Why is it OK to be bad at math?

Great Debates
41

People who are bad at basic math are probably more likely to make bad decisions: get loans at usurious interest, gamble more, buy the more expensive per unit weight grocery, not notice the incidental mistake at the cashier. There is a social stigma to not understanding basic finance, which is obviously different from pure math.

I’ve written several invitational national math exams. Math always came easily to me, and I’ve taken more than sixteen university level math courses (some graduate level) and been a T.A. for a few of the harder ones. Even so, the math I need for my daily life is pretty basic.

I think it is okay to be bad at math. Can’t be good at everything; gotta know your limits. And who am I to say what people should enjoy doing? I have less sympathy for those who don’t try to learn math because others dislike it. Math and physics are difficult. Many of the concepts are not obvious to most people. It takes a lot of practice and effort to get better at math, but having said that I do think most people can overcome their difficultes with math if they try hard enough.

Having tutored math for several years, the approach many schools use is ass-backward. If you haven’t mastered the simple stuff, you just can’t learn the harder stuff. One school I know spends a lot of time having grade three kids memorize suffixes like “femto” or introduces them to base six. Math classes often seem to be taught for the benefit of the more advanced students who might benefit from these extras. Memorization just shouldn’t have a big role in basic mathematics, concepts are everything.

42

Dr. Paprika – Gamble more??? if you’re bad at math?

WTF?

43

If you got a B in college algebra, you aren’t actually bad at math, anyway. College algebra doesn’t make you Stephen Hawking, but it’s a reasonably good command of fundamental math.

I never LIKED math, but then, I never liked biology, either. However, a little understanding of both is a good thing. I sort of had to learn calculus and stats for my major (economics) but I didn’t ENJOY it.

44

Because you won’t understand the truly miniscule odds of actually winning, and the benefits of using your lottery ticket money for another purpose like investment.

I suspect “payday loans” are common in low-income areas not just because those are the people who tend to need payday loans, but because they tend to be less educated and less likely to realize that 10% interest for a two-week loan is insane.

45

I always say, lotteries are just a tax on the mathematically challenged.

One million people buy lottery tickets for a dollar, and the payout is $500,000. If you don’t have the math skills to figure out what’s wrong with the picture, then you’re exactly the kind of person who voluntarily pays extra taxes. If you don’t have the math to figure it out, then you are essentially at the financial mercy of those who can. You might as well just open your wallet and hand out cash when a smarter person enters the room, since anyone who understands math could take all your money from you anyway. You pay the minumum on your credit card balance, you finance your new car (with just a low low low monthly payment!), you figure since the coin has come up heads three times in a row it’s bound to come up tails next time.

See you at the bank…suckers!

46

But isn’t that subtraction rather than muliplication? 50-50=0. In muliplication it seems to me that I’m lead to believe that the boxes of M&Ms no longer exist at all, on the shelf or otherwise.

47

Actually I think my calc prof. mentioned this and it still surprises me. I mean I like math alot but have an umitigated hatetred of french and I find it surprising that they’re supposedly similar. I mean with language you generally use hearing and speech to interact.(And I know I have alot of trouble understanding speech) Math is usually conveyed with reading and writing. Another major difference is that you can check an answer in math but that doesn’t seem possible in language. I mean if you get f(x) = x^2 you can plug in a few numbers to check your result. In language the only way to find out correctness is to ask a native speaker if you’re right. Actually that leads me to what is another major difference. Ok this is my opinion but it seems that math is a much more individualistic endevour while language is obviously much more inter-personal. To say that more simply you use language to talk to people while you can do quite a bit of math by yourself.

48

I can explain very clearly why I suck at Math: aversion therapy. My school math experiences (starting with 4th grade) were horrible. I was considered “above average” in math, so I was put in the advanced classes. But I wasn’t ready for that, and I was lost. I’ll never forget being hollered at by a loony, red-faced enraged teacher, and sent outside because I didn’t know the answer to a math question. I was in 4th grade! I remember all the bigger kids (I was in an advanced class, with 5th and 6th graders) laughing at me as I was sent outside, as “punishment”. And it got worse from there. I STILL was put in advanced math classes, where I was constantly tormented by class bullies, while the teacher looked on and did nothing. Of COURSE I didn’t learn a damned thing! When I was put in an “average” math class, I started to bloom. But oh no! We can’t have that! I did so well in average math, I was bumped up to advanced math, and the same hell started all over again. I didn’t have the sense to protest, and by 10th grade I’d had my fill of math torment. No more math after that. I had somehow gotten through all my math requirements, and I was determined to never take another math class again.

I do believe that math is something that can be learned. I believe that I am capable of learning it—I am not too bad at doing simple math in my head, and figuring out tips, change, stuff like that. But I have such a bad taste in my mouth from my hellish school experiences; I get a tight feeling in my chest when I think of taking a math class. And it’s a shame, really. But the complete traumatic and inept teaching I was subjected to in school is to blame.

49

Oh, and I never play lotto, and I hate gambling. It’s like money down a rathole to me.

50

Well, this has been enlightening. I’ve read some of the most dumb-assed things I’ve ever heard people say - and some of them from otherwise intelligent people. I have serious doubts that some of you actually believe what you’re typing. :confused:

Since this isn’t the place for getting into it, I’ll repeat what I’ve said before about math - one major contributing factor is that there are few good math teachers, expecially at the higher levels.

I’ll hazard I’ve more math and am better at math than about 95% of this Board. I’ve gone to integral transforms, Eigenspace, PDEs, etc. But the only reason I got there was because of one teacher.

I sucked ASS at ordinary DEs - I took the course twice, and had to drop it out of risk of complete failure. This was bad, because this was a required course for nearly every class that I had to take.

And so, over the Summer, I took it a third time, terrified of having to do it all again but only over 8 weeks.

I ended up with the best teacher in the entire University. And a 102% in the class at the end of the Semester. And what’s more important, I understood. I felt like the math goddess, and I laughed at the DE book that had taunted me before. I could even work all of the challenge problems, on my own, and then go on from them to re-develop the fundamental theories.

Her technique?

  1. Each class, she would give us the theory for 30 minutes, with many real-life examples of why it was important.

  2. Then, she did something that no other DE teacher before her did - she spent 2.5 hours working fucking homework problems on the Board. And not skipping any step, no matter how small.

  3. Then she passed out copious notes - the first class, she passed out more than 30 pages of notes, all handwritten by her, clearly legible, doing nothing but working example problems. And, this is important, not skipping a single step or making any assumptions without explaining them.

  4. She assigned homework. TONS of homework. Typically, she would work or have on her notes all of the even-numbered problems from a Section, and then assign all of the odd-numbered problems. It was insanely repetetive - but it worked.

  5. She assigned extra-credit problems as challenge problems, but they were actually doable.

  6. She herself was available in her office for extra help and personal assistance, and not a TA who spoke nearly no English whatsoever (which is exactly what screwed up many who sought help in the previous two classes. Oh yeah, gotta love that Liberal attitude on campus too - when one exasperated student stood up in a previous class, nearly in tears as she described how she spent a total of 3 hours with the TAs and could not understand their English, she was told to “stop being a bigot” :rolleyes: ) I’m serious - I spent only 2 hours with the two TAs, and I don’t think I understood a word after “Hi”. Yet, if I complained, I would have been a “bigot”.

Anyhow, as I said - not only did it make the class successful for me, but I had enough momentum to take PDE’s and the other courses. Even though those were taught by the typical shitty profs and their inscrutable TA’s.

I have a feeling that everyone in this thread who says they “don’t get math” could have “got it” had they had my one, fantastic teacher. To quote one lady, who had got straight C’s in Calc 1,2, and 3, but an A in DE’s: “She could teach a rock! She even went back over my Calc and explained it all to me one weekend, and I learned more about math in 1 week than I did in two years!”

I think it only takes one good teacher to make a student, and one bad teacher to break a student. And I always remember this lesson with every class that I teach now.

51

Well, this has been enlightening. I’ve read some of the most dumb-assed things I’ve ever heard people say - and some of them from otherwise intelligent people. I have serious doubts that some of you actually believe what you’re typing. :confused:

Since this isn’t the place for getting into it, I’ll repeat what I’ve said before about math - one major contributing factor is that there are few good math teachers, expecially at the higher levels.

I’ll hazard I’ve more math and am better at math than about 95% of this Board. I’ve gone to integral transforms, Eigenspace, PDEs, etc. But the only reason I got there was because of one teacher.

I sucked ASS at ordinary DEs - I took the course twice, and had to drop it out of risk of complete failure. This was bad, because this was a required course for nearly every class that I had to take.

And so, over the Summer, I took it a third time, terrified of having to do it all again but only over 8 weeks.

I ended up with the best teacher in the entire University. And a 102% in the class at the end of the Semester. And what’s more important, I understood. I felt like the math goddess, and I laughed at the DE book that had taunted me before. I could even work all of the challenge problems, on my own, and then go on from them to re-develop the fundamental theories.

Her technique?

  1. Each class, she would give us the theory for 30 minutes, with many real-life examples of why it was important.

  2. Then, she did something that no other DE teacher before her did - she spent 2.5 hours working fucking homework problems on the Board. And not skipping any step, no matter how small.

  3. Then she passed out copious notes - the first class, she passed out more than 30 pages of notes, all handwritten by her, clearly legible, doing nothing but working example problems. And, this is important, not skipping a single step or making any assumptions without explaining them.

  4. She assigned homework. TONS of homework. Typically, she would work or have on her notes all of the even-numbered problems from a Section, and then assign all of the odd-numbered problems. It was insanely repetetive - but it worked.

  5. She assigned extra-credit problems as challenge problems, but they were actually doable.

  6. She herself was available in her office for extra help and personal assistance, and not a TA who spoke nearly no English whatsoever (which is exactly what screwed up many who sought help in the previous two classes. Oh yeah, gotta love that Liberal attitude on campus too - when one exasperated student stood up in a previous class, nearly in tears as she described how she spent a total of 3 hours with the TAs and could not understand their English, she was told to “stop being a bigot” :rolleyes: ) I’m serious - I spent only 2 hours with the two TAs, and I don’t think I understood a word after “Hi”. Yet, if I complained, I would have been a “bigot”.

Anyhow, as I said - not only did it make the class successful for me, but I had enough momentum to take PDE’s and the other courses. Even though those were taught by the typical shitty profs and their inscrutable TA’s.

I have a feeling that everyone in this thread who says they “don’t get math” could have “got it” had they had my one, fantastic teacher. To quote one lady, who had got straight C’s in Calc 1,2, and 3, but an A in DE’s: “She could teach a rock! She even went back over my Calc and explained it all to me one weekend, and I learned more about math in 1 week than I did in two years!”

I think it only takes one good teacher to make a student, and one bad teacher to break a student. And I always remember this lesson with every class that I teach now.

52

I had to teach myself math. I went from D’s in pre-calc to straight A’s in Calculus I and II. Most math teachers are terrible, 'tis true.

Get off the fucking lottery already. Sound like a bunch of Florida election whiners.

53

Funny, I have pretty good math skills and I like buying lottery tickets, because it’s fun. In fact, I know exactly what my odds are of winning the Lotto 6/49. The return sucks, but then, the return sucks on buying TVs, cars, video games, clothes, jewellery, flowers, furniture, and a million other things; you buy most things not as an investment, but to gain utility.

I also like playing roulette and blackjack. Sure, I “lose” money. I’m spending money on entertainment; I derive utility from the money spent. It’s just as logical an “investment” as buying a video game or a DVD.

Of course, I do realize that many people gamble their life’s savings away and get addicted to it, and that lotteries are disproportionately marketed to the desperate and the poor. I ain’t in those categories, however, nor are many people who like gambling. Unless, of course, you’re planning on saying the Chinese are numerically challeged than Baptists, seeing as how gambling is more popular among them than it is among Baptists.

elfkin477:

Okay, then imagine the boxes are set on fire. Now you have 0 boxes of 10M&Ms. Hence, 0 M&Ms.

Of course, you say “Well, there are no boxes of 10 M&Ms.” Well, right, that’s why you’re multiplying by zero. :slight_smile: If you have nothing, you have nothing. Right now I have no cages of 15 elephants, so I have zero elephants. I have zero cases of Coke at 24 cans a case, so I have zero Cokes. The multiplication-by-zero bit simply means that if you have nothing of something, you have nothing of something. Imagine saying it in English:

“I lost my pack of gum. I don’t have any gum now.”

That works linguistically, right? You don’t say "I don’t understand that; what happened to the pack of gum? The words pack of gum' are right there in the first sentence, so why is there no gum in the second sentence?" You understand, reading the words, that the words pack of gum’ are just WORDS, not an actual pack of gum. And since the context of the words is arranged that the sentence is saying there is no pack of gum, it’s not confusing to you when I say I have no gum. “Pack of gum” is used to indicate a lack of gum, not a presence of it.

“I don’t own a stable, so I have no horses.”
“I don’t have any cigarettes. I can’t smoke.”
“I don’t have any credit cards because I lost my wallet.”

In response to these you would not say “But you DO have a stable, it’s right there in the sentence! You do have cigarettes, look, the cigarettes are right there in that sentence after the word `any.’ And you do have your wallet; I can see the wallet right there in your words.”

Similarly, take “Ten times zero is zero.” That is basically the equivalent of saying “I don’t have any tens. Not a single ten on me. So, I have nothing.” Why would you say “But I know you have a ten, I see it right there in the sentence!” You see it because I used the word to tell you I didn’t have any. In the equation 10x0=0, I’m just using the word to tell you I don’t have any.

“10x0=0” is the mathematical equivalent of saying “I have no ten dollar bills, so all my ten dollar bills add up to nothing, because I don’t have any of them.” It’s kind of a self-evident statement, the sort of thing you wouldn’t say in English because everyone around you would say “Duh. Thanks for the update, brainiac.” That may be why it seems a little weird to you; you’d never say something that obvious in a spoken language.

54

And that is NOT being “bad at math”. It’s actually being good, but not expressing it in the formal, symbolic form. Those “educated guesses and reasonable estimations” have a mathematical basis even if it has never been expressed in a formal symbolic form.

55

Now that you mention it, Florida in 2000 was the perfect example of the consequences of a mathematically illiterate system of jurisprudence.

You remember all the recounts (and attempted recounts). The rules were, if one could show that a particular ballot was counted for Candidate X, or not counted at all, when the evidence was that the voter meant to vote for Candidate Y, then the ballot could be changed.

However, if you had a basket with 1000 ballots in it, and you could marshal overwhelming evidence that 900 of them were counted incorrectly, our court system said you were SOL if you couldn’t demonstrate which ones were counted incorrectly.

And that is exactly what statistics does: it proves things to be true for a group without saying diddly about any specific individuals in the group. So the stance of our legal system was that statistical proof counted for nothing, while hanging chads were valid evidence. Go figure.

56

I hate math, and I don’t gamble. I find it lame. That and when I worked in a grocery store, I had to do the lotto. People would come in, spend 50 bucks, get back 25, and think they were ahead.

:rolleyes:

But I’m good at Lit and History. History especially. Ask me all about the Romanovs, Aleksander Kerensky. The Yugoslav movement in the early 20th century. The Irish Uprising of 1916. The sinking of the Lusitania, the US interventions in Latin America.

Just don’t ask me what 2+2=

BTW, it’s 5, right?

:wink:

57

Only for particularly large values of 2. :wink: right back atcha.

58

RT, my comment was a bit obscure, then; I simply find that lottery comment interjected as often as Florida election quips or Bush/Clinton/whoever bashes in completely unrelated topics. And it irritates me, s’all.

Playing the lottery is not a necessary condition of stupidity, period, end of story, and I am simply tired of people saying otherwise. The worst thing is, lottery winners would just shrug it off; “Who cares if he thinks I’m stupid? I’ve got 2.4 million dollars!” Right on, Jack. But, not being a millionaire, I care about these things.

Does a person who takes care of themselves automatically become stupid because it is a statistical impossibility that they will live to 104? Absurd, inflammatory, and incorrect use of statistics.

59

That is exactly what’s screwed me over, in college, and in all my years of schooling before.

PROOFS. Friggin’ PROOFS. Whenever I go in to ask for help on one, or if we’re learning how to do them in class, the teachers will ALWAYS without fail, jump from step two to step five, saying only “Well, that’s just algebra in the middle, so we’ll skip that.”

NO NO NO NO! NO SKIPPING ANYTHING! Some of us can’t solve systems of equations IN OUR HEADS while taking notes on the fly, thank you.

On top of that, when proving something, there’s always some little “trick” involved manipulating a mathematical property that I never even knew EXISTED!

How on earth are we supposed to use higher math if we don’t learn half of the preliminary stuff?

Gah. Rant. Apologies.

60

tiggeril, that is precisely what threw me for such a loop in pre-calc that sunk my grades so low. I thought I knew algebra, I really did. I always scored well on the tests and so on. But when pre-calc came around and it was time to do other kinds of math and skip the algebra (during explanations) I found myself staring at what should have been math and ended up being gibberish.

I don’t know whether to blame the teachers or not (in my case). They thought I knew it, I thought I knew it, as far as tests were concerned I knew it… :confused: I was actually rather depressed when I got F after D after F on tests; math had always been a strong subject for me.

But I buckled down (who knew my mistakes better than me?) and worked out problems and followed proofs and tried to prove things that were just given and it soon started to come together. The introduction of the ocncept of the limit threw me for a huge loop; it seemed so simple but the formal definition was just too scary for me. I worked hard to understand calc, and I’ve never forgot it since (though it is true that I almost never use it).

There is a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction for me when I learn stuff in math. I should have been a math major; alas, I am stuck buying Dover books and trying to keep myself going.