People that are "bad at math," why? (Poll)

In My Humble Opinion
21

I was the “why” kid, and it was hugely frustrating to me and everyone else because nobody could seem to answer it satisfactorily. But in hindsight, I think there’s another factor that doesn’t seem to come up much:

We group kids in school based almost exclusively by age. Then we put a couple of dozen of them in a room and expect them to learn something like math at exactly the same rate. It seems more and more absurd as I get older.

Math builds on itself. You learn this, then that, then take both of those things and do something else and it probably needs to be learned in that order. Fine. But when everyone is doing it at the same time, some kids aren’t going to get it the first time. And as soon as they fall behind it’s very difficult to catch up.

So my experience as a kid went like this:

Teacher: OK, everyone got that step.

Me: (silently) Uhhhhhh…

Teacher moves on to next thing. Ten minutes later…

Teacher: Everybody got that? Good, now we do this…

And I’m still stuck ten minutes ago. It’s a very helpless feeling. I made attempts to get help, and teachers sometimes tried to go back or slow down, but the fact was I was very unlikely to learn it at that pace. It wasn’t until years later I found that I could learn it if I went much more slowly.

Nowadays I’m very un-shy about saying, “No, I don’t understand,” during some kind of training. And of course, there are usually others too. But godammit, I’ve gotten pushback on that sometimes!

Should also mention here that I used to be a (non-math) teacher. I understand that we need to keep a schedule, but I recognized that if people weren’t absorbing the material there was little point in moving forward.

22

Maybe I just don’t look at many of the math questions posed on SDMB, but the ones I have looked at have been beyond my ability to solve. I’ll ask our oldest, who is really good at math, if he can solve a mathematical query from the board, and I can’t remember any he couldn’t figure out.

The problem I had once I hit algebra was that I couldn’t tell what I understood and what I didn’t. A teacher (or tutor) could show me the steps for solving a problem, and everything would appear to make perfect sense. However, I’d be lost when I saw a nearly identical problem. In other subjects I usually knew when I turned in a test what I got right and what I got wrong, but my guess could be off by 50 points in algebra. I didn’t get better with practice, I just got more and more frustrated. Fortunately, teachers who said that students needed to understand Algebra 2 to succeed in college didn’t know what they were talking about. “You need it for learning to think logically” was BS as well.

Does this mean I’m “bad” at math? I dunno; “bad” is such a relative term.

23

My wife, Pepper Mill, is by her own admission abysmal at math. We can tell you stories…
…but we won’t. Not now.

You ask “why”. In her case, she feels pretty certain it’s because of her dyslexia. She struggled with it so that she could finally read comfortably (and she’s a voracious reader today), but she didn’t have the interest or drive to conquer it in math. To this day algebra is her kryptonite. She says that she’s fine with things like geometry, where she doewsn’t have to deal with letters and numbers, but algebra and calculus* and anything higher confounds her.
*She had to take Intro to Calculus for a business course. It was a disaster for all concerned. She’s grateful she survived with a “D”.

24

I can’t explain why.

I did fine in all my math classes up through freshman high school algebra. Then came geometry, and while I struggled through the class with a B, things were never the same after that. The teacher was a bright, tough lady who I liked and who taught well, but the concepts did not translate very well. Trigonometry wasn’t quite as bad but not a lot of fun either. Survived calculus (gotta have that if you want to be a doc :dubious:) and that was blessedly it.

Maybe it was a combination of brain wiring and disliking the subject matter, but bleah.

25

Some people have mental processes that deal well with math. Some people don’t.

I know how to create a poem or music. I used to know the structure of Iambic Pentameter. I was always absolute crap at all of it. I had a friend in high school that could hold up his end of a conversation in Iambic Pentameter. It wasn’t a matter of vocabulary because I’ve always been a voracious reader. It’s just not something I can get my mental hooks into.

Certainly there are people who would be better at math if they were taught a different method. Or in some cases by a different instructor. But in the end I think it’s mostly what Jackmannii just said. Brain wiring.

26

I’m very good at applied Math. The calculus we used in Physics didn’t give me any problems.

I took and dropped College Calculus twice because it was all theory and proofs. It had me thinking I was a complete idiot.

I took a Applied Calculus class for science students and made an A in the class. Barely, IIRC my average was 89 point something and the teacher rounded up. All the exercises were physics calculations. I enjoy solving them.

Give me a formula, tell me what you want solved and I’ll do it.

Don’t give me this bullshit that we have a number in the Set of Real Numbers and let’s prove this theorem that I don’t understand. I’ll flunk out every time.

27

I am bad at math/geometry/algebra/etc…

Teacher told me pies are square, everybody knows pies are round. Then in algebra the teacher kept telling me to find the X. I said “how do I know where the X is at? You were the one married to her”.

I actually had to take remedial algebra in college (state university) and had a foreign exchange TA for the class. I kept good notes as I NEEDED to pass this class. The teacher kept talking about “soocos” and that was what I was writing in my notes. Later in the class after she drew it on the board found out she was talking about “circles”.

28

If that’s all you mean, I can do all that. But I don’t think that qualifies as being “good at math”.

Back in the 1960’s –

I did fine clear through algebra. (I’ve forgotten just about everything I used to know about algebra, but I had no trouble with it in my high school classes.) Then I switched schools, and the next math class I got – I don’t even remember now whether it was trig or calculus, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t geometry. What I do remember was that I was getting the answers right – but I had no idea what I was actually doing. I was just following formulas that made no sense to me, and I was pretty sure that this was going to be a problem later on. But when I went to the teacher about it, I got told that of course I must understand it because I was getting all the answers right.

Um, no. I didn’t think of the analogy until years later; but I felt like somebody translating, say, Arabic into Chinese with the aid of a set of word equivalency lists, but with no understanding of either language – just copying the symbols from a set of tables, and with no idea whether I’d just said ‘that was the pen of my aunt’ or ‘the horse has a sore hoof’ or ‘I am a fool who has no idea what I’m doing’.

The next semester I got to choose between a math course and biology. I took biology. I never took another math course.

29

Relevant New Yorker Magazine cartoon from some years ago.

30

Just always remember and never forget that . . .
lim[sub]x→a[/sub] f(x) = L

means . . .

∀e>0 ∃d>0 : 0<|x-a|<d → |f(x)-L|<e

That’s everything you need to know! :dubious:

(Cite. But your browser better be able to display .aspx files with math stuff in order to be readable!)

(with curses for this stinkin MacBook Pro that I paid $0 for that doesn’t have the Greek alphabet in it’s character sets, so I had to improvise in the above.)

31

There is an incentive to learn what you will need to know. When there are new tools that reduce that need, the incentive diminishes. We all learned long division when no technology existed to bypass our own calculation.

32

(Damn this board is nigh unusable today. Must be all the discussion of current events going on.)

As an example of what jtur88 writes, I have this 1940s-era college algebra book (discussed in another thread not long ago), which has an entire chapter (or two?) on doing manual computations with logarithms (and co-logarithms!), using pencil and paper and log tables. And lots of messy problems to practice with! You won’t see any of that being taught anymore.

Similarly, back in the day we used to learn a computational technique called “linear interpolation”. (Remember that? I think it was typically taught in trigonometry classes.) I’m pretty sure that isn’t being taught anymore either.

Storytime:

Just how disincentivized can a student get? I was tutoring statistics once. The student had some messy-ish problem, but when all was said and done the answer came down to:
0.1/0.2
So I asked the student if he could put that into some more “standard” form. He immediately grabbed for his calculator. I exclaimed:

The student immediately panicked and said “Yes, Yes I do! I can’t do that without a calculator!” as the sweat broke forth upon his brow.

So I let him use his steenkin calculator.

33

I would like to see some evidence that many people are organically “bad at math” or suffer from true dyscalculia. Incompetent teachers (“those who can’t do, teach…” though at many decent universities the professors actually have to teach a few classes), never took an advanced math class, simply don’t like it for miscellaneous reasons, all that stuff, sure.

34

I agree with this. I’m not great at doing complex arithmetic in my head, but I can carry out the steps for solving problems. I don’t think this makes me “good at math”, though. It just means I’m a OK practitioner. I’m like a cook who can follow a recipe by heart and has the wherewithal to cobble together a bunch of recipes to formulate a new dish. But do I understand how the ingredients interact with other? No. Could I create a recipe from scratch, without relying on someone’s recipe? No.

I have a mind for statistics. Coworkers will often consult with me on how they should go about analyzing data. Stats, of course, is math. But I am not a statistician. I’m just a good “memorizer”. I know which tests or tools are useful for which study designs and I know have which assumptions and rules underlie these tests or tools. But I can’t derive the tests or tools. I don’t understand the calculus behind them. A true statistician can do these things.

Honestly, I think a lot of the people who seem to be “good at math” are just people who aren’t anxious about working with numbers.

35

I suppose this has been addressed but it bugs me that in trying to make a point about math you used an example that is more about chemistry than math. After all, the volume calculation you can just look up on Google.

36

Dyscalculia is a real thing just like dyslexia. It has been very slow to be recognized in the US; some of the best info is coming out of the UK. It’s estimated that around 7% of children have it (around 12% of children have dyslexia).

Math anxiety caused by poor teaching can be addressed by better teaching; math anxiety caused by a brain disorder won’t change. However, people who have dyscalculia can be helped by a learning disorder specialist, they say.

In school I got straight A’s with very little effort, except for math, where I always struggled to just pass. I scored in the 99th percentile in all verbal type skills in any standardized test. I graduated with honors in English Lit from a top university. I literally (and I use that word literally) can barely add and subtract. Tips are always a challenge. I cannot measure the length and width of a rectangle without forgetting the first measurement, unless I write it down. I cannot repeat back a string of five numbers. I was twelve when I finally kind of figured out an analog clock, which was a source of terrible anxiety for me up until then.

Whether or not you believe dyscalculia exists doesn’t alter the facts.

WebMD article

37

I consider myself ‘bad at math’. Numbers don’t make sense in my head the way words and spelling do.

For instance, my husband (who can’t spell to save his soul) can look at a column of figures and give a pretty close guess as to what the total will be, or at a lump sum coming in once a month and know instantly how much that is in weekly cash. I need a calculator to feel comfortable adding 2 + 2.

On the other hand, I can spell almost anything without thinking about it, I proof almost all of his written stuff, and I’m addicted to reading. As a kid (LONG before internet) I almost always had a book to hand, and if for some reason I didn’t I’d rather read the back of the cereal box than just sit and do nothing. Words are comforting, numbers are intimidating.

38

I sometimes get mocked for my poor math skills. Silly comments like “you’re a programmer and you can’t do math!?” To which I reply the logical “I don’t need to figure it out, the computer does it for me.”

But over time I’ve figured out a few things about it. Like someone above said, when taught formulas in school, I was told to use them but not why. Basic multiplication in elementary school never made sense to me, and then one summer in 6th grade my mom made me and my brother do multiplication table drills every day. She had a different approach from our teachers, though. My mom taught us the patterns in the numbers. For example when computing multiples of 9, if you add up the two digits in the answer, they should total 9. 9 * 5 = 45 (4 + 5 = 9). I remember 7 had a complicated pattern, so I still struggled with it, but her method made the other numbers from 2 to 12 so much easier to figure out in my head.

Once I got into algebra in high school, my math grades went from a hard-won C to easy A’s. The reason? Instead of apparently arbitrary formulas, now we were dealing with logic. Trig was back to the formulas. Calculus was both logic and formulas so I struggled hard with Calc 1 and then in the middle of Calc 2, what I learned in Calc 1 started to make sense.

One other thing I’ve discovered is that some people can build mental maps in their heads for certain things. I visualize language. To spell a word, I see it in my head and then just spell what I see. I also visualize routes to places so I can navigate in real time. I can’t do that with math but my husband said that when he does math he just sees it in his head. And since working in my shop for a few years now, when I make change for people I can often do that math in my head rather than counting it out. I didn’t used to be able to do that, so it’s possible that it just takes practice also. But more or less practice for different people.

Oh, and one thing I always “resent” that makes my husband laugh when I tell it. I mentioned how the rote formulas seemed arbitrary to me so I never really understood why I was doing these things with these numbers. Then at some point in (I think) high school they introduced the concept of complex numbers. These things that looked like regular numbers but then they had an imaginary part. When I got to that, my head exploded and I metaphorically threw my hands in the air. They really were screwing with me trying to teach me about imaginary parts of numbers. Complete BS! :dubious: :smiley:

39

I always thought that I should have tried to get on Jeopardy, except that I wouldn’t know how to figure out what to bet at the end.
I really related to Senegoid’s student above with the panicked grab for the calculator. Sitting here alone, with plenty of time to look at the problem, I can see that it’s not that hard, but in the first moment, I was like, “Decimal! Fraction symbol! Aieee!”
I know how to leave a 20% tip in a restaurant, but if I feel like everybody’s waiting on me to do it, I’ll screw it up. Math phobia?
I never got beyond Algebra II in high school, and I only got that far by tutoring and summer school and night classes.

40

I do know, for a fact, it exists. And if around 10% of people suffer from it, that is something we have to try to work with and ameliorate, as with dyslexia and illiteracy.

What I don’t know is whether the number of people who report that they are “bad at math” is any greater than that 10%. Some people sort of like mathematics, or used to, but for various reasons did not have a good experience. But anxiety and lack of confidence can be helped. And some people do have some degree of dyscalculia and can be helped via special techniques, as you remind us.