As a child I was always good at maths. I didn’t enjoy it much, but basic arithmetic came very easily to me, I could do most of it in my head quite quickly, so could get correct answers way ahead of everyone else. Once I got to High School and I met a lot more people who were as good as or better than me at maths, I was still proud that I could hold my own.
Maths for me was logical, there were simple steps to follow and it gave you the answer. But after a while there’s a shift, and it goes away from simple steps and leaps into weird counter-intuitive methodology. There’s a lot of assumption that we’ve done all the early steps enough to know that we can skip those and take the shortcuts to get the same answer, and now suddenly I was out of my depth. All the logic I had been confident in was replaced by tricks and techniques that no longer felt organic. I completely lost track and started to struggle in my exam results.
Since leaving school, I have forgotten a lot of it, and barely need to use it as I can use a calculator or just look things up. I am a little frustrated that I cannot program computers because the principles I struggled with in maths are the same kind of “shortcuts to get a result” used in coding languages, and it’s just an area I can’t wrap my head around. I’m sure if I had a great teacher and a lot of patience I could probably manage to be mediocre at the basics, but that’s not what I’d need to get anything done, and I know that what I do need is far beyond my capabilities.
It was some self deprecation combined with an easy way to say “I don’t know what formulas I should use to figure this out.” I get that I could have looked up the volume of a sphere and the density of air but it seemed more complicated than that. The air is under pressure inside it and that would change things.
As it turns out I would have been way off because I misunderstood the size of the ball until someone else pointed it out.
I don’t actually “suck” at math. I did all right in school but that was back in the 80s. I can do arithmetic, percentages, fractions, and I knit a lot so that means a lot of shaping and knowing what combination of stitches will give you a certain shape and size. I can knit a ball, but don’t ask me to figure out the volume of it!
I was fine at math, all A’s, until Algebra 2 (11th grade?) I couldn’t wrap my head around the abstract stuff, I guess. I could do the basic abstract stuff in Algebra 1 but once it got more complicated, I lost my grip. It was bad enough that I, a straight-A student, dropped out of the class and didn’t take a math in 12th grade, and went on to a journalism degree at a school where journalism didn’t require math classes.
I had to figure something out yesterday…I had sent an invoice for a project via PayPal. When it was paid, a percentage was taken off the top. I had to split the remainder between myself and someone else. I didn’t know the percentage taken off, just the total amount. There were a lot of variables, fractions and percentages to deal with. I did not know what formula to use. Eventually I poked around enough to get it close to right but it wasn’t spot-on and I would have lost points in the “show your work” portion.
But also yesterday I worked out the meaning of a few medical terms based on Greek and Latin roots. So I’m not a total dumbass when it comes to learnin’. I just have a brain block when it comes to certain kinds of math.
And I’m super good at figuring out tips. I can do 10%, 20%, any multiple of 10!
I’ve always assumed I was bad at math, and that has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. I’m typically convinced I screwed it up somehow, then redo it and redo it until my eyes feel like they’re about to fall out of my sockets, only to realize I’ve over-thought it and should probably do it the way I did the first time. Which, not surprisingly, leads me to not like math much either. But I get by - I have to or I’d never be able to make a budget for my products at work. But I don’t have to like it.
It’s clear to me—and this thread provides evidence—that being “bad (or good) at math” means different things to different people. Is it about doing calculations, or about knowing which calculations to do? Is it about being able to quickly and accurately follow algorithms, or about knowing which algorithms to use, or about understanding how and why the algorithms work, or about being able to devise algorithms for oneself? Does “math” refer to the kind of thing a first grader does, or the kind of thing a high school student does, or the kind of thing a Ph.D. student in mathematics does?
Kind of like how being “a good writer” could mean all sorts of different things, from being able to make up interesting stories, to being able to put words and sentences together in a clear and grammatical way, to having neat, legible handwriting.
It’s also clear to me from many years of teaching and reading about math—and this thread provides evidence—that different people are bad at math for different reasons (though it’s not always easy to tell what the reason is for a particular person). It could be a neurologically-based learning disability, a bad experience with math at a formative age, a self-fulfilling prophecy, lack of practice, never being taught properly, having a fixed vs. a growth mindset, or who knows what other factors.
I don’t know why people don’t seem to realize that it’s possible to have a learning disability in math, the same as there is for reading. I’m not sure if anything has changed, but back in the 1970s to 1990s when I was in school and college, there didn’t seem to be much remedial help for students with math difficulty. There is something called dyscalculia.
I do think a lot of teachers are bad at teaching math also. They want to do a quick lesson, then have the students work 40 problems and not ask any questions because it will make the teacher angry IME.
There was a remedial math class in my high school for those who failed the math section of the TABS test, but it seemed to me that the math in the class and the math on the test were totally different! Maybe that was just my flawed perception. My brain doesn’t understand or retain math instruction.
My money’s on “Had a bad experience w/ math or other mental block.”
I teach art, and Computer Stuff 101. And I’ve noticed a lot of people who say they “hate math” are actually just afraid of it. To the extent that their brains shut down when confronted with the dreaded “Math Problem”[cue horror movie music].
Same with computer issues. Especially my older students. They’ll freeze up even with simple tasks. What made me realize it was when a 60 yr old was just sitting there. She said:
*“I didn’t do anything because I tried, and a box came up on my screen.” *
“What did it say?” I asked (needlessly optimistic…) “How should I know?”
“Well, the box had words in it?” “Oh, yes, a bold typeface.”
“And… what were the words?” "I wasn’t going to read it, it was on the computer!"
If it’s on a computer, it’s alien to them, and they can’t apply ordinary logic to it.
For some people, math problems are like that, too.
I was never “good at math” up through high school, although in retrospect, that meant I wasn’t stellar at it, not that I was somehow bad at it relative to everyone else. “Good at math” typically meant my peers whose best academic subject was math- the kids making As in the advanced math classes. I was generally a B/C student in advanced math, or a solid B student in regular math. So not “bad”, just not “good”.
Testing-wise, I’ve always shook out to be about 75th-80th percentile on most of the standardized tests.
I ended up getting a computer science degree in college, which was interesting. The structured thinking involved with programming wasn’t an issue at all- I was good enough at that not to struggle. The actual math courses were a problem though; I had to retake a few over the course of that degree. After some analysis, I realized that one of two things was happening- either I wasn’t picking it up as quickly as I needed to, or (more often), I wouldn’t understand one part, and then before I had a good handle on that, we’d be moving on to something else , and I wasn’t quick enough on the uptake to both figure out the stuff I hadn’t understood, as well as pick up new stuff, so I was always kind of discombobulated and not quite caught up. I finally got tutoring, which let me catch up in a course, and I got a fairly good grade as a result.
In terms of everyday math, I’m fine- I can do percentages, I can do fractions, I can look stuff up, etc… and I can do proportions, cross multiplication, etc… But if someone was to ask me to do trigonometry off the top of my head, or how to calculate the gradient of something, I’d be at a loss. I mean, I did that stuff in school, but I don’t remember it anymore.
When I was stinking up Algebra 2, the teacher strongly implied that it was because I wasn’t trying. Her only reason for saying that was my PSAT math scores, which had me in the top 15 percent. However, the PSAT was multiple choice. I realized that I could often eliminate 1 or 2 answers, thus increasing my odds of getting the correct answer. I wasn’t good at math, but I was very good at test taking. The fact that I had A’s in other classes also made her dubious that I was actually trying.
Some of them were simply explained badly, or never explained. There was that teacher who told a bunch of highly-analytical students “stop searching for logic in math, math doesn’t have any logic. Just learn it.” I finally understood those parts about rings and semigroups and so forth when someone explained it here in the Dope, by which time it wasn’t even part of the national curriculum any more.
A friend of mine can integrate in his sleep. I never really got the algorithm, if it’s not a straightforward integral I’m never sure what to try first. But he gets confused by matrices and I can do those with 120F fever.
I had a math teacher in college who inexplicably hated my guts (I eventually found out it was because of my lastname, I say of that lastname that “it’s paid for” because of the amount of trouble it’s caused me). He flunked me several times on grades that were ridiculously close to a pass, 2%, 3% away; our first year was selective (you had to pass every subject) and I had to stop for a retake on his subject despite having an 86% average… he would even stop the class to insult me for frowning. On his second year subject I had a super-stupid problem with one type of exercise: they were geometry exercises and I knew the solution without going through the equations, so my brain was like “yo, what the fuck we going to do multivariate differentials for, we already know it’s the circumferences with radius a centered on [a,0]!”
A friend of his, Geometry chair at a nearby Mathematics college, gave us a series of conferences and was extremely amused hearing me re-explain some of the stuff he’d explained to my classmates. He threw a bunch of questions at me, I eventually ended up solving some of those geometrical problems through geometry; my teacher claimed by answer was wrong, I explained that what was “wrong” was the algebraic solution and why, the mathematician said I was right, gave me his card and told me to give him a call if I ever got tired of applied science because “good doctorands are extremely difficult to find, in Geometry. Most people can’t see it.” I can. Euclidean, non-Euclidean, whatever, my brain is twisty enough to actually picture it. Now, learning how to translate those pictures to algebra, that might be the hard part.
I can do basic calculations with positive whole integers with no problem but beyond that it’s like a different language. I failed algebra in high school and it triggered me to completely quit school. I was a smart kid with an IQ so high they put me in special classes in elementary school Back then you didn’t learn much more than whole number manipulation until about seventh grade. That’s around the time I stopped understanding. It’s also when I stopped caring so that could be part of it. I took basic math again in college in one of those developmental courses. I passed it with little trouble, but then they put me in the second year and it was the same. I just can’t compute these partial numbers or remember how to calculate negatives with positives and when they combine all of it then throw in numbers it’s like moonspeak to me.
The funny thing about this is the number of parents who object to different approaches to teaching math, saying it should be taught the same way it was taught to them - and these objections, IME, typically come from the parents who can barely balance their checkbooks, and clearly had trouble learning math under the old methods.
The “why” led to New Math, which unsurprisingly still failed to please everybody or to lead to an unprecedented improvement in average competency, right?
It seems like one could even be a professional mathematician without having a knack for prodigious mental arithmetic, cube roots, complicated integrals in one’s head and similar. But at some point one would have to develop skills for solving problems, whether that involve reaching for a calculator, pen and paper, a mathematical encyclopedia to look something up, or whatever else it takes.
@Nava geometry… algebra… all you have to do is learn some algebraic geometry- conflict resolved! Seems like that would be perfect for someone with geometric visualization skills… with the caveat that the modern (20th century?) textbook approach to all that stuff is ineluctably couched in the abstract language of “rings and semigroups and so forth” so you have to beat that into your head willy-nilly anyway.
I think engineers might be best examples of being “good at math” other than actual mathematicians and possibly physical scientists. In a recent thread, either on here or on Quora, one engineer pointed out that what really matters is knowing which math to use, rather than remembering the full derivation of any given formula. ISTM that ability implies an excellent high-level knowledge of math, as it pertains to your engineering specialty, without getting bogged down in details.
I really don’t know which. I know I was good in grade three (I learned the times tables up to x12, when now you learn up to x10 in grade five) but by grade five my marks were getting “variable”, and after a while become consistently bad. I didn’t even understand that I was bad at math until I learned the quadratic formula. I am good at memorizing so naturally I could apply the formula without “thinking”. Except I found I couldn’t answer the questions. If A was anything other than 1, I could not reliably get the same answer given the exact same numbers. I would come up with at least two separate answers (and obviously there was only one correct answer). Due to my formula memorizing abilities, I aced high school physics, but when I went to university I barely passed (if it wasn’t for particle physics, which I’m very good at, I would have failed hard).
I can do basic arithmetic fast enough that many people think I’m good at math, but don’t ask me to do statistics more complicated than dice rolling or multiply 13 by something. If I don’t know the next step of some fairly complex math I don’t even know how to look it up. I took some accounting courses and could do bond interest calculations without too much trouble, so maybe I am okay with the “applied” side of things. Unfortunately I was pretty bad at statistics in biology.
I struggle with this question: why and how am I bad at math? Because I feel bad at math and this feeling leads me away from trying many things. It keeps me from being successful.
Now, I got a degree in physics and have been working as a scientist in industry for nearly 40 years since. Within the past month I’ve been using iterative nonlinear statistical modeling to estimate parameters that appear in a 10-dimensional tensor used to model viscous and inertial resistance to fluid flow through a porous continuum. I can estimate logarithms in my head to at least one decimal point. But I still have impostor syndrome and am convinced if I talk to anybody smart I will be immediately lost.
I can’t remember the gist of a proof a math major friend told me, back in school, of the fact that rational and irrational numbers alternate on the number line.
And I still remember with great unease how hard a time I had in a mechanics class on problem 17b: Imagine two different idealizations of planet earth. One is an oblate spheroid of uniform density. The other is a sphere of uniform density surrounded by a thin shell having an aerial density that varies in a sinusoidal way. Now, calculate the difference in the gravitational field vector for an arbitrary point in space near these earths. My professor in that class told me if I could not make the leap of letting the math take me to the answer even though it was beyond my physical insights, I would never be able to do much.
I think being bad at math means different things to different people.
And, ZipperJJ, I completely suck at figuring how to split the change after a percentage on the top.
Seems like that would be perfect for someone with geometric visualization skills… with the caveat that the modern (20th century?) textbook approach to all that stuff is ineluctably couched in the abstract language of “rings and semigroups and so forth” so you have to beat that into your head willy-nilly anyway.