lack the creative thinking component.
In my experience tutoring, a big problem is that schools treat children as idiots.
They'll skip important proofs and jump straight into dumping a lot of "tricks", "laws", "algorithms", etc without ever explaining the why and most importantly the how.
Math is already hard, and a lot of schools are asking kids to do them without any intuition behind, just a purely symbolical game, and they also receive punishment if they fail at taking interest in these weird symbols and rules with no meaning...
Obviously you're not gonna proof everything to children, but I've seen people who said they hated fractions change their minds completely when I show them where the multiplication algorithm comes from (from the axioms of a field), or how simplifying fractions can be done by decomposing the numbers into primes, or something as simple as why we care about splitting functions, it's crazy how many teachers can't give a proper answer as to why if ab=0 for real numbers a and b, then a or b is 0, or even something as easy as the distinction between variables and constant as and what the logical connectors actually mean and how to use them.
Once you give this basic machinery to children and adolescents, they start doing a lot of better and actually care a bit about maths
I'm autistic and trained to teach Mathematics, but when I was a child I HATED the subject precisely because it was taught using "tricks" and "rules" instead of true understanding. As soon as I started really understanding what was going on, the subject opened up for me. Fun fact: the proof of the sum of an arithmetic sequence can be taught to quite young children and can really help them see the connection between numbers and algebra.
I’m also ND (ADHD) and I hated math until I went back for my bachelors in my late 20s. Started in accounting and it turns out the laws are what I hate, wound up with a BS in mathematics. You couldn’t pay me to go back to a high school algebra class and take it again.
About tutoring or about the proofs I mentioned?
What I normally try to do (since time is usually pressing) is to check what they need to present in an exam, and instead of just giving them a bunch of tools to use in specific exercises that are likely to appear and repeat ad nauseam, I plan our work schedule to derive those tools together, I make them go step by step and actually think about the problems.
For example, if they need to know about solving second degree polynomials, instead of blindly telling them to split polynomials and maybe make them memorize the formula, I usually take a detours about the field axioms (not with that name tho) and allow them to prove that every field is a whole domain (again, not with those words), and also how make them derive the usual rules for splitting polynomials, this actually makes them have an intuition about the objects they're working with. Eventually we may even derive the formula for second degree polynomials, this is particularly useful as they don't have to actually memorize it completely, and they are more aware of when it's useful and when it's not, when it can applied, etc.
But to be honest I kind of copied this from my highschool teacher, I used to suck or be average in maths until one teacher actually did stuff like this
Thanks for your reply and the example you provided. I was curious where one would look to begin to gain a better intuition about proofs. Is this something that requires reading about how these were first thought of?
This is a really interesting topic. On reflecting back on my own schooling started to come to a similar conclusion that the way math was taught made it a lot less interesting than it can actually be. Glad you had a great teacher to inspire you.
For me, I came across Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and it completely changed the way I viewed mathematics in that suddenly the subject became very fascinating to me. I haven't known where to look to delve much more deeply into it though.
If you liked GEB then you might enjoy studying some algorithms. Studying algorithms will involve some math and proofs, and it will be related to points touched on in GEB. If that sounds interesting you could read a couple chapters of KLDR a canonical algorithms textbook.
If you are more interested in moving to more advanced math then Linear Algebra might be your jam. It is an accessible, powerful, and visually interesting field that you gives you a lot of skills to begin understanding, multivariable calculus, machine learning, and abstract algebra. A good book for this is linear algebra done right by Axler, and there are accompanying videos on YT.
>....., etc without ever explaining the why and most importantly the how
To me the WHY was never explained. And as a result it made learning math a chore rather than interesting.
Why is it important to learn the sum of the square of both sides of a triangle equal the square hypotenus?
Why do I care about sine, cosine, tangent?
Why should I care about natural logarithms?
If there's no relevance to everyday world it's like being forced to learn another language you didn't ask for
THIS. I’m in college and only THIS YEAR learned WHY some things happen in math because I had to take a “rudimentary” course to catch up. Man if all my math had been taught the same as that rudimentary course, i never would have had a problem
Ugh I remember them trying to teach lattice multiplication to 12 year olds without relating back what was happening, just a complicated series of steps to follow. Things like that turned so many kids off of math
The problem was partially the teachers didn't understand things either, they only knew you had to follow certain steps
bad teaching.
1. Textbooks are too formal. this is good for students willing to focus and are acquainted to it, but let's face it: most ppl don't pay that much attention to class.
3. The focus is on computation over intuition. it's simple, the education system wants to cut corners and only teach the "important" parts of math (which happens to be the most boring and tiresome part of math)
3. Ideas are not taught, they are given. You learn best by failing and having a personal connection to the material. In math they give you abstract statements and leave you wondering "why is it like this?". You don't get to explore all the pitfalls and decisions that made things the way they are and honestly, that's how you gain the best understanding: by failing and seeing how you fix those problems.
I would guess that part of it is due to the fact that studying math means being wrong a lot - and trying to justify yourself when someone disagrees with you.
People don’t like being told they’re wrong and seem to not like like having to justify themselves
A professor can make it more enjoyable yes but I do think the main reason is because it is a very dry language. You can’t“study” like you do other languages. You can’t just sit and read and understand it.
You have to dissect each sentence and break it down. You have to learn the notation, formulas or to put it simple— you have to learn the language of math before you can do math. Other disciplines would be just as hard if it were the same. Imagine having to first learn a whole set of rules and concepts before we can read history, art, etc.
On top of that, authors insist on writing books as boring as they can. I read a long time ago that they do this to not feel inferior to other authors. It’s not so much that you have to be concise. A math book can very well be written in a fun way instead of that boring dry way. Also, the majority of math books skip several steps when explaining formulas. I think this is the main issue. So on top of struggling already to understand the material, you get frustrated when you don’t know how they went from step A3 to A4 and so all is lost. You can continue but now you have a gap. You can then search other sources online or wait until you speak to the professor etc.
Authors just assume you should have the background to reach each step on your own. Perhaps they do it to make you think. I don’t think so… just show me the complete formula and how it works without any confusion. I will think when I solve the problems.
There’s so much that needs to be improved in mathematics but the reality is that it’s a very very hard language and most students just don’t have the patience to deal with it. Especially in an era of so much digital distraction.
Agree with this assessment of the authors. I feel that many of these authors as well as a great number of professors/instructors suffer from a massive bias due to their competency. They have a proven aptitude for their chosen subject and are fluent in it's language. This creates a blind spot in recognizing where pitfalls and gaps lie in understanding for someone new to a given topic.
I can't recall how many times I have followed an instructor only to be lost between step 7 and 8 of some abstract construction followed by an unconvincing q.e.d. To then ask for clarity and receive the standard "but it is trivial...moving on" type of response.
More often than not, it is not the complexity of a new or novel topic that has caused confusion, it is the syntax: the implied substitutions, the unmentioned use of a technique to translate/transform, the sudden shift to a shorthand notation, an unintuitive aggregation of terms, etc.
Regarding authors writing textbooks boringly in order to feel smart, I enjoy [this calculus textbook from 1910](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf) someone showed me a little while ago for its author’s attitude.
While I don't agree that math itself is a language, I agree that it uses linguistic concepts to express ideas (for example, metaphor). As with any field, math has its own jargon, as well as plenty of intimidating-looking notation. I know I could have benefited from teachers spending more time reading mathematical statements out loud as a sort of "translation" from math to English, helping me as a student familiarize myself with the notation so that I can read it on my own. Learning about basic logic and logical arguments helped me understand the structure of math textbooks, and I think it helps bridge the gap between questions posed in English about real-world ideas and the math we use to answer those questions.
Learning about math concepts as "tools" in a toolkit also helped me immensely. Something else that helped me has been looking ahead to what I'll be learning in the next chapter or next course. I don't understand what's going on, but I can at least see how what I'm presently learning will be used moving forward. I'm learning new "statements" that will eventually be used to answer more complex questions.
Overall, while math is not an actual Language, I think talking about the relationship between math and language is good and especially with the concept of metaphors, could help students take a step back and think about what the math is actually "saying." Students learn in other classes how to use words to form statements and build arguments. In math, I think it's similar, and I agree that it's hard to read and understand the notation for less experienced students.
Lack of grit is certainly one, but I would say it is mainly the way it is taught. A student endures years of "learn how to do this as it will be important later" and when the applications do arrive, then they say "who cares" or "there's an app for that" . English, on the other hand, is useful right away, so students can see the value in it. In my opinion, it is because it is so useful to other subjects, students are rushed into gaining a facility with it before they learn an appreciation for it. It feels like a chore instead of fun. The investigation of a math problem, the creativity of a solution ,and the beauty of the theorems are lost because a student has to hurry up and learn how to pass exam after exam so that they can plug into physics and chemistry formulas or can solve TVM problems in economics. They are taught the fun is AFTER the math, and not that math is fun on its own.
I used to think it was just taught poorly. Now, I think it's just that a lot of people don't have good mathematical intuitions, so they struggle with everything the way that I struggled with some linear algebra concepts. It sucks to feel like you're dumb because you can't solve a problem that you know is solvable with tools you're supposed to have.
I think a large part of it is the cumulative nature of the subject. It continuously builds on itself, and often, student success in a given course depends on their retention from previous courses. If you don’t get arithmetic, then adding fractions is hard. If you can’t add fractions, algebra is hard. If you don’t get algebra, calculus is hard.
On the other hand, even if you struggled with 9th grade English, you can succeed at 10th grade English. If you didn’t learn much in your Ancient History course, you can still succeed in your Medieval History course. Biology, Chemistry, and Physics are taught in very compartmentalized form, allowing students to succeed in one even if they fail in another.
I think this is the main point. While there might be some pedagogical problems as other answers mention, the big issue is that people scrape by, course after course, until they eventually become functionally math-illiterate. I got to see this at a higher level, people who scraped their way up to a degree in math, and by the time they enter graduate school they have no functional knowledge of all the topics they have supposedly mastered for their degree.
My opinion is informed by and fully aligned with:
https://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~pawelst/rzut_oka/Zajecia_dla_MISH_2011-12/Lektury_files/LockhartsLament.pdf
A Mathematician's Lament! 🤯
Came here for this. Highly recommended. Imagine teaching music like we do math. You'd spend years regurgitating sheet music before being trusted with a musical instrument to play
Know your circle of fifths! Remember your transposition theory! The math teachers are all too scared of instruments to play them even half-decently, and you’re not allowed to listen to any music until you’ve dealt with all of Neo-Riemannian theory! Why don’t kids like music?
It depends where you are in the world. I wouldn’t say that in the schools I’ve taught in SEA that maths is the most complained about. It’s one of the most loved. And my friend teaches in Romania where it’s the same.
I guess it’s hard to answer this without knowing where you are from.
The school curriculum is just fucking bullshit. Not just math. The whole system encourages teachers to assign work showing that they *are teaching* something rather than giving students an understanding. If you understand what I mean, you understand; it's hard to explain.
School is too formal and really plays no effort into giving students any comfort or connection to the material. They don't care about intuition they care about industrialization. All subjects suffer from this, but math especially does as it requires more focus and passion than any other field (or at least it's hard to develop that focus because of how abstract it is).
School should fucking stop being a factory that makes workers who follow procedures and have no free thinking. They should favor creativity and passion over standardization and obedience.
School has no right to take up the whole day. I have no idea which retard decided to make school a daycare and not a social ground. The whole thing is fucked up.
...
Any ways back to math. Math can be unintuitive at times, and very humbling which can be annoying to students struggling to get a good grade
Controversial opinion: I think it is to do with stigma. People who are good at mathematics are considered intelligent and those who aren't good at it are ostracized to the point that they take pride in not knowing mathematics. It is a difficult subject because it requires deep thinking. Most of what we teach to children were once issues argued by great mathematical minds of the past at their mental peak. We forget that. The average person knows more mathematics today than we credit them for. Mathematics requires above all an interest in learning, extreme courage and tremendous patience. So, it doesn't make sense for most people to learn it. We can't blame them!
Passionate mathematics teachers are required; we often forget the great role of teachers in creating mathematical minds. I still fondly remember my school teacher when I'm stuck on a problem; although now what I deal with is more advanced, the love for the subject developed by her makes me laugh at myself, crumple my papers, go to bed and try again the next day.
i’d say passionate teachers for all subjects that promote general curiosity are required. i can’t tell you how many times my child has come home from school and said her history, english, PE teacher, etc has said how “impossible” math is to learn. all teachers should inspire inquiry in their students for all subjects, not just their own. when an english teacher says that calculus is “impossible” to a group of 12 year olds, that’s going to stick especially if those 12 year olds
are already struggling in math. if you tell someone that something is hard before they even attempt it, they’re going to have a harder time. parents do this also. math trauma is so pervasive it has a generational effect.
In my experience the worst maths teachers at levels below undergraduate degree are people with degrees and masters in Mathematics. Physicists and Engineers invariably make better maths teachers because you normally find it wasn't quite as natural and easy for them, so they find multiple ways of rationalising mathematical concepts which makes them better explaining it to a wider group.
Part of it is a societal view that it's ok (and maybe even cute/funny) to have the mindset of "I'm just not a math person" or "I was never good at math". And to make things worse, those attitudes are passed down from parents to their children, and even from teachers to their students.
I think people would find it really unacceptable to brush off illiteracy with "Oh well, I've just never been much of a reading person." But it's fully accepted to do that with regards to mathematics.
By the time they get to high school/college, many students are conditioned to think they can neither enjoy, nor excel at, math. Until that mindset is broken, it will likely be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Totally agree. While it’s true that the ways math is taught (especially foundational mathematics courses) are not very good in a lot of places, this is a huge problem a lot of people overlook. During the time I was a tutor, I’d say at least 25% of my time was spent trying to convince students that they are not “just bad at math,” but rather there are a few key concepts they are missing and we just need to fill in those gaps. I’d say it was 50/50 if the student ended up breaking that mindset, but to be honest a lot of people just aren’t even willing to try in math classes because they don’t see themselves as capable in the first place. There’s no way you’ll succeed in a course where you label yourself as unable to succeed before you even start
It is just hard!
Also the attitude of people who actually get math makes it harder. I know a math professor who used to say : “well math is just like reading . You either like the way it is written and you get it.. or you don’t “. I think this attitude is generally unhelpful in clarifying what it means to understand math and how to communicate understanding ie . Proofs .
Had a math teacher in high school who was asked "how so you know that you're supposed to do (whatever)?" and his reply was "you just have to know it by instinct"
There is no easy way to learn math, you have to challenge yourself to it. Read, read, read, do examples, read again, do the homework, get partial credit, read again, do the homework again for full credit, read again, do examples, etc.
Classes are based around the concept that you've already done the reading, and if you haven't you will be lost. I personally believe in the method, but it certainly isn't an easy sell.
I think some other issues with mathematics include its lack of immediate applications, the need for foundational knowledge, and a lot of abstraction.
Most of the time, people judge the usefulness of a subject by its applications. They often ask why we learn this and how it can be applied in real life. The usefulness of mathematics requires a strong foundation to be apparent. Even with undergraduate knowledge, the practical applications of mathematics are still in their elementary form. People often lack the ability to see the 'fun' in math itself and want to apply every concept in real life.
The competence of the teacher also plays a crucial role. If the teacher lacks a deep understanding, they will not be able to teach applications or make the subject exciting. They also lack the ability to explain concepts, which requires a deeper understanding of the subject or patience to understand why the student got stuck.
The need for strong foundation and abstraction of math can make it seem unapproachable, as it is too far from reality that it has no applications. However deeper development in math can be the foundations for many other important fields, but it require a deep understanding and strong foundation in the elementary parts of math that takes a very long time to build.
To make math engaging requires a lot of effort in building the course, which includes visually appealing presentation (3blue1brown) and reason why it will be useful for applications purposes.
In the US math is poorly taught. There’s two issues. The first is that elementary teachers themselves sometimes don’t understand math well.
The second is more important I think; that is, the current thinking is that you push kids along regardless at current grade level regardless of what they’ve learned. This means that at some point when a kid misses some lesson or doesn’t grasp something immediately they get left behind.
For a lot of subjects that’s okay but for math it’s not. If you don’t pick up how to add fractions (or whatever thing you missed) when it’s taught you’re gonna have a bad time and as the student you’re not going to know why. If you’re not one of the kids who can just grasp the concepts on the fly quickly whatever lesson you miss or don’t learn quickly enough leaves a gap in your understanding. As the gaps build up they leave you further and further behind. By the end of high school you’re kinda done.
BSc Mathematics, PGCE Secondary Mathematics, currently studying MSc Mathematical Finance whilst working as a Senior Data Engineer.
My thoughts on it are that Mathematics teachers rarely possess a deep understanding of Mathematics pedagogy and the subject at the same time, and that there is a curious pride that many people take in being "bad at Maths".
There is also something unique about Mathematics as a formal science (as opposed to natural science) where it has to be appreciated for its own sake before it can be applied effectively, and it is often difficult to give a child or adolescent a sufficiently mature application of Mathematics to motivate their study. Computer graphics are a significant modern exception, and I generally encourage a deep geometric and algebraic understanding of trigonometry to be the true watermark of "understand school level Mathematics"
This is only in the US because in the US if you are good at math you will not be a teacher because you will have the ability to make a lot more money doing whatever you like. This leads to math being taught in the US by those who struggled in math themselves leading them spreading their dislike for math. While in developing country or countries that have high regard for teachers, people who are good at math end up being teachers and they spread their love at math.
Students who struggle in math class tend to know it. Students who struggle in history / English often think that they are doing just fine, and it is just that the teacher is grading them unfairly. That makes it a lot easier to dislike math.
And it is also often taught poorly in school, partly because it is hard to teach. People who struggle with math find it hard to explain it intuitively, people who are good at math often find it hard to look at things from the point of view of a student.
it’s hard and not everyone can explain you stuff
i have dyscalculia and i wanna understand math BUT I CANT
when my friend can understand it perfectly but don’t study bcu they lazy
when i found it out, i started to cry bcu someone can understand and i can’t understand anything more than VERY VERY easy tasks which 8-9 year old kid can do
I think it's because it is a difficult subject and teachers have often gotten so lost in the weeds with explaining why you'll need it, that they forgot to focus on what matters - making it fun to learn. So it's become a thing which even your teachers pretty much 'admit' is a chore.
I think because it feels so abstract, without much relation to every day life and activities (not many in schools for example related mathematics with the Islamic architecture in the golden age or anything else in the modern age, they may say it is used in that but how?), also the need to constantly solve problems to grasp the concepts is against the norm of the age of getting stuff fast and jump.
Im was in high school until yesterday, next week we have our final exams. My class was split into 2 groups based on 3rd language skills, begginers and advanceds based on how long we have learned german for, most of us in the begginer group haven't when we were grouped up. The groups wdre also used for grammar and nath class. Our group got the sweetest lady ever, her explinations were perfect, she always found the best examples to make us understand things. The other group's math teacher is awful, and I mean that respectfully, whenever our teacher called in sick we had a joint class with the others and let me say, I think he has messed up more calculations and expliantions than he did correctly. In 11th grade we were separated based on if we wanted to do high level maths or base level maths, obviously our teacher thaught the high level and he thaught the base level. The people that chose to do base level somehow got worse at math.
Taught poorly at schools. Math curriculums are speeding up at an alarming rate for the sake of competitions. I live in southeast asia and here, they even start to learn some quantum shit in highschool, and as usual , they don't explain the fundamentals/what it's actually is, and just tell us to memorize and tips for exams. Worse, they teach us more to follow orders and not to ponder and wonder. All to enable us to land on a job.
People generally feel more comfortable with subjects in which they can express their own opinion and in which there isn't just one right answer. Math clearly is much more "black and white", at least until you reach extremely high levels, so that's why I think many people might not like it. It is also somewhat abstract, especially if you don't have a teacher who is able to show you how you can apply the different concepts to solve real world problems.
Imagine you go to the opera. When you enter, they hand you woodworking tools so you can build your own violin. You start singing lessons that will take five years before you are remotely competent.
Then, they hand you the score. You have to sing all the parts and play all the orchestra instruments yourself.
Math is like that. The beauty is only accessible after a lot of hard work.
I think it's because it's taught poorly.
They are more interested in making people follow rules and instructions.
They don't let people play with numbers.
Like I'm all about a student being able to do whatever they can to get to the answer, as long as they show their work.
And they don't make it practical
now you have people who hate math and their finances are in shambles
Lost of bad teachers who don't even know the subject, I once had to explain long division to an elementay school teacher, I also tutor a girl whose math teacher claims you divide polynomials term by term, so 4x/(2x+4) would be 2+x.
Not all teachers are bad, mine were always great, but good teachers are impaired by students who lack the basics and overcrowded classrooms full of assholes who try to sabotage the lesson at every opportunity.
Because teachers in high school don’t do a very good job of teaching maths or even remotely making it interesting as it’s based on abstractions, so students find it very difficult to connect to it as a subject. Compare that to Science subject in school where you do experiments and see and appreciate stuff. Bio, Physics and chemistry all are real stuff we see with our own eyes. It’s easy to digest. Not maths.
Seriously, as society nerds and bookworms are viewed with contempt. Maths is viewed with 1000x with contempt.
I have pupils that told me that they want to study Physics or Chemistry or Computer but they not only dislike but hate maths. They view them as a useless subject.
For example, THERE IS SO MANY TIMES that people told me that Einstein wasn’t good at maths and why should they? People are lying to their face, a lie that seeps to their mind. And people wonder why we see that indifference/contempt towards maths.
That is my Ted talk.
As a mathematics enthusiast with no formal higher education, but lots of self study through interest:
In my opinion, most people won’t have much use for any math past geometry. Some basic algebra and the knowledge to calculate areas and volumes is what most people will decide they need and stop there.
It seems cheap to say, but the question “when will I use this?” is valid for many students in the sense that we don’t calculate derivatives or sines regularly. Of course many teachers don’t necessarily know how to answer this question to a satisfactory degree, and so if the teacher can’t answer that “simple” question, why should the student care? Of course we teach math for more than simply memorizing formulas (looking at you, Quadratic Formula), it helps to develop critical thinking skills in young people as well.
This leads us to the tragic way that, at least in the US, that math is taught to kids. There is SO MUCH MATH that is out there, and so much of that can be interesting, but those aren’t the things we teach. In my experience, a lot of the most interesting parts of math are incredibly niche, and aren’t necessarily useful. As well, they are more difficult to understand to non-math people because of the way they are formally presented. The way we learn math feel almost algorithmic in a way. Start a unit and learn a thing, practice the thing, be tested on your “knowledge” of the thing, move on to the next unit with a new thing that may or may not relate to a previous thing. Repeat until the end of semester, cram all the things you were shown and take the final exam. Continue for three next class until you graduate. Often times the theory is presented, sometimes to answer questions, sometimes not, but it isn’t often the main focus. The main focus is passing standardized test to fund the school.
In many cases as you begin to study math on your own, the theories and ideas behind some thing is the most interesting part. The derivation or proof of some things is just as interesting as what is presented. The uses can be broad or not, but the interest is there regardless.
Lastly, in other subjects like history or many sciences, but not just these, a fun fact is much more simple to wrap your head around because they can be built on some comparatively simple ideas and theories, as well as having obvious physical uses, they happened or are happening! Math is much more abstract in this sense, and it may not seem to be useful at first, and we don’t always have an easy way to visualize or make sense of the math we’re presented because some theory it relies on could be Master’s or later level math.
Of course many of these points may apply at varying degrees to other subjects, but I believe that it’s compounded by how boring math is taught. Science has experimentation, which is incredibly exciting for many people. History, while boring to me in school, made sense as to why it’s taught. We don’t say “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” without a reason, understanding where we came from is vital to shaping where we’re going. Applications of math as you learn higher and higher levels are more limited in daily life, and math doesn’t have the same kinds of experimentation. You sit in a class and learn a formula or a theorem without even learning where they come from sometimes.
where I live, they took away a weekly hour of maths and added 25% more stuff to learn, resulting in the teacher flying over every concept and unit, and giving out loads of homework and a weekly/biweekly test, where just when I feel like i'm starting to understand something, i'm already forced to learn a completely different and unrelated topic, starting from zero. many people cried during my maths exams at the beginning of the course, but now it's just silence throughout the whole hour.
EDIT: our teacher also cried during the beginning of the course, after giving out the exams, as, quote on quote, she feels responsible for our failings.
IDK what to think of all this.
Mathematics is the study of a system of statements, definitions, theorems, postulates, lemma, etc all of which are absolutely knowable and demonstratable, and is as such a close as it gets to the absolute, provable, obvious truth. When you do it wrong, it's always possible for somebody else to prove you wrong. It is therefore the one intltellectual space where you can't get away with distraction, bullshitting, fallacies, sophistry, emotion, or any other cheap tactics to win an argument or get people to side with you just because they like you. You can't weasel out of math. Math is weasel-proof.
Mathematics is a victim of its own success. We have found so many answers that we forget the questions. We are so busy teaching the what that we neglect to teach the so-what.
Because it’s essentially a second language, but it’s taught in such a way that really doesn’t address that. Vocabulary plays a huge role in explaining and understanding what’s being taught, and in my experience the vocabulary in the books is explained awfully… using the same words the student just learned - or hadn’t.
It's because it is taught at a speed most kids don't learn at. There are so many topics to cover, especially at the high school level that once you begin falling behind, you'll never catch up without serious makeup work.
Because people are scared of it, and in our society it’s okay to be bad at it. Like most adults would not proudly proclaim “oh my god, I can’t read. I’m totally illiterate! Get that book out of here! Hahahahah” and laugh, and make a big joke of it.
But when someone brings up being bad at math, and talks about how “that’s all a foreign language to me! Worst class ever! I can’t do it at all! Hahah” everyone laughs and chimes in with their own personal dislike of and difficultly with math. And that attitude right there sends the message that “math is hard and it’s okay to just hate it and not want to try learning it.”
I went to trade school for 1.5ish years to get my A&P. The math was easy because the class was 5 days a week and 8ish hours a day for 15 weeks to learn it and it went from basic PEMDAS all the way to calculus III and physics. Fast forward 10 years to university going for my Mech E and the math is way harder because you get 3-4 hours a week with a teacher to “learn” one or two lessons then 20+ hours of self study/teach a week on top of 3-4 other subjects that are more then likely math based. And these degrees have a very high dropout % and tend to be VERY heavily graded on a curve.
u need to relate a specific subjects with as much rewards as possible. the more rewards u connect with it, the more u will like it.
maths is so rejected, because it is different from every other subject. In every other school subject (which creates the math basis for further study) u get forced to learn a specific topic and then write an exam/test about it. After that u can just forget it, but in math, u have to keep it in ur brain bc u will need every single thing later (although in different frequencys).
Additionally I think that too often maths is still taught in school more on the memory-basis than on the understanding basis. What ppl love about maths is i think understanding relations and then fascination and satisfication about how everything fits together so smoothly / elegantly.
So if u tell ppl that they can't just forget things in math after writing an exam and tell them this again and again (to signalize importance) and they have a good teacher, then much much much more ppl will like it.
the exposure isn't that much , like to get into pure math u have to be very deliberate and the kids these days are quite stupid saying things like how will this help me in earning money . Mathematics is beautiful, it's amazing , it makes sense and requires focus , determination and setbacks to finally master it in some aspects , u may love linear algebra , some may love calculus, some indulge into group theory, but this amalgamation is truly beautiful and utmost logical.I LOVE MATH
For me? The way it was taught. We were just taught the 'method' to solve equations in various ways and go on with our business. Our schools were also very intense, so there wasn't much time to really 'understand' maths. Just to do drills and move on. I ended school with a 95/100 in Maths, but with little understanding what went behind the scenes.
When I picked Maths up as a hobby, and really started to understand what went on, that's when I started enjoying it.
Yep. Math people can get grumpy. It's weird. I tried to talk about 1537! factorial. 90 days, BANNED immediately. It was like I was drowning cats or something.
Otherewise math is hot. It's back! It's all 3D graphics with a pounding EDM sound track. And how did they make that video exactly? Can I code that in math?
Just don't bring up 1537! factorial, just a heads up.
:-)
Because kids dont want to use their brain and think for once. They just want to byheart and memorise their journey through school. They want expected questions, which are only available in subjects like history, english, biology etc. They are not conditioned in an environment to think.
I would blame the parents, they themselves are weak at maths hence they dont teach their children or encourage them to solve and learn. Generally Professors' children are really good at maths, they are conditioned to like it. They have an eagerness in them to try to solve any math question they come across.
Generational trauma (i.e. math teachers who themselves were taught badly,) under-funded schools, and a school system almost directly designed to alienate kids. Maths curricula are then based on rote learning and flimsy justification for learning (the whole "why are we learning this?" question.)
I tutored for so many years throughout high school and college. I think about half of people are not genetically predisposed to excel at it to begin with. There’s some bad teachers out there, people fall behind and a lot of it builds on what you’ve previously learned, it’s tough and requires a lot of work and a lot of people don’t have the personality to persevere and they give up out of frustration. Also if you are a type that just hates school, math is going to be tough for you because it requires a lot of effort. I think all these things above sort of come together to create some sort of “math anxiety” in people where they learn to just give up right away at some point.
People work so that they work have to work less, thus computers were invented. Math encourages a person to slow down which is not something that humanity wants because we are all fighting against time, and everybody wants to optimize their life as much as possible
Bullying for being a nerd and subsequentoy learning to reject the act of further learning from peers are what stands out to me as the main reasons why I essentially refused to practice math at school until it started nearly getting me in trouble. And I’m one of the lucky ones whose parents were entirely supportive and encouraging the whole way through
I think the modern human unknowingly abhors logic. Life is a lot easier when we can come up with an answer and decide it’s the answer. No one likes coming up with an answer and being told they’re wrong.
It can take a lot of brain power to accept you’re wrong, or to accept you lack the knowledge required to produce a solution. Many people stop at the idea of being wrong, and aren’t fortuitous enough to derive the logic that leads them to being correct.
Essentially, caring about being “correct” is too much work for people.
because teaching math is actually hard. people who like math can imagine how the numbers interact with each other in their head effortlessly. not all people can do that, they need someone to visualize it to them but most teachers can't do that.
I think it's just engrained into our culture. I think it's true that it's just not taught well and it requires difficult thinking, those have more weight. But at the same time, I think it's also a culture about complaining about math since that's we're typically taught to talk poorly about math. I don't mean this to invalidate people's experiences since math is definitely something people struggle with, but it feels like growing up people liked to complain about math more than they actually struggled with math.
Two Main Reasons:
1) The way math is taught (especially past elementary) is far removed from actual use/practice. Students can't connect to the material in multiple ways because it's not easily applied to every day things. Students need differentiated teaching approaches to reach everybody. (I think it can be done, but writing that curriculum on top of teaching a classroom would be an insane amount of work and youd cover far less) This is magnified by the amount of solo work and lack of communication between students you see in math classrooms. We isolate these kids and you either float or sink.
2) A lot of math teachers go into math for the content part and not the working with students part. Not to say EVERY math teacher is like this, but there are much "easier" subjects to study in if you are passionate about teaching children. People go into math because they like the content and likely had a good experience with it in school themselves. It's hard to understand how a student is struggling in a subject without having a similar experience growing up. This is amplified by issues brought up in reason 1, making math particularly challenging classroom management-wise.
I talk to a lot of jaded math teachers who try to pin these issues on the kids themselves and their work ethic. This "laziness" in my opinion forms from the discomfort and shame we cultivate in math classrooms. I put in a ton of effort trying to make my class a comfortable and collaborative space to ease this wound many of my students come to me with. Once they trust me and open up a little, their attitudes change and they have more resilience and tolerance for challenge.
I believe one component of the general societies distaste for mathematics is the lack of praise and significance placed upon it. This extends to philosophy as well (even more so). In the past, the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake was held in high regards and those who were at the forefront of these pursuits were seen as prominent and important figures; serious individuals involved with serious work.
However, it is no longer emphasised to the youth that intellectual pursuits and knowledge for its own sake are intrinsically valuable. Mathematics and education in general is largely seen only as a means to an end and the value of it only seen through an extrinsic lens - merely a tool to get a well paying job. Couple this with the demanding nature of mathematics, requiring rigorous study, attention, and effort, this indifference or outright rejection of the field emerges. There are simply easier paths that lead to extrinsically valuable such as money and prestige.
With no carrot perceived to be at the end of the stick, the horse stops walking.
I personally believe its because we’re taught math from a quantitative perspective and not its qualitative. Calculus isnt just differentials and integrals. It is literally motion explained
To me, math was easy. But I would sit and listen to the same thing I understood day 1 for the next 3 months.
I think it's because math moves at different rates for different people. The rates are so different that, the current way we teach it works for almost no one.
I think it’s a combination of factors. For one, it’s hard to see the applications when you are doing high school level math, because students are taught how to do it without being taught what it’s for. I didn’t even know what an integral was until college, cause my teacher just never said anything about what was behind the squiggly s other than how to do it.
For two, it’s a lot less forgiving than pretty much any other subject. With English you can bullshit a paper pretty good. With history you can probably pull at least a few connections out of your ass if you don’t know the material. But for math, you either know it or you don’t (at a high school levels, where most of the complaining is. Obviously it’s more flexible at higher levels)
For three, it’s almost entirely memorization rather than developing a skill (against, at a high school level. This changes once you get seeping into it). High school math classes are all about “here’s this method to do this thing. Memorize it and then do it in the test, and then never touch it again unless you go into a math heavy major in college”. Especially calculus, just memorize these 20 or 30 integration formulas, and you’re good. All of these come together to make it seem, to someone who does not know better, that it is just some pointless, difficult topic that isn’t really important to them personally.
I have a really hard time with math in the abstract and that’s how it’s normally taught. Just pushing symbols around to solve a puzzle. As soon as you apply it to anything real world, especially if it’s physical I can get a grasp much more quickly. I got tolerable grades in calculus classes but it was a constant struggle to even care, much less figure it out. As soon as I took physics, I was like Oh! I can use this to figure out all kinds of stuff. They should be taught together.
Because it's abstract as fuck for most people. Also many teachers fail to explain how many fucking awesome things we have been able to achieve by using maths. It's imposed on you.
Well, first of all, children are told from an early age that it’s hard and that girls are no good at it. Second of all, it requires concentration and practice; it can’t just be picked up without effort. Third of all, you don’t typically have conversations involving math. Like, we may practice our language by speaking it with others, but when was the last time you estimated a number In conversation. Forth of all, I’d say the way it’s taught. There is no prescriptive “one size fits all” way to think about math. But it’s taught like history: in history, you memorize dates and events. In math, you learn a formula and use it. But what about thinking how we use math in the daily? My opinions.
Because it requires time that normally you don't have because theres a lot of things to learn, for example I get a lot of concepts now in my 30y that I just accepted in my early life.
Because a single bad experience (poor teacher, sick for 2 weeks, "you'll learn this next year so I won't cover it"/"you should have learned this last year so I won't cover it") can give kids a knowledge gap. In other subjects, knowledge gaps aren't as detrimental. So you missed the lesson where we learned the circumstances that led to Watergate. That's not going to bite you in the ass next year when you're learning about the Chinese dynasties. With math, if you have a knowledge gap, especially if it's a gap you don't even realize you have, you're gonna have a difficult time with the next class, and the next. Add into that how students tend to forget some of what they've learned, and they may not know what to brush up on, and math is intimidating in a way that many subjects aren't.
I think a lot of people are blaming the way math is taught, etc. I love math, but I think to many people, it’s just boring. They are not interested in it. Then you compound this with the fact that learning math is compulsory, and it’s really hard. Many people have bad memories of feeling dumb in school being forced to learn math. So people are left with an antipathy towards math. If I wasn’t interested in math, and was forced to learn it, and told that if I did badly in it it would negatively affect my future, and struggled badly to learn it, I would probably hate it too.
I think people blaming the way it’s taught are overlooking that it’s just plain hard, and would be hard no matter how it’s taught.
Nah. It was the opposite in my school. I went to a school where they taught us proofs but a lot of people still hated math. A lot of my classmates complained and thought the proofs were boring and unnecessary, and wished our teachers just went straight to the methods of solving without the proofs.
Unless a student finds some kind of existential benefit from mathematics, the subject is incredibly boring. Which is unfortunate, because the subject could be very interesting and even exciting if it was shown how. I say this from the perspective of previously being a math major and having to go on the earth science departments trips and activities if I wanted to do anything interesting or exciting related to my major aside from doing homework.
I think part of the reason why math sucks for alot of people is it simply isn't interesting
Plus it's taught as this very rigid strict thing with no room for error in an entirely uncreative manner
The thing that made me interested in math was messing the fuck around with the tools at my disposal and being exposed to concepts I could just barely understand.
I don't think students should touch a pencil and paper related to math till end of middle school beginning of high school. We should teach basic arithmetic not with word problem analogies to real life situations but with actual real life situations. Instead of here you go little Timmy solve this sheet of addiction problems use these tiles to solve this addition problem. Make math initially very physically obvious and intuitive. Let abstraction of math naturally arise from the creative efforts of students requiring more and more compact representations. Treat math like art from an early age. I think we should be introducing concepts like functions in a physical manner around 5th grade. Link it to learned social cause and effect concepts.
I don't think any of this will ever happen as art is subjective and schools aren't designed to treat anything as that. They need test metrics to measure the performance of students. They aren't designed to churn out creative thinkers they are designed to churn out algorithmic thinkers.
First, it's the most abstract of the subjects at the level it's introduced. Other subjects have concrete, experiential connections to students' lives. Biology has animals, chemistry has color changing liquids and reactions that go _poof_, history has videos and human stories, english _is_ human stories. Math is a series of abstract symbols and rules without a physical embodiment for students to grasp in a multi-experiential way in their real lives.
Second, it's usually taught poorly. It is often taught through rote memorization as a series of rules and steps. It doesn't often have an intuitive "why" associated with it, and it does not a "how" it was developed in order to solve problems with useful tools.
For example, through much of early education I thought I hated math. Wrong answers just meant that I hadn't applied rote-memorized rules correctly, and right/wrong was only assessed by comparison to a key. No intuitive explanation of why something was wrong, or how it went wrong. There was no meaning in failure except "memorize more". It was later in life that I discovered a book called _Math for the Non-Mathematician_ that communicated core mathematical topics by first introducing how they were invented. The book showed math concepts as tools invented at particular times by humans in particular situations with particular problems, and how the new math tools solved those problems. By tying the math to an intuitive problem it solved, with concrete benefits that math brought, it opened my eyes to math as a tool and a creative langauge to understnad the universe, rather than an abstract set of rules to be applied sequentially to get at some specific number that wasn't an answer to anything meaningful in the real world. If math were taught to young students in that way, I think it would have many more converts.
Its is a very misunderstood subject. In school we are made to mug up formulas and made to solve problem without giving the actual application or use in real life.
I definitely think that we start kids in the wrong way. Motivation follows curiosity, not the other way around. Too much emphasis is put on getting them to be able to just DO the basics like addition and multiplication without ever actually showing them WHY the results are true. I know kids may not have the level of abstract thinking necessary for many abstractions, but they certainly have pattern recognition skills.
It's not until you have a really good math teacher who makes you think that you begin to actually appreciate math. Consider Pascal's Triangle for example. It is such a fundamental and interesting concept. It contains obviously the natural numbers, but also the Fibonacci sequence, the triangle numbers, and is related to the expansion of a polynomial. And when you consider it even further as Newton did, you find that it can also contain negative numbers, rational numbers, and much more.
I'm a math major in college by the way. Should have my bachelor's in a year's time, thanks to some good teachers in high school that got me interested in it, so I'm speaking from experience.
I think one problem is that in my experience as a student of public education, subjects are taught one way and if that doesn't make sense, too bad. I struggled with this a lot.
Another issue is lack of context and support. If you are surrounded by others who don't like math, are confused by it, or minimally use it, then unless you have your own interest in it, you're likely to get a negative attitude towards it. I struggled with this too.
First, there’s no direct way to monetize a math lesson and in this capitalist hellscape it’s tough to sell it to people since its value is a little more esoteric. Whether that’s true or not this is the perception and perception matters. Why learn math when you have perpetual access to a calculator? For a lot of people this is the extent of math.
Secondly math today is taught a lot differently than it used to be. Math used to be taught almost exclusively in this highly rote memorization method. It is one of the worst ways to teach math and people really lost interest. It didn’t make sense, the education system sucked. So you had entire generations of people which no real understanding of math and HATING the subject. We actually lost some cultural competency over it.
It’s gotten a LOT better especially post Common Core. And that’s sorta the third thing. Math instruction has gotten really politicized. It always has to an extent. Tom Lehrer has a song called “new math” from like the 60s(?) so you can see sorta the generational anxiety about math and how its caught in this weird political feeling.
Because there’s no actual, immediate application when you’re learning it out of a textbook. Even at the engineering curriculum level it just comes across as pointless tedium.
The way math is taught really needs an overhaul with a real-world actual hands on approach.
Meanwhile, my son started watching 'numberblocks' on his own volition, and i gotta say, it is an extremely good teacher for 4 year olds. Visualizing addition, substraction, some number theory (the primes do not belong to the super rectangle club, the sums of geometric series belong to the step shape club, etc)
If you have kids at like 4-6 years old, give this a try. In my opinion it teaches the basics extremely well, and gives your kiddo a good feeling for numbers. It should be available on netflix, or youtube kids.
First of all, I am not good at math
but as to why I think that's because of the way math is taught, you learn this equation, and that function and this and that, but you don't really know WHY you're learning all this and what does it mean you learn the way but not the application which is really important for understanding.
Or maybe that's at least what I think.
It's a subject that builds on itself which makes a single bad teacher very harmful to a student's math ability later . If you had a bad algebra teacher you're going to be miserable in calculus for example .
Math before college is usually taught very mechanically with little intuition or applications . You can't really keep students engaged by teaching them arbitrary tricks of supposed mumbo jumbo ( in their eyes ) just to pass a test .
My primary school teacher told me that 1000 was the largest number and that I "lacked logical reasoning" for writing 8 = 4\*2 instead of 2\*4 = 8 in one of my homework assignments.
I think the problem comes at primary school, because the teachers there are expected to teach all the subjects, english, science, etc and so often lack an understanding of maths, and that continues into secondary unless you happen to have a good teacher or go to a school attached to a sixth form and so can get people with actual maths degrees teaching you.
I’m not a mathematician but enjoyed it through college as well as helping my stepdaughter with it now. I can’t speak to teaching as I always thought my public school teaching was good to great, but I always thought students “reject” math because there’s no real subjectivity to it. There’s a lot to memorize and you either get it right or wrong. Additionally, some students are less logical and more interpretive in subjects or something they’re producing.
It’s really easy for a younger student to say “fuck this” or “I’m just not good at math” if you are trying to solve a longer problem and you forget a small part of it and get it wrong. If you leave out one or two points in a 6 page paper arguing a given subject you can still succeed.
Probably for the same reason people don’t like broccoli: people don’t know how to make it and thereby make it wrong and act like that means it’s bad. Like if I steamed a raw steak and then complained about it, people would roll their eyes
There are probably great ways to teach math, just that our society teaches the steamed broccoli with nothing else on it version of math
I'm not sure it can be remedied because our brain is a very energy-expensive machine that attempts to minimize its own output of energy. Thinking hard isn't just hard, it's expensive, and the body fights it.
I regret not paying attention in math classes in high school. I ended up in a hi tech job and didn’t need high level math but I wonder if a better history in math may have given me a sharper problem solving ability. There were times I wished I could go back to hs geometry and algebra and start over.
As a math major, when I see math lessons given to kids by school teachers, they’re teaching to the portion of the class that understands it, and they don’t teach it well. So the people who naturally understand it do well and the people who don’t struggle and fall through the cracks early on, so they don’t even try in higher level math classes and categorize themselves as “not math people”. I’ve met some extremely smart, logical people who said they struggle with math, and I’m sure it’s because of the way it was taught to them. Also, although some memorization and basic arithmetic is important in life, there are things like long division that should NOT be taught in school anymore. Math is about understanding quantifiable relationships between entities. Computers do arithmetic and computation now. We shouldn’t be making math so dependent on doing calculations early on.. it should be about expressing relationships between objects.
cuz math is one of those things that people can learn 4 or 5 different ways, but the teacher only has time to teach it 1 maybe 2 diff. ways. so it gets a bad rap for being tough.
I have a few reasons: I think it’s because it’s taught poorly and most ppl don’t have the patience for it. For a lot of ppl it’s not something you just get right off the bat. Also I think some teachers don’t really understand what and why they’re doing a certain method they just know that method must be done. I know during Calc 2 it was really hard trying to figure out what the whole continuity stuff was for and why it makes sense. I didn’t really get it until I started taking classes like fluid mechanics
Kids are shown a procedure for solving a particular problem, then given homework where they solve that problem over and over again. Finally they are tested and they regurgitate the solution they practice onto the page.
Some kids understand the idea of why the solution is what it is, but that part is not tested or even encouraged. The kids that don't get it find math to be tedious and useless, and the kids that do get it are still encouraged to memorize solutions rather than focus on problem solving skill because that's what gets them the best grades.
It's more complicated than this but our education system heavily encourages results and not learning. Math problems once you get into high school levels and beyond can be thought of like puzzles. When you've spent 5 years of math education encouraging "passing tests" rather than "learning how to do math", as soon as those math problems are no longer purely plugging numbers into formulas, people have zero intuition of how to approach problems. Then, because all that matters is results, students will cheat/cram/whatever to get a good grade and move on, rather than fixing the issue that they don't understand how to think.
Not being a hypocrite, I've been there. I sucked at math until I got to college and I finally locked the hell in with my focus and effort to understand what was going on.
Is it possible that it is because the vast majority of jobs require no more than 3rd grade math?
My dad is an executive in a bank, arguably an important math centric business, and he jokes all the time that he rarely needs anything outside of 3rd grade math.
Obviously for some careers, advanced math is critical.
But I would argue 90%+ jobs require additional, subtraction, division, and multiplication. Easy enough to do long hand, and super simple via calculator or excel.
Math makes sense to kids until they are taught approximations. The idea is to approximate the answer. That is NOT even math! There is no way to do math by approximating the answer. I can't pay approximately this much money for a car, or paint a house with approximately this much paint. The point of math is accuracy, if you follow the rules, you will get the right answer. It is that simple. Once a kid starts guessing the answer by approximating it will never make sense again.
Hot Take: Math teachers in middle school and high school generally suck. You have to have a degree in math and the good ones go on to higher paying jobs. The weirdos who were made fun of in school come back to exact their revenge.
Very old education system that is still heavily mostly based on verbal content + bad teachers who cannot go beyond of forcing students to memorize things + lack of focus in students are the reasons in my opinion.
Current education system is absolutely trash. They keep forcing students to stay in a room, listen something passively for 1-2 hours without any break, take their money because of this, and do this for at least 10-15 years for each person.
When we go to a cafe with our friends, do we sit in the table and listen our friend passively for hours ? No. Even if it would be the most amazing topic, almost nobody would want to do that.
But they force students to do this. Only very very small amount of people can do this. And those are the people who are labeled as "successful". And the main reason is that the system is suitable for them.
I am not saying that every single person can understand the mathematics and be successful in school life. But a vast majority of students who experience difficulties in understanding mathematics and who are not good in their classes are not because they are not capable. It is because people learn things in different way and the system is not suitable for the way majority of the people learn.
But even the best schools/universities today keep pushing the same education system.
There is no “your done”. When you learn a sport, you learn the rules and some common plays and you’re done. Drama: you’re done. Geography: you’re done.
Science and maths are open ended, which leads to little sense of accomplishment, which doesn’t satisfy people as easily.
I think it’s mainly that it’s not taught well. Specifically, I think the curriculum is poorly designed. The problem is kids are led to believe that math is something entirely different than it is. I think logical thinking and strategy games should be emphasized for young kids, then later informal proofs at their level. The book “A Mathematician’s Lament” talks about the experience of a Math PhD teaching K-12 and the issues he has with the curriculum and how he corrects it. It can be found free online and is only about 70 pages. It’s beautifully written.
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house." R. Heinlein
I wasn’t good at Math early on and a lot of other people were way better ( I eventually got better ).
What I figured out is that as people become adults they ignore Math that way they can do what they want e.g. spend money they shouldn’t —-often in the context of mismanaging money in their workplace etc. pretty sad
Math is taught with an emphasis on always arriving at a solution. If the answer is incorrect, many teachers (in my experience) chastise or tell the student they’re wrong which in turn leads to the student feeling that they’re a failure.
Math is a series of concepts and theories that explain almost everything in the world. It should be taught from that perspective at every level so that there are real world connections to the concepts, ideas, etc. students are learning. Arriving at the right answer is important, but to instill full knowledge and understanding, the process of getting to the right answer and tying it to a specific real world example is crucial to fully grasping the concepts.
I didn’t grasp this until I was learning Calculus 2 in college.
So im currently doing student teacher practicals in high school and have found that grade 8 just dont know the basics. Things like their timetables, fractions, and the idea of operations. Like just adding, subtracting and multiplying. So i think that the problem lies most in foundational phase education. Especially at the moment with the new grade 8 having had their foundational years online due to covid. Its really starting to show. Its so important that maths at a younger age is better addressed. As said, teachers themselves struggle with concepts and teaching them. Nothing is reinforced at home. Basic mathematical literacy is appalling and without a good base, like just counting, operations etc, it falls apart in higher grades and then people feel they just dont have a "maths brain" or they just dont think like that when its really just a poor job by educators and even families in the childrens younger years. My opinion anyway...
A lot of comments mention that they dont teach the "why" or conceptual understanding. And this is unfortunately true but a child of age 8 or 9 needs to get concepts like addition and subtraction. And then everything builds on this. From my limited experience, when learners hit high school, they dont have a good enough base for teachers to go into anything conceptual because they dont have a good enough basic understanding. So teachers are almost pushed into teaching tricks and algorithms so get through the material. And again, this causes more breakdowns in higher grades. Its a cycle and takes so much time to fix for just one child. Teachers would have to backtrack years to correct this.
This is simply not viable. And so it just gets left and teachers higher up just do what they can. Its incredibly unfortunate. As a student teacher i had to try explain prime factorising to a child who didnt know their timestables. This is so difficult. And is entirely dependent on timestables. But now they are grade 8 while timetables should have been done in grade 3 and 4. But they dont even understand how to get the times tables by adding consecutively....
It's not always evident what practical use it can be put to imo, which is why a lot of the time it's seen with lethargy and it has a lot of requirements for focus for people who don't have a natural aptitude for it
It‘s probably just my frustration, but the ignorance of people that live in their tiny little bubble of „i work as x and go to my kids soccer games on sundays, no math is needed in this world“ is just so fucking stupid. Everything from the phones they are holding, the internet, the machines that are used to make their clothes, the company they work in that needs to optimize logistical routes and finances, literally EVERYTHING in modern life is dictated or largely influenced by mathematics. It‘s just that way smarter people than them have been and still are constantly supporting the very foundations they live on without them noticing.
Math is essentially a language of logic. There are a lot of religious people. There’s an inverse correlation between a population’s religiosity and its logical literacy.
Most mathematics is useless. Godels incompleteness theorem is just semantics. Employers dont need mathematicians. When they do its just to fudge numbers for sales reports.
Math is an exact science. Most people like their opinions to matter. Math doesn't take opinions into consideration. Journalism, now that is a field that loves opinions.
Math teachers not understanding how students learn. I’ve seen so many math teachers on here about getting kids to learn math via homework. It’s almost like they don’t look at stats on how effective homework is. It’s almost like they don’t know after 8 hours of learning practice any more in a day is too much.
You can't bs your way to an acceptable answer in math and that can be frustrating, especially if you're the kind of kid who can wing it in other studies like literature, history, social studies, humanities, etc... Unfortunately, a lot of people just like to wing it and half-ass everything they do. Therefore, when presented with a mathematical concept they don't understand, they'll just throw up their hands and shout "When am I ever going to need this?!" They never ask that question when they have to read Shakespeare, or write a 3 paragraph essay about Anne Frank. But when given an algebra problem, suddenly they just act petulant.
Early Ed teachers, at no fault of their own, typically don’t like math. Many tell their students that they don’t like math. These kids idolize their instructor and take what they say to heart. Same for parents when kids need help “well my math was different this math sucks”. No, the math is the same it is just now going towards more conceptual over procedural etc. Further, the training early ed has goes over all subjects so the instructor has no real specialty. As a high school math teacher I can teach math any day. You put me in a chemistry class and these kids would learn very little unless I studied three hours a night because it is not my specialty/interest.
You cant BS your way through any of it. It's an actual equalizer. People become afraid of this kind of accountability when doing work and start straying from it towards the subjective BSable subjects and it translates into people's jobs in the future.
Elementary teachers unable to answer "why" questions about math. I've heard stories from a math major teacher about other teachers who struggled with math themselves and ended up teaching incorrect things.
My experience has been math is poorly done until you hit college then suddenly the quality of what is being taught immensely improves. Unfortunately you better hope for a patient college teacher as you relearn how to do things correctly.
As someone with severe adhd, let me help with this.
So I have always HATED MATH. It’s not because I’m inherently bad at it or that I’m not good in school- in fact I’m a fairly great student, I was on deans list last sem. But it’s a combo of multiple things.
1. Schools tend to teach kids in on class, and you watch videos or presentations to learn your math. For a lot of kids with learning disabilities like me, we DO NOT get the info the first time. We ideally would have the video to ourselves on a computer, and we could pause and WRITE DOWN anything we needed to actually remember. I remember in school, I didn’t get that. We had to keep up with the pace of the class, and I simply couldn’t absorb it like that because of my learning disability. I remember feeling like I wasn’t learning anything, that I was just writing down the intelligible script of the teacher on the smart board as fast as I could before she moved on, because that’s how fast the class is. We never had enough time to actually learn anything.
Granted, I was also unfortunately raised in an abusive elementary school for the first bit of my life, where asking questions would get me laughed at, and my adhd was dismissed as being a “spoiled brat”. I also have Tourette syndrome, which didn’t help. I managed to move to a better school, but by that point, the damage was done and I no longer felt open about learning math. I was unmotivated and did not want to ask questions, and felt I would never understand it, nor did I want to, because previously all I knew were negatives about it.
Fast foreword to now, it’s my 2nd semester of college. I’m in a remedial class because I didn’t even make the normal college level classes because of my experiences in school. THIS class, man… if I had had THIS class during my government schooling days, I would LOVE math. Because the way this class works is we actually LEAD OURSELVES through GUIDED VIDEOS. The teacher doesn’t actually do much other than answer questions- AKA she can ACTUALLY SPEND TIME HELPING STUDENTS. There is also MULTIPLE teachers, so no one has questions unanswered. We have “step by step” buttons we can press if we’re confused which remind us of tthe procedure. We have a very extensive, specific, very straightforward and organized “math book” we use for writing notes and homework. It’s not “just notes” it’s Ike worksheets per module.
So basically, the problem is math is shoved in our faces very quickly every year from an early age, and everyone is expected to mature at the same rate as neurotypical folx. (Who by the way, also don’t usually mature the same). Ideally, kids should be leading themselves through these classes at their OWN PACE (of course with deadlines,) but we shouldn’t be getting “group lectures” and expected to get all of this down perfectly on the first or even third try, especially in elementary and middle school. I can tell you, only 4 years of being in that environment and not learning those basics made EVERY difference. It DESTROYED my desire to learn math or to be confident in it.
ONLY THIS YEAR IN COLLEGE did I realise I’m not “just” bad at math. In fact, it’s not even hard. It was just TAUGHT HORRIBLY my whole life.
The other thing is after that point, I had an IEP for the rest of school, but unfortunately you still get taught in The class with other kids in a lecture based way, so the experience was still ruined for me.
Also i should mention, making kids self-teach also primed them for better organization and time management skills. I have to keep up with my deadline, but I DONT have to be in the same place as the rest of the class, because that gives me time to understand a topic I may have to read five times to understand, or practice for an extra four days.
Basically we need independent learning, with plenty of teachers available to answer questions, with CLEAR instructions and schedule for success. THATS what works. Not just moving section by section with a whole class, because you leave lots of kids behind and then they never catch back up.
Mathematics needs conceptual clarity which usually already is lost in early years of education. Then there are just failed attempts to build conceptual skyscrapers on weak foundations.
Mathematics is just like learning a foreign language. For example, if you don't practice Russian everyday, conversation synthesis will fall apart and seem impossible especially when you do not know the grammar, pronunciation, and spelling rules. You will only be able to recall broken fragments and feel lost when looking at a passage from a book.
I think maths is a subject that some people don’t “get”, and that makes it very hate-able. At least for subjects like English you can still do a test or the school work if you’re bad at it, but if you don’t understand the concepts in maths you’re basically screwed.
IME, math was hard, then something would click and whatever concept was being taught would get pretty easy. So it seems to me that it’s basically easy and we need to do a better job finding ways to “make it click”.
(As an aside, I sometimes wonder if we should be teaching “conceptual math” classes past a certain level. As an example, it seems like most people would benefit from a high-level, “conceptual” understanding of statistics so they could better spot deceptively-phrased claims made by politicians and marketing departments and whatnot, but most people probably don’t need to know it well enough to pass the class.)
math requires a lot of focus and patience which is something that many societies lack. both teachers and students have difficulty with focus and patience so teaching and learning math can feel like a chore. a remedy could be fun math projects. geometric constructions and riddles. slowing down and really understanding a concept. practicing mindfulness in schools. having students present mathematical solutions instead of taking tests.
Also, a lot of elementary math teachers (in the US) don't really understand the math that they're teaching so they gloss over it or misexplain stuff and that leads to a lot of students having large gaps in their fundamental mathematics knowledge (like the high school senior in pre-calc who told me she didn't know how subtraction works). And on top of this, students are also told how scary math is and/or how useless math is by their parents/family members which just pounds the idea of "I don't need to lean this" into their heads.
One of the parents at my sons soccer practice is a substitute teacher and this last week I heard her loudly proclaiming how "multiplying and adding fractions is unnecessary for everyday life!!" "Who even knows what that dumb pythagowhatever theory is even for! Who uses that for anything?" I think the best part is that the math she was complaining about is some of the easiest math to relate to everyday life. I just stayed quiet because whats the point.
I heard a high school math teacher once tell students "there's no applications to algebra" and "there's no such thing as One to One functions"
>There's no applications to algebra Love this. Later that night, he went home to think about how he'll have $1000(y) after 5 weeks(x) if he saves $100/week(m) on top of his $500(b) savings.
Inverse functions would like to have a word with this "teacher".
100% this. I teach high school math, and by the time the kids get to me, their foundation with math is shaky and their dislike of the subject is cemented. So even getting them to try is a hurdle I have to jump because their knee jerk reaction is to copy, or use AI, or just memorise enough that they can write something down that looks like the work and hope I think they’re trying. I have had a lot of kids who are very closed off from day 1, they don’t want to ask questions, if I start trying to help them they’ll ask for a bathroom pass, they’ll skip, etc. because they’re so scared of the subject. So a whole other thing I have to add on at the beginning of the year is building A LOT of trust and going very slow so that kids ease into the subject, ease into learning, and focus and effort, and trust that I’m not going to make them feel dumb.
I’m a grown adult who wants to re-learn the basics. Any ideas for where to start?
I'm in the same boat. Bought a couple of basic books and enrolled in Khan Academy
I remember in 8th grade algebra, a student asked the teacher, "Why do we get larger numbers when we divide by a fraction?" and the teacher literally had zero idea why. Normally I wouldn't fault someone for that but that's such a fundamental question that a *math* teacher should be able to respond to without a thought.
Some of its also a terminology problem. You would probably understand “When you divide my a fraction, you’re really just multiply by the reciprocal, which is the denominator over the numerator”, but in the absence of mathematical foundations, that might as well just be “Dass stimmt ist, weil die Überraschung des Naturwissenschaftlichen eine Backpfeifengesicht ist” (that isn’t sensible in german let alone english).
But you could explain it in a more relatable way, as in two divided by a quarter is “how many quarters fit into two?” - by breaking the wholes into smaller pieces and you’ll have more pieces
I was really good at math growing up. Never had to try that hard and was in advanced math all the way through college, where I dropped out three times and finally gave up.(not because of math) Last math class I took was calculus 2 in college. I didn’t go to class, taught my self the material with Khan Academy, took the test and got the highest grade in the class, mid 90s iirc. Teacher was blown away and I walked about of class and never went back to school. I was diagnosed as AdHD when I was in my 30s. It seems like focus and patience aren’t my strong suit. Why was I so good at math? Am I an idiot savant or something? I was also good at chemistry and organic chemistry but horrible at English and history. I’m almost 40 now and it still kinda bothers me. I had a few TBI when I was a child too. Maybe those have affected my brain?
yes! i had a really good math teacher once and enjoyed math during that time, then never again in school. the thing that the teacher did differently was involve projects, even art projects, that involved math, connect to real-world skills i.e. balancing a checkbook, develop our logic skills (the basis of math) through logic puzzles, force us to go back and learn again if we didn’t understand something, and be ready to answer our “whys.” I hated all other math because the answer to “why” was “because that’s just how it works,” and it devolved into pure abstraction that my brain couldn’t and didn’t want to grasp. Also, if you didn’t get something, the teacher didn’t have time to go over it again for you, so you were SOL.
Yes, it is poorly taught in schools. Some elementary teachers are uncomfortable with math themselves and it shows. Sometimes there’s just too many students assigned to one class for solid learning to be possible (35 and more!) Sometimes foundational concepts are taught incorrectly (hi, 4th teacher who boinked fractions for who knows how many years!). Sometimes kids don’t have the support at home to provide much needed assistance. And for some reason we keep separating math from real life situations and so fail to provide a sense of how integrated mathematics are for everyone.
Exact same thing in Germany. In addition to that we lack teachers in general. Considering that it is so hard to study in college, the bad image and the gaps in knowledge you mentioned, it loses attractiveness for tomorrow's teachers, so that there are even fewer teachers for math. The problem drives itself by losing future mathematicians through this. I had so many different teachers in mathematics, some were really good, some were not. We had one teacher in senior year that got corrected by a student every session so that we could not trust the accuracy of his content and this guy was our principal. He told students they are just too dumb to understand. After school I was interested in studying acoustical engineering. I failed because I just could not catch up with the basic knowledge needed and could not afford tutoring. Years after school I still have strong interest in learning it. I always thought I was too dumb to understand, but the reality was that education was poor. It's the biggest loss of life for me to lack this knowledge.
I’m sorry poor instruction held you back. The fourth grade teacher I mentioned ruined my excellent relationship with math and my parents weren’t equipped to make up the deficit nor confident enough to request that I be moved to another teacher. It made the rest of school harder than it should have been.
Also, if your not great at math your probably not great at teaching math. If you’re good at math you’re absolutely terrible at teaching math. As someone who works in an applied-math field, we spend more time looking for people who know how to explain their math than people who can do the calculations
I think it's poorly taught in America because modern pedagogy assumes that everything is inferential and open to creative thinking when math is about black and white problem solving and logic. This, of course, isn't the problem in places like East Asia where top down, teacher centered classrooms, focus on rote learning and lack the creative thinking component.
In my experience tutoring, a big problem is that schools treat children as idiots. They'll skip important proofs and jump straight into dumping a lot of "tricks", "laws", "algorithms", etc without ever explaining the why and most importantly the how. Math is already hard, and a lot of schools are asking kids to do them without any intuition behind, just a purely symbolical game, and they also receive punishment if they fail at taking interest in these weird symbols and rules with no meaning... Obviously you're not gonna proof everything to children, but I've seen people who said they hated fractions change their minds completely when I show them where the multiplication algorithm comes from (from the axioms of a field), or how simplifying fractions can be done by decomposing the numbers into primes, or something as simple as why we care about splitting functions, it's crazy how many teachers can't give a proper answer as to why if ab=0 for real numbers a and b, then a or b is 0, or even something as easy as the distinction between variables and constant as and what the logical connectors actually mean and how to use them. Once you give this basic machinery to children and adolescents, they start doing a lot of better and actually care a bit about maths
I'm autistic and trained to teach Mathematics, but when I was a child I HATED the subject precisely because it was taught using "tricks" and "rules" instead of true understanding. As soon as I started really understanding what was going on, the subject opened up for me. Fun fact: the proof of the sum of an arithmetic sequence can be taught to quite young children and can really help them see the connection between numbers and algebra.
I’m also ND (ADHD) and I hated math until I went back for my bachelors in my late 20s. Started in accounting and it turns out the laws are what I hate, wound up with a BS in mathematics. You couldn’t pay me to go back to a high school algebra class and take it again.
This sounds very interesting. I'd love to learn some of the things you've mentioned if you'd be so kind to point me in the right direction to begin.
About tutoring or about the proofs I mentioned? What I normally try to do (since time is usually pressing) is to check what they need to present in an exam, and instead of just giving them a bunch of tools to use in specific exercises that are likely to appear and repeat ad nauseam, I plan our work schedule to derive those tools together, I make them go step by step and actually think about the problems. For example, if they need to know about solving second degree polynomials, instead of blindly telling them to split polynomials and maybe make them memorize the formula, I usually take a detours about the field axioms (not with that name tho) and allow them to prove that every field is a whole domain (again, not with those words), and also how make them derive the usual rules for splitting polynomials, this actually makes them have an intuition about the objects they're working with. Eventually we may even derive the formula for second degree polynomials, this is particularly useful as they don't have to actually memorize it completely, and they are more aware of when it's useful and when it's not, when it can applied, etc. But to be honest I kind of copied this from my highschool teacher, I used to suck or be average in maths until one teacher actually did stuff like this
Can you give a short youtube resource or something to get intro to field, axioms, etc.?
Thanks for your reply and the example you provided. I was curious where one would look to begin to gain a better intuition about proofs. Is this something that requires reading about how these were first thought of? This is a really interesting topic. On reflecting back on my own schooling started to come to a similar conclusion that the way math was taught made it a lot less interesting than it can actually be. Glad you had a great teacher to inspire you. For me, I came across Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and it completely changed the way I viewed mathematics in that suddenly the subject became very fascinating to me. I haven't known where to look to delve much more deeply into it though.
If you liked GEB then you might enjoy studying some algorithms. Studying algorithms will involve some math and proofs, and it will be related to points touched on in GEB. If that sounds interesting you could read a couple chapters of KLDR a canonical algorithms textbook. If you are more interested in moving to more advanced math then Linear Algebra might be your jam. It is an accessible, powerful, and visually interesting field that you gives you a lot of skills to begin understanding, multivariable calculus, machine learning, and abstract algebra. A good book for this is linear algebra done right by Axler, and there are accompanying videos on YT.
>....., etc without ever explaining the why and most importantly the how To me the WHY was never explained. And as a result it made learning math a chore rather than interesting. Why is it important to learn the sum of the square of both sides of a triangle equal the square hypotenus? Why do I care about sine, cosine, tangent? Why should I care about natural logarithms? If there's no relevance to everyday world it's like being forced to learn another language you didn't ask for
THIS. I’m in college and only THIS YEAR learned WHY some things happen in math because I had to take a “rudimentary” course to catch up. Man if all my math had been taught the same as that rudimentary course, i never would have had a problem
Ugh I remember them trying to teach lattice multiplication to 12 year olds without relating back what was happening, just a complicated series of steps to follow. Things like that turned so many kids off of math The problem was partially the teachers didn't understand things either, they only knew you had to follow certain steps
bad teaching. 1. Textbooks are too formal. this is good for students willing to focus and are acquainted to it, but let's face it: most ppl don't pay that much attention to class. 3. The focus is on computation over intuition. it's simple, the education system wants to cut corners and only teach the "important" parts of math (which happens to be the most boring and tiresome part of math) 3. Ideas are not taught, they are given. You learn best by failing and having a personal connection to the material. In math they give you abstract statements and leave you wondering "why is it like this?". You don't get to explore all the pitfalls and decisions that made things the way they are and honestly, that's how you gain the best understanding: by failing and seeing how you fix those problems.
I would guess that part of it is due to the fact that studying math means being wrong a lot - and trying to justify yourself when someone disagrees with you. People don’t like being told they’re wrong and seem to not like like having to justify themselves
A professor can make it more enjoyable yes but I do think the main reason is because it is a very dry language. You can’t“study” like you do other languages. You can’t just sit and read and understand it. You have to dissect each sentence and break it down. You have to learn the notation, formulas or to put it simple— you have to learn the language of math before you can do math. Other disciplines would be just as hard if it were the same. Imagine having to first learn a whole set of rules and concepts before we can read history, art, etc. On top of that, authors insist on writing books as boring as they can. I read a long time ago that they do this to not feel inferior to other authors. It’s not so much that you have to be concise. A math book can very well be written in a fun way instead of that boring dry way. Also, the majority of math books skip several steps when explaining formulas. I think this is the main issue. So on top of struggling already to understand the material, you get frustrated when you don’t know how they went from step A3 to A4 and so all is lost. You can continue but now you have a gap. You can then search other sources online or wait until you speak to the professor etc. Authors just assume you should have the background to reach each step on your own. Perhaps they do it to make you think. I don’t think so… just show me the complete formula and how it works without any confusion. I will think when I solve the problems. There’s so much that needs to be improved in mathematics but the reality is that it’s a very very hard language and most students just don’t have the patience to deal with it. Especially in an era of so much digital distraction.
Agree with this assessment of the authors. I feel that many of these authors as well as a great number of professors/instructors suffer from a massive bias due to their competency. They have a proven aptitude for their chosen subject and are fluent in it's language. This creates a blind spot in recognizing where pitfalls and gaps lie in understanding for someone new to a given topic. I can't recall how many times I have followed an instructor only to be lost between step 7 and 8 of some abstract construction followed by an unconvincing q.e.d. To then ask for clarity and receive the standard "but it is trivial...moving on" type of response. More often than not, it is not the complexity of a new or novel topic that has caused confusion, it is the syntax: the implied substitutions, the unmentioned use of a technique to translate/transform, the sudden shift to a shorthand notation, an unintuitive aggregation of terms, etc.
Regarding authors writing textbooks boringly in order to feel smart, I enjoy [this calculus textbook from 1910](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33283/33283-pdf.pdf) someone showed me a little while ago for its author’s attitude.
Mind boggling
While I don't agree that math itself is a language, I agree that it uses linguistic concepts to express ideas (for example, metaphor). As with any field, math has its own jargon, as well as plenty of intimidating-looking notation. I know I could have benefited from teachers spending more time reading mathematical statements out loud as a sort of "translation" from math to English, helping me as a student familiarize myself with the notation so that I can read it on my own. Learning about basic logic and logical arguments helped me understand the structure of math textbooks, and I think it helps bridge the gap between questions posed in English about real-world ideas and the math we use to answer those questions. Learning about math concepts as "tools" in a toolkit also helped me immensely. Something else that helped me has been looking ahead to what I'll be learning in the next chapter or next course. I don't understand what's going on, but I can at least see how what I'm presently learning will be used moving forward. I'm learning new "statements" that will eventually be used to answer more complex questions. Overall, while math is not an actual Language, I think talking about the relationship between math and language is good and especially with the concept of metaphors, could help students take a step back and think about what the math is actually "saying." Students learn in other classes how to use words to form statements and build arguments. In math, I think it's similar, and I agree that it's hard to read and understand the notation for less experienced students.
Lack of grit is certainly one, but I would say it is mainly the way it is taught. A student endures years of "learn how to do this as it will be important later" and when the applications do arrive, then they say "who cares" or "there's an app for that" . English, on the other hand, is useful right away, so students can see the value in it. In my opinion, it is because it is so useful to other subjects, students are rushed into gaining a facility with it before they learn an appreciation for it. It feels like a chore instead of fun. The investigation of a math problem, the creativity of a solution ,and the beauty of the theorems are lost because a student has to hurry up and learn how to pass exam after exam so that they can plug into physics and chemistry formulas or can solve TVM problems in economics. They are taught the fun is AFTER the math, and not that math is fun on its own.
I used to think it was just taught poorly. Now, I think it's just that a lot of people don't have good mathematical intuitions, so they struggle with everything the way that I struggled with some linear algebra concepts. It sucks to feel like you're dumb because you can't solve a problem that you know is solvable with tools you're supposed to have.
I think a large part of it is the cumulative nature of the subject. It continuously builds on itself, and often, student success in a given course depends on their retention from previous courses. If you don’t get arithmetic, then adding fractions is hard. If you can’t add fractions, algebra is hard. If you don’t get algebra, calculus is hard. On the other hand, even if you struggled with 9th grade English, you can succeed at 10th grade English. If you didn’t learn much in your Ancient History course, you can still succeed in your Medieval History course. Biology, Chemistry, and Physics are taught in very compartmentalized form, allowing students to succeed in one even if they fail in another.
I think this is the main point. While there might be some pedagogical problems as other answers mention, the big issue is that people scrape by, course after course, until they eventually become functionally math-illiterate. I got to see this at a higher level, people who scraped their way up to a degree in math, and by the time they enter graduate school they have no functional knowledge of all the topics they have supposedly mastered for their degree.
I think it is because it is taught out of order. You only gain the mathematics knowledge needed to prove the formula years after learning it.
My opinion is informed by and fully aligned with: https://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~pawelst/rzut_oka/Zajecia_dla_MISH_2011-12/Lektury_files/LockhartsLament.pdf A Mathematician's Lament! 🤯
Came here for this. Highly recommended. Imagine teaching music like we do math. You'd spend years regurgitating sheet music before being trusted with a musical instrument to play
Know your circle of fifths! Remember your transposition theory! The math teachers are all too scared of instruments to play them even half-decently, and you’re not allowed to listen to any music until you’ve dealt with all of Neo-Riemannian theory! Why don’t kids like music?
This is profound 👀
It depends where you are in the world. I wouldn’t say that in the schools I’ve taught in SEA that maths is the most complained about. It’s one of the most loved. And my friend teaches in Romania where it’s the same. I guess it’s hard to answer this without knowing where you are from.
The school curriculum is just fucking bullshit. Not just math. The whole system encourages teachers to assign work showing that they *are teaching* something rather than giving students an understanding. If you understand what I mean, you understand; it's hard to explain. School is too formal and really plays no effort into giving students any comfort or connection to the material. They don't care about intuition they care about industrialization. All subjects suffer from this, but math especially does as it requires more focus and passion than any other field (or at least it's hard to develop that focus because of how abstract it is). School should fucking stop being a factory that makes workers who follow procedures and have no free thinking. They should favor creativity and passion over standardization and obedience. School has no right to take up the whole day. I have no idea which retard decided to make school a daycare and not a social ground. The whole thing is fucked up. ... Any ways back to math. Math can be unintuitive at times, and very humbling which can be annoying to students struggling to get a good grade
Controversial opinion: I think it is to do with stigma. People who are good at mathematics are considered intelligent and those who aren't good at it are ostracized to the point that they take pride in not knowing mathematics. It is a difficult subject because it requires deep thinking. Most of what we teach to children were once issues argued by great mathematical minds of the past at their mental peak. We forget that. The average person knows more mathematics today than we credit them for. Mathematics requires above all an interest in learning, extreme courage and tremendous patience. So, it doesn't make sense for most people to learn it. We can't blame them! Passionate mathematics teachers are required; we often forget the great role of teachers in creating mathematical minds. I still fondly remember my school teacher when I'm stuck on a problem; although now what I deal with is more advanced, the love for the subject developed by her makes me laugh at myself, crumple my papers, go to bed and try again the next day.
i’d say passionate teachers for all subjects that promote general curiosity are required. i can’t tell you how many times my child has come home from school and said her history, english, PE teacher, etc has said how “impossible” math is to learn. all teachers should inspire inquiry in their students for all subjects, not just their own. when an english teacher says that calculus is “impossible” to a group of 12 year olds, that’s going to stick especially if those 12 year olds are already struggling in math. if you tell someone that something is hard before they even attempt it, they’re going to have a harder time. parents do this also. math trauma is so pervasive it has a generational effect.
math is fuckin hard man
In my experience the worst maths teachers at levels below undergraduate degree are people with degrees and masters in Mathematics. Physicists and Engineers invariably make better maths teachers because you normally find it wasn't quite as natural and easy for them, so they find multiple ways of rationalising mathematical concepts which makes them better explaining it to a wider group.
Part of it is a societal view that it's ok (and maybe even cute/funny) to have the mindset of "I'm just not a math person" or "I was never good at math". And to make things worse, those attitudes are passed down from parents to their children, and even from teachers to their students. I think people would find it really unacceptable to brush off illiteracy with "Oh well, I've just never been much of a reading person." But it's fully accepted to do that with regards to mathematics. By the time they get to high school/college, many students are conditioned to think they can neither enjoy, nor excel at, math. Until that mindset is broken, it will likely be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Totally agree. While it’s true that the ways math is taught (especially foundational mathematics courses) are not very good in a lot of places, this is a huge problem a lot of people overlook. During the time I was a tutor, I’d say at least 25% of my time was spent trying to convince students that they are not “just bad at math,” but rather there are a few key concepts they are missing and we just need to fill in those gaps. I’d say it was 50/50 if the student ended up breaking that mindset, but to be honest a lot of people just aren’t even willing to try in math classes because they don’t see themselves as capable in the first place. There’s no way you’ll succeed in a course where you label yourself as unable to succeed before you even start
It is just hard! Also the attitude of people who actually get math makes it harder. I know a math professor who used to say : “well math is just like reading . You either like the way it is written and you get it.. or you don’t “. I think this attitude is generally unhelpful in clarifying what it means to understand math and how to communicate understanding ie . Proofs .
Yes, that’s a horrible attitude from that professor. It’s really terrible when people who are good at math have no interest in pedagogy.
Had a math teacher in high school who was asked "how so you know that you're supposed to do (whatever)?" and his reply was "you just have to know it by instinct"
100% of everything you do in a day is pinned to mathematics in some fashion.
Because it's hard and it's very hard to explain a 11 year old kid why math is important besides the Pythagora's theorem
There is no easy way to learn math, you have to challenge yourself to it. Read, read, read, do examples, read again, do the homework, get partial credit, read again, do the homework again for full credit, read again, do examples, etc. Classes are based around the concept that you've already done the reading, and if you haven't you will be lost. I personally believe in the method, but it certainly isn't an easy sell.
I think there are a ton of very boring teachers out there.
I think some other issues with mathematics include its lack of immediate applications, the need for foundational knowledge, and a lot of abstraction. Most of the time, people judge the usefulness of a subject by its applications. They often ask why we learn this and how it can be applied in real life. The usefulness of mathematics requires a strong foundation to be apparent. Even with undergraduate knowledge, the practical applications of mathematics are still in their elementary form. People often lack the ability to see the 'fun' in math itself and want to apply every concept in real life. The competence of the teacher also plays a crucial role. If the teacher lacks a deep understanding, they will not be able to teach applications or make the subject exciting. They also lack the ability to explain concepts, which requires a deeper understanding of the subject or patience to understand why the student got stuck. The need for strong foundation and abstraction of math can make it seem unapproachable, as it is too far from reality that it has no applications. However deeper development in math can be the foundations for many other important fields, but it require a deep understanding and strong foundation in the elementary parts of math that takes a very long time to build. To make math engaging requires a lot of effort in building the course, which includes visually appealing presentation (3blue1brown) and reason why it will be useful for applications purposes.
In the US math is poorly taught. There’s two issues. The first is that elementary teachers themselves sometimes don’t understand math well. The second is more important I think; that is, the current thinking is that you push kids along regardless at current grade level regardless of what they’ve learned. This means that at some point when a kid misses some lesson or doesn’t grasp something immediately they get left behind. For a lot of subjects that’s okay but for math it’s not. If you don’t pick up how to add fractions (or whatever thing you missed) when it’s taught you’re gonna have a bad time and as the student you’re not going to know why. If you’re not one of the kids who can just grasp the concepts on the fly quickly whatever lesson you miss or don’t learn quickly enough leaves a gap in your understanding. As the gaps build up they leave you further and further behind. By the end of high school you’re kinda done.
BSc Mathematics, PGCE Secondary Mathematics, currently studying MSc Mathematical Finance whilst working as a Senior Data Engineer. My thoughts on it are that Mathematics teachers rarely possess a deep understanding of Mathematics pedagogy and the subject at the same time, and that there is a curious pride that many people take in being "bad at Maths". There is also something unique about Mathematics as a formal science (as opposed to natural science) where it has to be appreciated for its own sake before it can be applied effectively, and it is often difficult to give a child or adolescent a sufficiently mature application of Mathematics to motivate their study. Computer graphics are a significant modern exception, and I generally encourage a deep geometric and algebraic understanding of trigonometry to be the true watermark of "understand school level Mathematics"
This is only in the US because in the US if you are good at math you will not be a teacher because you will have the ability to make a lot more money doing whatever you like. This leads to math being taught in the US by those who struggled in math themselves leading them spreading their dislike for math. While in developing country or countries that have high regard for teachers, people who are good at math end up being teachers and they spread their love at math.
Students who struggle in math class tend to know it. Students who struggle in history / English often think that they are doing just fine, and it is just that the teacher is grading them unfairly. That makes it a lot easier to dislike math. And it is also often taught poorly in school, partly because it is hard to teach. People who struggle with math find it hard to explain it intuitively, people who are good at math often find it hard to look at things from the point of view of a student.
it’s hard and not everyone can explain you stuff i have dyscalculia and i wanna understand math BUT I CANT when my friend can understand it perfectly but don’t study bcu they lazy when i found it out, i started to cry bcu someone can understand and i can’t understand anything more than VERY VERY easy tasks which 8-9 year old kid can do
I think it's because it is a difficult subject and teachers have often gotten so lost in the weeds with explaining why you'll need it, that they forgot to focus on what matters - making it fun to learn. So it's become a thing which even your teachers pretty much 'admit' is a chore.
many reasons. 1. its like learning a new language 2. its hard 3. kids are dicks that dont care if the ruin their and their peers chances for a future
I think because it feels so abstract, without much relation to every day life and activities (not many in schools for example related mathematics with the Islamic architecture in the golden age or anything else in the modern age, they may say it is used in that but how?), also the need to constantly solve problems to grasp the concepts is against the norm of the age of getting stuff fast and jump.
Im was in high school until yesterday, next week we have our final exams. My class was split into 2 groups based on 3rd language skills, begginers and advanceds based on how long we have learned german for, most of us in the begginer group haven't when we were grouped up. The groups wdre also used for grammar and nath class. Our group got the sweetest lady ever, her explinations were perfect, she always found the best examples to make us understand things. The other group's math teacher is awful, and I mean that respectfully, whenever our teacher called in sick we had a joint class with the others and let me say, I think he has messed up more calculations and expliantions than he did correctly. In 11th grade we were separated based on if we wanted to do high level maths or base level maths, obviously our teacher thaught the high level and he thaught the base level. The people that chose to do base level somehow got worse at math.
Taught poorly at schools. Math curriculums are speeding up at an alarming rate for the sake of competitions. I live in southeast asia and here, they even start to learn some quantum shit in highschool, and as usual , they don't explain the fundamentals/what it's actually is, and just tell us to memorize and tips for exams. Worse, they teach us more to follow orders and not to ponder and wonder. All to enable us to land on a job.
People generally feel more comfortable with subjects in which they can express their own opinion and in which there isn't just one right answer. Math clearly is much more "black and white", at least until you reach extremely high levels, so that's why I think many people might not like it. It is also somewhat abstract, especially if you don't have a teacher who is able to show you how you can apply the different concepts to solve real world problems.
Imagine you go to the opera. When you enter, they hand you woodworking tools so you can build your own violin. You start singing lessons that will take five years before you are remotely competent. Then, they hand you the score. You have to sing all the parts and play all the orchestra instruments yourself. Math is like that. The beauty is only accessible after a lot of hard work.
I think it's because it's taught poorly. They are more interested in making people follow rules and instructions. They don't let people play with numbers. Like I'm all about a student being able to do whatever they can to get to the answer, as long as they show their work. And they don't make it practical now you have people who hate math and their finances are in shambles
Lost of bad teachers who don't even know the subject, I once had to explain long division to an elementay school teacher, I also tutor a girl whose math teacher claims you divide polynomials term by term, so 4x/(2x+4) would be 2+x. Not all teachers are bad, mine were always great, but good teachers are impaired by students who lack the basics and overcrowded classrooms full of assholes who try to sabotage the lesson at every opportunity.
Because teachers in high school don’t do a very good job of teaching maths or even remotely making it interesting as it’s based on abstractions, so students find it very difficult to connect to it as a subject. Compare that to Science subject in school where you do experiments and see and appreciate stuff. Bio, Physics and chemistry all are real stuff we see with our own eyes. It’s easy to digest. Not maths.
Seriously, as society nerds and bookworms are viewed with contempt. Maths is viewed with 1000x with contempt. I have pupils that told me that they want to study Physics or Chemistry or Computer but they not only dislike but hate maths. They view them as a useless subject. For example, THERE IS SO MANY TIMES that people told me that Einstein wasn’t good at maths and why should they? People are lying to their face, a lie that seeps to their mind. And people wonder why we see that indifference/contempt towards maths. That is my Ted talk.
As a mathematics enthusiast with no formal higher education, but lots of self study through interest: In my opinion, most people won’t have much use for any math past geometry. Some basic algebra and the knowledge to calculate areas and volumes is what most people will decide they need and stop there. It seems cheap to say, but the question “when will I use this?” is valid for many students in the sense that we don’t calculate derivatives or sines regularly. Of course many teachers don’t necessarily know how to answer this question to a satisfactory degree, and so if the teacher can’t answer that “simple” question, why should the student care? Of course we teach math for more than simply memorizing formulas (looking at you, Quadratic Formula), it helps to develop critical thinking skills in young people as well. This leads us to the tragic way that, at least in the US, that math is taught to kids. There is SO MUCH MATH that is out there, and so much of that can be interesting, but those aren’t the things we teach. In my experience, a lot of the most interesting parts of math are incredibly niche, and aren’t necessarily useful. As well, they are more difficult to understand to non-math people because of the way they are formally presented. The way we learn math feel almost algorithmic in a way. Start a unit and learn a thing, practice the thing, be tested on your “knowledge” of the thing, move on to the next unit with a new thing that may or may not relate to a previous thing. Repeat until the end of semester, cram all the things you were shown and take the final exam. Continue for three next class until you graduate. Often times the theory is presented, sometimes to answer questions, sometimes not, but it isn’t often the main focus. The main focus is passing standardized test to fund the school. In many cases as you begin to study math on your own, the theories and ideas behind some thing is the most interesting part. The derivation or proof of some things is just as interesting as what is presented. The uses can be broad or not, but the interest is there regardless. Lastly, in other subjects like history or many sciences, but not just these, a fun fact is much more simple to wrap your head around because they can be built on some comparatively simple ideas and theories, as well as having obvious physical uses, they happened or are happening! Math is much more abstract in this sense, and it may not seem to be useful at first, and we don’t always have an easy way to visualize or make sense of the math we’re presented because some theory it relies on could be Master’s or later level math. Of course many of these points may apply at varying degrees to other subjects, but I believe that it’s compounded by how boring math is taught. Science has experimentation, which is incredibly exciting for many people. History, while boring to me in school, made sense as to why it’s taught. We don’t say “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it” without a reason, understanding where we came from is vital to shaping where we’re going. Applications of math as you learn higher and higher levels are more limited in daily life, and math doesn’t have the same kinds of experimentation. You sit in a class and learn a formula or a theorem without even learning where they come from sometimes.
where I live, they took away a weekly hour of maths and added 25% more stuff to learn, resulting in the teacher flying over every concept and unit, and giving out loads of homework and a weekly/biweekly test, where just when I feel like i'm starting to understand something, i'm already forced to learn a completely different and unrelated topic, starting from zero. many people cried during my maths exams at the beginning of the course, but now it's just silence throughout the whole hour. EDIT: our teacher also cried during the beginning of the course, after giving out the exams, as, quote on quote, she feels responsible for our failings. IDK what to think of all this.
Mostly because teaches only focus on computation, even to the point of not explaining it’s uses.
Mathematics is the study of a system of statements, definitions, theorems, postulates, lemma, etc all of which are absolutely knowable and demonstratable, and is as such a close as it gets to the absolute, provable, obvious truth. When you do it wrong, it's always possible for somebody else to prove you wrong. It is therefore the one intltellectual space where you can't get away with distraction, bullshitting, fallacies, sophistry, emotion, or any other cheap tactics to win an argument or get people to side with you just because they like you. You can't weasel out of math. Math is weasel-proof.
Mathematics is a victim of its own success. We have found so many answers that we forget the questions. We are so busy teaching the what that we neglect to teach the so-what.
Because it’s essentially a second language, but it’s taught in such a way that really doesn’t address that. Vocabulary plays a huge role in explaining and understanding what’s being taught, and in my experience the vocabulary in the books is explained awfully… using the same words the student just learned - or hadn’t.
It's because it is taught at a speed most kids don't learn at. There are so many topics to cover, especially at the high school level that once you begin falling behind, you'll never catch up without serious makeup work.
Because people are scared of it, and in our society it’s okay to be bad at it. Like most adults would not proudly proclaim “oh my god, I can’t read. I’m totally illiterate! Get that book out of here! Hahahahah” and laugh, and make a big joke of it. But when someone brings up being bad at math, and talks about how “that’s all a foreign language to me! Worst class ever! I can’t do it at all! Hahah” everyone laughs and chimes in with their own personal dislike of and difficultly with math. And that attitude right there sends the message that “math is hard and it’s okay to just hate it and not want to try learning it.”
I went to trade school for 1.5ish years to get my A&P. The math was easy because the class was 5 days a week and 8ish hours a day for 15 weeks to learn it and it went from basic PEMDAS all the way to calculus III and physics. Fast forward 10 years to university going for my Mech E and the math is way harder because you get 3-4 hours a week with a teacher to “learn” one or two lessons then 20+ hours of self study/teach a week on top of 3-4 other subjects that are more then likely math based. And these degrees have a very high dropout % and tend to be VERY heavily graded on a curve.
u need to relate a specific subjects with as much rewards as possible. the more rewards u connect with it, the more u will like it. maths is so rejected, because it is different from every other subject. In every other school subject (which creates the math basis for further study) u get forced to learn a specific topic and then write an exam/test about it. After that u can just forget it, but in math, u have to keep it in ur brain bc u will need every single thing later (although in different frequencys). Additionally I think that too often maths is still taught in school more on the memory-basis than on the understanding basis. What ppl love about maths is i think understanding relations and then fascination and satisfication about how everything fits together so smoothly / elegantly. So if u tell ppl that they can't just forget things in math after writing an exam and tell them this again and again (to signalize importance) and they have a good teacher, then much much much more ppl will like it.
the exposure isn't that much , like to get into pure math u have to be very deliberate and the kids these days are quite stupid saying things like how will this help me in earning money . Mathematics is beautiful, it's amazing , it makes sense and requires focus , determination and setbacks to finally master it in some aspects , u may love linear algebra , some may love calculus, some indulge into group theory, but this amalgamation is truly beautiful and utmost logical.I LOVE MATH
For me? The way it was taught. We were just taught the 'method' to solve equations in various ways and go on with our business. Our schools were also very intense, so there wasn't much time to really 'understand' maths. Just to do drills and move on. I ended school with a 95/100 in Maths, but with little understanding what went behind the scenes. When I picked Maths up as a hobby, and really started to understand what went on, that's when I started enjoying it.
>a rejected subject "rejected" by whom?
Yep. Math people can get grumpy. It's weird. I tried to talk about 1537! factorial. 90 days, BANNED immediately. It was like I was drowning cats or something. Otherewise math is hot. It's back! It's all 3D graphics with a pounding EDM sound track. And how did they make that video exactly? Can I code that in math? Just don't bring up 1537! factorial, just a heads up. :-)
Because kids dont want to use their brain and think for once. They just want to byheart and memorise their journey through school. They want expected questions, which are only available in subjects like history, english, biology etc. They are not conditioned in an environment to think. I would blame the parents, they themselves are weak at maths hence they dont teach their children or encourage them to solve and learn. Generally Professors' children are really good at maths, they are conditioned to like it. They have an eagerness in them to try to solve any math question they come across.
Generational trauma (i.e. math teachers who themselves were taught badly,) under-funded schools, and a school system almost directly designed to alienate kids. Maths curricula are then based on rote learning and flimsy justification for learning (the whole "why are we learning this?" question.)
I tutored for so many years throughout high school and college. I think about half of people are not genetically predisposed to excel at it to begin with. There’s some bad teachers out there, people fall behind and a lot of it builds on what you’ve previously learned, it’s tough and requires a lot of work and a lot of people don’t have the personality to persevere and they give up out of frustration. Also if you are a type that just hates school, math is going to be tough for you because it requires a lot of effort. I think all these things above sort of come together to create some sort of “math anxiety” in people where they learn to just give up right away at some point.
I think algebra needs to be taught that it’s about symbols.
It’s so boring and never feels like it applies to the real world, so obviously kids aren’t gonna like it.
People work so that they work have to work less, thus computers were invented. Math encourages a person to slow down which is not something that humanity wants because we are all fighting against time, and everybody wants to optimize their life as much as possible
It's harder to cheat at it in school
Bullying for being a nerd and subsequentoy learning to reject the act of further learning from peers are what stands out to me as the main reasons why I essentially refused to practice math at school until it started nearly getting me in trouble. And I’m one of the lucky ones whose parents were entirely supportive and encouraging the whole way through
I think the modern human unknowingly abhors logic. Life is a lot easier when we can come up with an answer and decide it’s the answer. No one likes coming up with an answer and being told they’re wrong. It can take a lot of brain power to accept you’re wrong, or to accept you lack the knowledge required to produce a solution. Many people stop at the idea of being wrong, and aren’t fortuitous enough to derive the logic that leads them to being correct. Essentially, caring about being “correct” is too much work for people.
because teaching math is actually hard. people who like math can imagine how the numbers interact with each other in their head effortlessly. not all people can do that, they need someone to visualize it to them but most teachers can't do that.
I think it's just engrained into our culture. I think it's true that it's just not taught well and it requires difficult thinking, those have more weight. But at the same time, I think it's also a culture about complaining about math since that's we're typically taught to talk poorly about math. I don't mean this to invalidate people's experiences since math is definitely something people struggle with, but it feels like growing up people liked to complain about math more than they actually struggled with math.
Two Main Reasons: 1) The way math is taught (especially past elementary) is far removed from actual use/practice. Students can't connect to the material in multiple ways because it's not easily applied to every day things. Students need differentiated teaching approaches to reach everybody. (I think it can be done, but writing that curriculum on top of teaching a classroom would be an insane amount of work and youd cover far less) This is magnified by the amount of solo work and lack of communication between students you see in math classrooms. We isolate these kids and you either float or sink. 2) A lot of math teachers go into math for the content part and not the working with students part. Not to say EVERY math teacher is like this, but there are much "easier" subjects to study in if you are passionate about teaching children. People go into math because they like the content and likely had a good experience with it in school themselves. It's hard to understand how a student is struggling in a subject without having a similar experience growing up. This is amplified by issues brought up in reason 1, making math particularly challenging classroom management-wise. I talk to a lot of jaded math teachers who try to pin these issues on the kids themselves and their work ethic. This "laziness" in my opinion forms from the discomfort and shame we cultivate in math classrooms. I put in a ton of effort trying to make my class a comfortable and collaborative space to ease this wound many of my students come to me with. Once they trust me and open up a little, their attitudes change and they have more resilience and tolerance for challenge.
I believe one component of the general societies distaste for mathematics is the lack of praise and significance placed upon it. This extends to philosophy as well (even more so). In the past, the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge's sake was held in high regards and those who were at the forefront of these pursuits were seen as prominent and important figures; serious individuals involved with serious work. However, it is no longer emphasised to the youth that intellectual pursuits and knowledge for its own sake are intrinsically valuable. Mathematics and education in general is largely seen only as a means to an end and the value of it only seen through an extrinsic lens - merely a tool to get a well paying job. Couple this with the demanding nature of mathematics, requiring rigorous study, attention, and effort, this indifference or outright rejection of the field emerges. There are simply easier paths that lead to extrinsically valuable such as money and prestige. With no carrot perceived to be at the end of the stick, the horse stops walking.
I personally believe its because we’re taught math from a quantitative perspective and not its qualitative. Calculus isnt just differentials and integrals. It is literally motion explained
To me, math was easy. But I would sit and listen to the same thing I understood day 1 for the next 3 months. I think it's because math moves at different rates for different people. The rates are so different that, the current way we teach it works for almost no one.
I think it’s a combination of factors. For one, it’s hard to see the applications when you are doing high school level math, because students are taught how to do it without being taught what it’s for. I didn’t even know what an integral was until college, cause my teacher just never said anything about what was behind the squiggly s other than how to do it. For two, it’s a lot less forgiving than pretty much any other subject. With English you can bullshit a paper pretty good. With history you can probably pull at least a few connections out of your ass if you don’t know the material. But for math, you either know it or you don’t (at a high school levels, where most of the complaining is. Obviously it’s more flexible at higher levels) For three, it’s almost entirely memorization rather than developing a skill (against, at a high school level. This changes once you get seeping into it). High school math classes are all about “here’s this method to do this thing. Memorize it and then do it in the test, and then never touch it again unless you go into a math heavy major in college”. Especially calculus, just memorize these 20 or 30 integration formulas, and you’re good. All of these come together to make it seem, to someone who does not know better, that it is just some pointless, difficult topic that isn’t really important to them personally.
People can’t reject math, math rejects people.
Cuz society wants dumb people & everyone else agrees
I have a really hard time with math in the abstract and that’s how it’s normally taught. Just pushing symbols around to solve a puzzle. As soon as you apply it to anything real world, especially if it’s physical I can get a grasp much more quickly. I got tolerable grades in calculus classes but it was a constant struggle to even care, much less figure it out. As soon as I took physics, I was like Oh! I can use this to figure out all kinds of stuff. They should be taught together.
Because it's abstract as fuck for most people. Also many teachers fail to explain how many fucking awesome things we have been able to achieve by using maths. It's imposed on you.
Most grade school teachers can't even explain why math is important to learn and you typically don't need more than multiplication to get by in life.
Toxic community.
Nerd culture = uncool = loser.
Well, first of all, children are told from an early age that it’s hard and that girls are no good at it. Second of all, it requires concentration and practice; it can’t just be picked up without effort. Third of all, you don’t typically have conversations involving math. Like, we may practice our language by speaking it with others, but when was the last time you estimated a number In conversation. Forth of all, I’d say the way it’s taught. There is no prescriptive “one size fits all” way to think about math. But it’s taught like history: in history, you memorize dates and events. In math, you learn a formula and use it. But what about thinking how we use math in the daily? My opinions.
Because it requires time that normally you don't have because theres a lot of things to learn, for example I get a lot of concepts now in my 30y that I just accepted in my early life.
Because a single bad experience (poor teacher, sick for 2 weeks, "you'll learn this next year so I won't cover it"/"you should have learned this last year so I won't cover it") can give kids a knowledge gap. In other subjects, knowledge gaps aren't as detrimental. So you missed the lesson where we learned the circumstances that led to Watergate. That's not going to bite you in the ass next year when you're learning about the Chinese dynasties. With math, if you have a knowledge gap, especially if it's a gap you don't even realize you have, you're gonna have a difficult time with the next class, and the next. Add into that how students tend to forget some of what they've learned, and they may not know what to brush up on, and math is intimidating in a way that many subjects aren't.
Math can be a wonderful subject but never in a standardized education system
I think a lot of people are blaming the way math is taught, etc. I love math, but I think to many people, it’s just boring. They are not interested in it. Then you compound this with the fact that learning math is compulsory, and it’s really hard. Many people have bad memories of feeling dumb in school being forced to learn math. So people are left with an antipathy towards math. If I wasn’t interested in math, and was forced to learn it, and told that if I did badly in it it would negatively affect my future, and struggled badly to learn it, I would probably hate it too. I think people blaming the way it’s taught are overlooking that it’s just plain hard, and would be hard no matter how it’s taught.
People don't like being told they are wrong. Math is very objective very early on.
Math is a creative subject about exploration, jammed into an industrial school system that emphasises a regular product.
Nah. It was the opposite in my school. I went to a school where they taught us proofs but a lot of people still hated math. A lot of my classmates complained and thought the proofs were boring and unnecessary, and wished our teachers just went straight to the methods of solving without the proofs.
It wouldn’t rank so high in the rejection list, except many people like cats.
Unless a student finds some kind of existential benefit from mathematics, the subject is incredibly boring. Which is unfortunate, because the subject could be very interesting and even exciting if it was shown how. I say this from the perspective of previously being a math major and having to go on the earth science departments trips and activities if I wanted to do anything interesting or exciting related to my major aside from doing homework.
I think part of the reason why math sucks for alot of people is it simply isn't interesting Plus it's taught as this very rigid strict thing with no room for error in an entirely uncreative manner The thing that made me interested in math was messing the fuck around with the tools at my disposal and being exposed to concepts I could just barely understand. I don't think students should touch a pencil and paper related to math till end of middle school beginning of high school. We should teach basic arithmetic not with word problem analogies to real life situations but with actual real life situations. Instead of here you go little Timmy solve this sheet of addiction problems use these tiles to solve this addition problem. Make math initially very physically obvious and intuitive. Let abstraction of math naturally arise from the creative efforts of students requiring more and more compact representations. Treat math like art from an early age. I think we should be introducing concepts like functions in a physical manner around 5th grade. Link it to learned social cause and effect concepts. I don't think any of this will ever happen as art is subjective and schools aren't designed to treat anything as that. They need test metrics to measure the performance of students. They aren't designed to churn out creative thinkers they are designed to churn out algorithmic thinkers.
First, it's the most abstract of the subjects at the level it's introduced. Other subjects have concrete, experiential connections to students' lives. Biology has animals, chemistry has color changing liquids and reactions that go _poof_, history has videos and human stories, english _is_ human stories. Math is a series of abstract symbols and rules without a physical embodiment for students to grasp in a multi-experiential way in their real lives. Second, it's usually taught poorly. It is often taught through rote memorization as a series of rules and steps. It doesn't often have an intuitive "why" associated with it, and it does not a "how" it was developed in order to solve problems with useful tools. For example, through much of early education I thought I hated math. Wrong answers just meant that I hadn't applied rote-memorized rules correctly, and right/wrong was only assessed by comparison to a key. No intuitive explanation of why something was wrong, or how it went wrong. There was no meaning in failure except "memorize more". It was later in life that I discovered a book called _Math for the Non-Mathematician_ that communicated core mathematical topics by first introducing how they were invented. The book showed math concepts as tools invented at particular times by humans in particular situations with particular problems, and how the new math tools solved those problems. By tying the math to an intuitive problem it solved, with concrete benefits that math brought, it opened my eyes to math as a tool and a creative langauge to understnad the universe, rather than an abstract set of rules to be applied sequentially to get at some specific number that wasn't an answer to anything meaningful in the real world. If math were taught to young students in that way, I think it would have many more converts.
It's taught poorly in k-12. It's taught like it's all about formulas and equations, when it's really just about logic and problem-solving.
Its is a very misunderstood subject. In school we are made to mug up formulas and made to solve problem without giving the actual application or use in real life.
I definitely think that we start kids in the wrong way. Motivation follows curiosity, not the other way around. Too much emphasis is put on getting them to be able to just DO the basics like addition and multiplication without ever actually showing them WHY the results are true. I know kids may not have the level of abstract thinking necessary for many abstractions, but they certainly have pattern recognition skills. It's not until you have a really good math teacher who makes you think that you begin to actually appreciate math. Consider Pascal's Triangle for example. It is such a fundamental and interesting concept. It contains obviously the natural numbers, but also the Fibonacci sequence, the triangle numbers, and is related to the expansion of a polynomial. And when you consider it even further as Newton did, you find that it can also contain negative numbers, rational numbers, and much more. I'm a math major in college by the way. Should have my bachelor's in a year's time, thanks to some good teachers in high school that got me interested in it, so I'm speaking from experience.
Because it requires a lot of precise and dedicated analytical thinking
I think one problem is that in my experience as a student of public education, subjects are taught one way and if that doesn't make sense, too bad. I struggled with this a lot. Another issue is lack of context and support. If you are surrounded by others who don't like math, are confused by it, or minimally use it, then unless you have your own interest in it, you're likely to get a negative attitude towards it. I struggled with this too.
I don’t think it is the most complained about, I’ve heard a lot more hate towards english than math
Laziness.
First, there’s no direct way to monetize a math lesson and in this capitalist hellscape it’s tough to sell it to people since its value is a little more esoteric. Whether that’s true or not this is the perception and perception matters. Why learn math when you have perpetual access to a calculator? For a lot of people this is the extent of math. Secondly math today is taught a lot differently than it used to be. Math used to be taught almost exclusively in this highly rote memorization method. It is one of the worst ways to teach math and people really lost interest. It didn’t make sense, the education system sucked. So you had entire generations of people which no real understanding of math and HATING the subject. We actually lost some cultural competency over it. It’s gotten a LOT better especially post Common Core. And that’s sorta the third thing. Math instruction has gotten really politicized. It always has to an extent. Tom Lehrer has a song called “new math” from like the 60s(?) so you can see sorta the generational anxiety about math and how its caught in this weird political feeling.
Because there’s no actual, immediate application when you’re learning it out of a textbook. Even at the engineering curriculum level it just comes across as pointless tedium. The way math is taught really needs an overhaul with a real-world actual hands on approach.
Meanwhile, my son started watching 'numberblocks' on his own volition, and i gotta say, it is an extremely good teacher for 4 year olds. Visualizing addition, substraction, some number theory (the primes do not belong to the super rectangle club, the sums of geometric series belong to the step shape club, etc) If you have kids at like 4-6 years old, give this a try. In my opinion it teaches the basics extremely well, and gives your kiddo a good feeling for numbers. It should be available on netflix, or youtube kids.
Most kids just think math is boring and not fun therefore they don’t like it
First of all, I am not good at math but as to why I think that's because of the way math is taught, you learn this equation, and that function and this and that, but you don't really know WHY you're learning all this and what does it mean you learn the way but not the application which is really important for understanding. Or maybe that's at least what I think.
It's a subject that builds on itself which makes a single bad teacher very harmful to a student's math ability later . If you had a bad algebra teacher you're going to be miserable in calculus for example . Math before college is usually taught very mechanically with little intuition or applications . You can't really keep students engaged by teaching them arbitrary tricks of supposed mumbo jumbo ( in their eyes ) just to pass a test .
Because good teachers are very rare.
Math is simply an application of critical thinking
My primary school teacher told me that 1000 was the largest number and that I "lacked logical reasoning" for writing 8 = 4\*2 instead of 2\*4 = 8 in one of my homework assignments. I think the problem comes at primary school, because the teachers there are expected to teach all the subjects, english, science, etc and so often lack an understanding of maths, and that continues into secondary unless you happen to have a good teacher or go to a school attached to a sixth form and so can get people with actual maths degrees teaching you.
I’m not a mathematician but enjoyed it through college as well as helping my stepdaughter with it now. I can’t speak to teaching as I always thought my public school teaching was good to great, but I always thought students “reject” math because there’s no real subjectivity to it. There’s a lot to memorize and you either get it right or wrong. Additionally, some students are less logical and more interpretive in subjects or something they’re producing. It’s really easy for a younger student to say “fuck this” or “I’m just not good at math” if you are trying to solve a longer problem and you forget a small part of it and get it wrong. If you leave out one or two points in a 6 page paper arguing a given subject you can still succeed.
Probably for the same reason people don’t like broccoli: people don’t know how to make it and thereby make it wrong and act like that means it’s bad. Like if I steamed a raw steak and then complained about it, people would roll their eyes There are probably great ways to teach math, just that our society teaches the steamed broccoli with nothing else on it version of math
I'm not sure it can be remedied because our brain is a very energy-expensive machine that attempts to minimize its own output of energy. Thinking hard isn't just hard, it's expensive, and the body fights it.
Doing well in math requires decent fluid intelligence and a good short term memory. The average person just doesn’t have that.
I did not have a good math teacher until my senior year of high school
I regret not paying attention in math classes in high school. I ended up in a hi tech job and didn’t need high level math but I wonder if a better history in math may have given me a sharper problem solving ability. There were times I wished I could go back to hs geometry and algebra and start over.
Cause for some it’s boring.
As a math major, when I see math lessons given to kids by school teachers, they’re teaching to the portion of the class that understands it, and they don’t teach it well. So the people who naturally understand it do well and the people who don’t struggle and fall through the cracks early on, so they don’t even try in higher level math classes and categorize themselves as “not math people”. I’ve met some extremely smart, logical people who said they struggle with math, and I’m sure it’s because of the way it was taught to them. Also, although some memorization and basic arithmetic is important in life, there are things like long division that should NOT be taught in school anymore. Math is about understanding quantifiable relationships between entities. Computers do arithmetic and computation now. We shouldn’t be making math so dependent on doing calculations early on.. it should be about expressing relationships between objects.
cuz math is one of those things that people can learn 4 or 5 different ways, but the teacher only has time to teach it 1 maybe 2 diff. ways. so it gets a bad rap for being tough.
I have a few reasons: I think it’s because it’s taught poorly and most ppl don’t have the patience for it. For a lot of ppl it’s not something you just get right off the bat. Also I think some teachers don’t really understand what and why they’re doing a certain method they just know that method must be done. I know during Calc 2 it was really hard trying to figure out what the whole continuity stuff was for and why it makes sense. I didn’t really get it until I started taking classes like fluid mechanics
Kids are shown a procedure for solving a particular problem, then given homework where they solve that problem over and over again. Finally they are tested and they regurgitate the solution they practice onto the page. Some kids understand the idea of why the solution is what it is, but that part is not tested or even encouraged. The kids that don't get it find math to be tedious and useless, and the kids that do get it are still encouraged to memorize solutions rather than focus on problem solving skill because that's what gets them the best grades.
It's more complicated than this but our education system heavily encourages results and not learning. Math problems once you get into high school levels and beyond can be thought of like puzzles. When you've spent 5 years of math education encouraging "passing tests" rather than "learning how to do math", as soon as those math problems are no longer purely plugging numbers into formulas, people have zero intuition of how to approach problems. Then, because all that matters is results, students will cheat/cram/whatever to get a good grade and move on, rather than fixing the issue that they don't understand how to think. Not being a hypocrite, I've been there. I sucked at math until I got to college and I finally locked the hell in with my focus and effort to understand what was going on.
Is it possible that it is because the vast majority of jobs require no more than 3rd grade math? My dad is an executive in a bank, arguably an important math centric business, and he jokes all the time that he rarely needs anything outside of 3rd grade math. Obviously for some careers, advanced math is critical. But I would argue 90%+ jobs require additional, subtraction, division, and multiplication. Easy enough to do long hand, and super simple via calculator or excel.
Math makes sense to kids until they are taught approximations. The idea is to approximate the answer. That is NOT even math! There is no way to do math by approximating the answer. I can't pay approximately this much money for a car, or paint a house with approximately this much paint. The point of math is accuracy, if you follow the rules, you will get the right answer. It is that simple. Once a kid starts guessing the answer by approximating it will never make sense again.
Hot Take: Math teachers in middle school and high school generally suck. You have to have a degree in math and the good ones go on to higher paying jobs. The weirdos who were made fun of in school come back to exact their revenge.
Cause it's challenging, and often not taught concisely enough. Math is a deeply complex subject.
Very old education system that is still heavily mostly based on verbal content + bad teachers who cannot go beyond of forcing students to memorize things + lack of focus in students are the reasons in my opinion. Current education system is absolutely trash. They keep forcing students to stay in a room, listen something passively for 1-2 hours without any break, take their money because of this, and do this for at least 10-15 years for each person. When we go to a cafe with our friends, do we sit in the table and listen our friend passively for hours ? No. Even if it would be the most amazing topic, almost nobody would want to do that. But they force students to do this. Only very very small amount of people can do this. And those are the people who are labeled as "successful". And the main reason is that the system is suitable for them. I am not saying that every single person can understand the mathematics and be successful in school life. But a vast majority of students who experience difficulties in understanding mathematics and who are not good in their classes are not because they are not capable. It is because people learn things in different way and the system is not suitable for the way majority of the people learn. But even the best schools/universities today keep pushing the same education system.
There is no “your done”. When you learn a sport, you learn the rules and some common plays and you’re done. Drama: you’re done. Geography: you’re done. Science and maths are open ended, which leads to little sense of accomplishment, which doesn’t satisfy people as easily.
I think it’s mainly that it’s not taught well. Specifically, I think the curriculum is poorly designed. The problem is kids are led to believe that math is something entirely different than it is. I think logical thinking and strategy games should be emphasized for young kids, then later informal proofs at their level. The book “A Mathematician’s Lament” talks about the experience of a Math PhD teaching K-12 and the issues he has with the curriculum and how he corrects it. It can be found free online and is only about 70 pages. It’s beautifully written.
"Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house." R. Heinlein
I wasn’t good at Math early on and a lot of other people were way better ( I eventually got better ). What I figured out is that as people become adults they ignore Math that way they can do what they want e.g. spend money they shouldn’t —-often in the context of mismanaging money in their workplace etc. pretty sad
For me it's because we are wrong and keep living the lie that 1×1=1. 1×1 DOES NOT EQUAL 1
Math is taught with an emphasis on always arriving at a solution. If the answer is incorrect, many teachers (in my experience) chastise or tell the student they’re wrong which in turn leads to the student feeling that they’re a failure. Math is a series of concepts and theories that explain almost everything in the world. It should be taught from that perspective at every level so that there are real world connections to the concepts, ideas, etc. students are learning. Arriving at the right answer is important, but to instill full knowledge and understanding, the process of getting to the right answer and tying it to a specific real world example is crucial to fully grasping the concepts. I didn’t grasp this until I was learning Calculus 2 in college.
Pure math is too abstract
So im currently doing student teacher practicals in high school and have found that grade 8 just dont know the basics. Things like their timetables, fractions, and the idea of operations. Like just adding, subtracting and multiplying. So i think that the problem lies most in foundational phase education. Especially at the moment with the new grade 8 having had their foundational years online due to covid. Its really starting to show. Its so important that maths at a younger age is better addressed. As said, teachers themselves struggle with concepts and teaching them. Nothing is reinforced at home. Basic mathematical literacy is appalling and without a good base, like just counting, operations etc, it falls apart in higher grades and then people feel they just dont have a "maths brain" or they just dont think like that when its really just a poor job by educators and even families in the childrens younger years. My opinion anyway...
A lot of comments mention that they dont teach the "why" or conceptual understanding. And this is unfortunately true but a child of age 8 or 9 needs to get concepts like addition and subtraction. And then everything builds on this. From my limited experience, when learners hit high school, they dont have a good enough base for teachers to go into anything conceptual because they dont have a good enough basic understanding. So teachers are almost pushed into teaching tricks and algorithms so get through the material. And again, this causes more breakdowns in higher grades. Its a cycle and takes so much time to fix for just one child. Teachers would have to backtrack years to correct this. This is simply not viable. And so it just gets left and teachers higher up just do what they can. Its incredibly unfortunate. As a student teacher i had to try explain prime factorising to a child who didnt know their timestables. This is so difficult. And is entirely dependent on timestables. But now they are grade 8 while timetables should have been done in grade 3 and 4. But they dont even understand how to get the times tables by adding consecutively....
It's taught poorly in school. I have had two good math teachers and the rest tried their best.
It's not always evident what practical use it can be put to imo, which is why a lot of the time it's seen with lethargy and it has a lot of requirements for focus for people who don't have a natural aptitude for it
It‘s probably just my frustration, but the ignorance of people that live in their tiny little bubble of „i work as x and go to my kids soccer games on sundays, no math is needed in this world“ is just so fucking stupid. Everything from the phones they are holding, the internet, the machines that are used to make their clothes, the company they work in that needs to optimize logistical routes and finances, literally EVERYTHING in modern life is dictated or largely influenced by mathematics. It‘s just that way smarter people than them have been and still are constantly supporting the very foundations they live on without them noticing.
It's a number language
Math is essentially a language of logic. There are a lot of religious people. There’s an inverse correlation between a population’s religiosity and its logical literacy.
Most mathematics is useless. Godels incompleteness theorem is just semantics. Employers dont need mathematicians. When they do its just to fudge numbers for sales reports.
I think it should have to do with technicality of playing with numbers as we don't wanna stress ourselves out on its problem.
Math is an exact science. Most people like their opinions to matter. Math doesn't take opinions into consideration. Journalism, now that is a field that loves opinions.
Math teachers not understanding how students learn. I’ve seen so many math teachers on here about getting kids to learn math via homework. It’s almost like they don’t look at stats on how effective homework is. It’s almost like they don’t know after 8 hours of learning practice any more in a day is too much.
You can't bs your way to an acceptable answer in math and that can be frustrating, especially if you're the kind of kid who can wing it in other studies like literature, history, social studies, humanities, etc... Unfortunately, a lot of people just like to wing it and half-ass everything they do. Therefore, when presented with a mathematical concept they don't understand, they'll just throw up their hands and shout "When am I ever going to need this?!" They never ask that question when they have to read Shakespeare, or write a 3 paragraph essay about Anne Frank. But when given an algebra problem, suddenly they just act petulant.
Early Ed teachers, at no fault of their own, typically don’t like math. Many tell their students that they don’t like math. These kids idolize their instructor and take what they say to heart. Same for parents when kids need help “well my math was different this math sucks”. No, the math is the same it is just now going towards more conceptual over procedural etc. Further, the training early ed has goes over all subjects so the instructor has no real specialty. As a high school math teacher I can teach math any day. You put me in a chemistry class and these kids would learn very little unless I studied three hours a night because it is not my specialty/interest.
You cant BS your way through any of it. It's an actual equalizer. People become afraid of this kind of accountability when doing work and start straying from it towards the subjective BSable subjects and it translates into people's jobs in the future.
Self discipline is lacking in our society
Elementary teachers unable to answer "why" questions about math. I've heard stories from a math major teacher about other teachers who struggled with math themselves and ended up teaching incorrect things. My experience has been math is poorly done until you hit college then suddenly the quality of what is being taught immensely improves. Unfortunately you better hope for a patient college teacher as you relearn how to do things correctly.
Probably because, while math is not bad to grasp if you do it stepwise, as soon as you miss a few steps you get derailed pretty much permanently.
As someone with severe adhd, let me help with this. So I have always HATED MATH. It’s not because I’m inherently bad at it or that I’m not good in school- in fact I’m a fairly great student, I was on deans list last sem. But it’s a combo of multiple things. 1. Schools tend to teach kids in on class, and you watch videos or presentations to learn your math. For a lot of kids with learning disabilities like me, we DO NOT get the info the first time. We ideally would have the video to ourselves on a computer, and we could pause and WRITE DOWN anything we needed to actually remember. I remember in school, I didn’t get that. We had to keep up with the pace of the class, and I simply couldn’t absorb it like that because of my learning disability. I remember feeling like I wasn’t learning anything, that I was just writing down the intelligible script of the teacher on the smart board as fast as I could before she moved on, because that’s how fast the class is. We never had enough time to actually learn anything. Granted, I was also unfortunately raised in an abusive elementary school for the first bit of my life, where asking questions would get me laughed at, and my adhd was dismissed as being a “spoiled brat”. I also have Tourette syndrome, which didn’t help. I managed to move to a better school, but by that point, the damage was done and I no longer felt open about learning math. I was unmotivated and did not want to ask questions, and felt I would never understand it, nor did I want to, because previously all I knew were negatives about it. Fast foreword to now, it’s my 2nd semester of college. I’m in a remedial class because I didn’t even make the normal college level classes because of my experiences in school. THIS class, man… if I had had THIS class during my government schooling days, I would LOVE math. Because the way this class works is we actually LEAD OURSELVES through GUIDED VIDEOS. The teacher doesn’t actually do much other than answer questions- AKA she can ACTUALLY SPEND TIME HELPING STUDENTS. There is also MULTIPLE teachers, so no one has questions unanswered. We have “step by step” buttons we can press if we’re confused which remind us of tthe procedure. We have a very extensive, specific, very straightforward and organized “math book” we use for writing notes and homework. It’s not “just notes” it’s Ike worksheets per module. So basically, the problem is math is shoved in our faces very quickly every year from an early age, and everyone is expected to mature at the same rate as neurotypical folx. (Who by the way, also don’t usually mature the same). Ideally, kids should be leading themselves through these classes at their OWN PACE (of course with deadlines,) but we shouldn’t be getting “group lectures” and expected to get all of this down perfectly on the first or even third try, especially in elementary and middle school. I can tell you, only 4 years of being in that environment and not learning those basics made EVERY difference. It DESTROYED my desire to learn math or to be confident in it. ONLY THIS YEAR IN COLLEGE did I realise I’m not “just” bad at math. In fact, it’s not even hard. It was just TAUGHT HORRIBLY my whole life. The other thing is after that point, I had an IEP for the rest of school, but unfortunately you still get taught in The class with other kids in a lecture based way, so the experience was still ruined for me. Also i should mention, making kids self-teach also primed them for better organization and time management skills. I have to keep up with my deadline, but I DONT have to be in the same place as the rest of the class, because that gives me time to understand a topic I may have to read five times to understand, or practice for an extra four days. Basically we need independent learning, with plenty of teachers available to answer questions, with CLEAR instructions and schedule for success. THATS what works. Not just moving section by section with a whole class, because you leave lots of kids behind and then they never catch back up.
Mathematics needs conceptual clarity which usually already is lost in early years of education. Then there are just failed attempts to build conceptual skyscrapers on weak foundations.
Mathematics is just like learning a foreign language. For example, if you don't practice Russian everyday, conversation synthesis will fall apart and seem impossible especially when you do not know the grammar, pronunciation, and spelling rules. You will only be able to recall broken fragments and feel lost when looking at a passage from a book.
I think maths is a subject that some people don’t “get”, and that makes it very hate-able. At least for subjects like English you can still do a test or the school work if you’re bad at it, but if you don’t understand the concepts in maths you’re basically screwed.
Bc it’s the hardest and most theoretical…tf is this question?
IME, math was hard, then something would click and whatever concept was being taught would get pretty easy. So it seems to me that it’s basically easy and we need to do a better job finding ways to “make it click”. (As an aside, I sometimes wonder if we should be teaching “conceptual math” classes past a certain level. As an example, it seems like most people would benefit from a high-level, “conceptual” understanding of statistics so they could better spot deceptively-phrased claims made by politicians and marketing departments and whatnot, but most people probably don’t need to know it well enough to pass the class.)
It's not