Gah, stop the mathphobia!

The BBQ Pit
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This rant was inspired by comments in this thread concerning fear of math. Pepperlandgirl wrote, “I suck at math, I got my credit in Math in Society.” I_Dig_Bad_Boys wrote, “I learned in HS that I have a math-related learning disorder and while I don’t use it as a crutch, it does make it hard to understand and comprehend math. Even basic algebra stumps me.”

Gah, you do NOT suck at math! Nobody does! The teaching of math sucks, as does the general conception that one can function in society without a basic grasp of arithmetic and basic mathematical concepts.

When I was a wee tot, I too thought that somehow math was beyond me even though I always scored extremely well in intelligence tests. My mother reinforced the idea by telling me that “our family just isn’t good at math.” Consequently, I shied away from math for a very long time. I hated algebra and geometry in high school because the teachers droned on and on about intangible concepts that had no practical applications in everyday life. My fear of math influenced my choice of history over biology as a major in college.

But one day, I had an epiphany. I was browsing at the library when I saw on a cart, Asimov on Numbers. I loved the Good Doctor’s essays, so although the book concerned the scary world of numbers, I checked it out and read it. What a revelation! Numbers weren’t scary, they were fun! Asimov’s clear, simple prose broke down concepts into easily undertood bits and showed how math could be used in practical applications. Soon, I was devouring math books, eager to make up my deficiencies in the subject. I took math classes and eventually studied calculus and got a solid B! I could do numbers!

It both saddens and infuriates me that people think that an ability to do math is something one is born with than a subject one must learn. We are not born knowing how to tie our shoes and drive a car, but we learn to do them eventually. The same is true for math, which is a subject that anyone can master. Sure, there is a level of mathematical work where talent does matter, but we’re not talking about L[sup]2[/sup] harmonic forms on non-compact Riemannian manifolds here.

Anyone, and I mean anyone, can learn to enough math to sort out a monthly payment for a car loan, to figure out a household budget, to multiply the ingredients of a recipe, to figure out the carrying charge of an installment puchase.

And while math-related learning disabilities do exist, they are rare and can be overcome with different learning strategies. But most mathphobes are not learning disabled; they are just victims of bad teaching and societal bias against learning math.

A solid grasp of basic math is the golden ticket to the carnival of success.

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I agree, gobear. I’ll be on the look out for the book you mentioned in you OP. According to amazon.com, it’s out of print and bookcloseouts.com yielded no results when I searched for the title.

Your last sentence sounds like something Principal Skinner would say, by the way.

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So Barbie was wrong? :wink:

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You are wrong—I do suck at math. I still manage to handle my finances w/o getting into debt . . . But I do suck at math.

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Numbers! Aieee! <flees>

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Maybe, Eve, but I’m willing to bet that it isn’t an inborn trait so much as the fact that you aren’t interested in it.

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I can apply basic mathematical principles to do things like calculate my gas mileage, figure out the various ratios, times, distances, etc that need to be applied to auto racing, balance my checkbook, and so on - but you know what? I’m not quick with the abstract concepts and “what does X equal?” and “plot a cosine” or whatever in math class. Which is why I say I suck at math. I suck at math class.

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That’s why Math in Society worked for me. I feel like when I’m working on math, especially Trig and Geometry, that I was missing very important connections. It’s like I was trying to learn how to read without knowing the vowels. I was aware that I was missing something, but I didn’t know what that something was and nobody could tell me.
The beauty of Math in Society was that it wasn’t totally abstract and scary. Each concept we learned had very real applications to life, and I actually got an A on one of my tests. I have never, ever gotten A on a math test before. I finished the class with a B+, the highest grade i ever got in math.

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No, you don’t, Eve. Anyone who can handle the minutiae of copy editing can handle basic mathematics. Remember, we’re only talking about caculating compound interest, handling fractions, and doing simple algebra. You can do it.

Juanitatech, the book may be out of print, but your local library might have a copy in the stacks. some other books I have read lately that I have fouind entertaining are The Kingdom of Infinite Number by Bryan Bunch, The Mathematical Universe by William Dunham, and The Math Gene by Keith Devlin.

For adults who want to reacquaint themselves with basic math, I recommend All the Math You’ll Ever Need : A Self-Teaching Guide by Steve Slavin or Arithmetic and Algebra Again by Brita Immergut and Jean Burr Smith.

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Thanks gobear.

I’m one of those people who’s aware of his shortcoming in the world of math. Every now and again I take a stab at learning more. In fact, not long ago I tried reading “The Mathematical Universe” and while I was able to follow it, I eventually grew tired of rereading every third paragraph to make it stick.

A quick check of my local library (they have their catalog online) shows that “Asimov on Numbers” is part of their collection. I must check it out.

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[Eve curls up into a small ball in the corner and whimpers quietly . . . ]

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I complete three semesters of calculus and I’m still a math phobe. Some of us just don’t like it.

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When I’m driving I like to try to calculate lots of things: How long until I get there? How long until I run out of gas (at X mph and y mpg)? What if I slow down/speed up to X mph for an hour? I’m driving at Z miles per minute, feet per second, etc.

Sometimes I figure it out, sometimes I don’t. I do it to kill time. If you give me a pencil and paper I can figure out just about anything up to and including most calculus/physics problems. I’m paper handicapped :slight_smile:

Seriously, if a parrot can tell you things like “three blue cubes” then any normal human can balance a checkbook.

I feel that most of the time math phobia is a psychological problem. Well, any phobia is a psychological problem, but you know what I mean. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Count me in with the “I was once a mathphobe but then saw the light” guys. Oddly enough, my epiphany occurred in calculus. All of a sudden, it was “integrals, eh?” and I could handle almost any math situation presented to me. One day I couldn’t figure out how to calculate price per ounce at the grocery store, the next day I was making Riemann sums my bitch. Where simple interest calculations were once a source of baffling confusion, now I understood how infinitely compounded interest was solved.

I don’t know what advice to give other than these two bits:

1.) If you tell yourself you suck at math, you’re probably going to suck at math.

2.) Keep trying.

Now, it’s back to univariate auto-regressive integrated moving average forecasts…

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Should i roll out screenings of Mathnet? or Mathman?

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I hate maths. I’m supposed to be intelligent, but I seem to be getting worse at it as time goes on. Case in point - two days ago, I was attempting to revise it, and came utterly unstuck for the first time since I started revision. They’re making me learn stuff like “y= a(f)x is a stretch of the funtion y=(f)x in the y direction scale factor a” and other equally incomprehensible snippets of information.

If gobear can explain to me what this actually means, I’d be very grateful. :slight_smile:

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I’m a complete and utter amoeba when it comes to math. But-it helped when I had better teachers. The best teacher of math in high school would assign us homework. The next day, the first part of class we would go over it-he’d ask us to tell us which problems with had difficulty with, and then we’d go over those, and he’d help to better explain them. Then he’d collect our homework, which we got points for. He would also stay after school every Thursday until six pm and anyone who wanted to could drop in for extra help.

And then there was the asshat I had in college-he would breeze through problems-this guy LOVED math. If we asked him to slow down, he would, a bit, but he’d whine, “But I want to get to the GOOD stuff!” My tutor wasn’t a help, because I was utterly and completely lost. So I dropped the class and took it again the following semester with a different professor. This time, I ended with a B-I got the same tutor I had before, and I did really well. The second professor was almost exactly like the teacher I had in high school.

Then the last math class I took, I failed, because the teacher was again confusing. I had a peer tutor AND my professor was helping me once a week-but whenever I asked how I was doing, she put me off by saying, “Don’t worry, if you can pull it together on the final, you’ll be all right.” But I wasn’t.

But since I was changing my major, and it didn’t require this particular math course, I didn’t bother taking it over again. I think if I had a different professor, I may have done better. (Probability and Statistics, for those who are curious).

Math sucks, and I absolutely hate it. I can do basic math, but anything higher confuses me. So I’m going into a field which requires very little math. shrugs I know my weaknesses, and I know my strengths.

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I personally think that the notion that it’s OK to suck at math, that most people suck at math, and will always suck at math, is essential to my well-being.

This way, people like me who make our living in math-related ways will be regarded as an occult priesthood by those who don’t, and they’ll pay us lots of money to do what we do, because they won’t be able to do it themselves (will be afraid to even try) and will have no idea that it really isn’t all that hard. :smiley:

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The difference between af(x) and af(y) is a times greater than the difference between f(x) and f(y).

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loneraven

Okey dokey, here is the explanation:

Go get yourself your silly putty. If you don’t have it handy, imagine your silly putty being rolled out into a sheet that is 1 foot wide by 1 foot tall. Draw a squiggly line from the left side to the right side of the silly putty.

The line you drew is y=f(x)

Now, stretch the silly putty until it is 1 foot wide still, but 2 feet tall. What happened to the line you drew? You stretched it. How far did you stretch it from its original size? Twice as much.

This new shape of the line is y=2f(x). In other words, the scale factor is 2 {a=2}

If this didn’t help, I’ll keep trying.

H.
Former Math Teacher.