Your Opinion -- Am I Hopeless With Math?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Yeah, the wife’s off to Florida for a function and I have entirely too much time on my hands. But I thought this would be a good opportunity to ask a very mundane question that has nevertheless bothered me my whole life.

The thread title pretty much says it all. I’ll just elaborate a little on my situation.

I seriously think that I have some sort of fundamental disability with regards to math. Not trying to excuse laziness or anything, but I genuinely believe that I just-don’t-get-it. No matter how hard I try, there are these “holes” that I have when trying to do mathematics.

I realize that osme folk have gifts in things–tennis, dancing, wordsmithery, arts & crafts, history, and so on. And I know that there are some folk with real learning disabilities…like dyslexics, for example. And, I am wondering if I have something of the sort but with math instead of words.

If you are still reading (thank you!) I would say that I am adequate with “arithmetic”, so-so but can get by with algebra, but am completely clueless when it comes to calculus.

And actually, I ain’t so great with arithmetic. Out of self defense, I memorized the times tables through 12 X 12 at a very early age and it has stood me in good stead through the years. My division and multiplication skills are sad. My wife & daughter think I have crazy artihmetic skills, but it is a matter of compensation/good approximations.

For instance, the wifey will see something at 19.98 marked down 70 per cent. I come up with the answer anlmost instantly and she thinks I am good w/arithmetic…but I am not. I do this crazy compensating thing like: "Take the recripocal of 70% which equals a real 30% of the original price and 19.98 is too much arithmetic to do so round it to twenty bucks, then multiply 3 times 20 never mind about the decimal places, too hard, come upwith 60, smentally slide the decimal over to what seem reasonable and I come up with Six Dollars. No getting 70% of 19.98, then subtracting that from from 19.98, and all–hopelessly beyond me.

That’s arithmetic. Algebra is a different story. With a lot of effort, I can so the machinations required for the formula, usually, but often I will make some fundamental mistake. Still, I do it well enough to make a B or C in college classes, but I have no “intuitive understanding” of it, I just follow the process.

Statistics, not much problem, this I get, but my Algebra non-skills hamper me. I can do it, and manage a high B or sometimes an A-, but I make stupid fundamental Algebra mistakes that are obvious later.

Calc? No . freaking . clue. I’ve had profs and classmates do this shit int heir heads…in their heads!.. and I am totally lost. I can get as far as integrating 32T squared, then doing it again to get the acceleration of 16, etc. That’s it. It.

I took a calc course in college, which is how I know this. I knew I was in deep doo-doo when I got the text at the book store. Slim book. Magazine slim. Coutned the pages. 84 pages. Yup, I am in trouble. Flunked the course. Damn made a D- but not quite. OK, I tried. Thank og it wasn’t a required course for my degree. Screw the F’s effect on my GPA, I just had to try, y’know?

Well…thanks for listening to this. I don;'t think I have EVER had such a long-winded post. But I am curious. What is your opinion? Am I just genetically hopeless here? I keep wanting to tilt at that windmill again. I just hate how my suckiness at math has limited me academically and would give dang near anythnign to be able to “speak” math, but it just eludes me.

Do you think there is any hope of me ever achieving competence here, or do I just need to get over it and keep on keeping on?

Thanks so much for reading through such a lonnnnnng tirade!

2

Math didn’t really make sense for me until I started learning algebra. I have a B.S. in math but I still struggle with arithmetic. Numbers don’t make sense to me, but symbols do. I hate having to count. I tutored plenty of students when I was at college and I helped some of them get from F’s to B’s. Some people get it with enough practice, some don’t.

3

I am horrible at math. In school, I remember going from my honor’s English class to my remedial math class. I just don’t get it, and never have. In high school, I got a D in chemistry- after that, my parents made me do an hour of chemistry every day, even if I didn’t have an hour’s worth of homework. That helped to bring my grade up to a C. I believe that it is a learning disability.

If you have time and money on your hands, you could always take a basic math course at a college.

4

I hate to break it to you, but that’s how everybody does it. I do it that way, and I once had my college matrix algebra professor ask me to become a math major.

As for the rest, it’s possible that you may one day find the right approach to learning this stuff, and it’ll click for you. Or maybe you won’t. Not everyone’s good at math, and that’s fine, as long as you can function.

I’ve been hearing people talk lately about “innumeracy” as a condition equivalent to dyslexia, so you’re not alone, and maybe one day you’ll get to have a recognized condition with a name and everything. I say, if you’re able to get through your day, don’t sweat it too much. And consider carrying a calculator.

5

Just because you can’t “show your work” doesn’t mean you’re hopeless, I think you have a better understanding of it than a lot of people. The example of coming up with $6.00 as 30% of $19.98 shows you know percentages well. (My way: 10% of $19.98 is about $2.00 so 30% would be $2 x 3 = $6.00.) People use Excel, calculators and computers a lot these days, but if they don’t know the basic concepts of what they’re trying to do their answers will be wrong. There are a lot of people who don’t understand calculus. I think if you don’t use the more advanced math you learned in high school all that often you forget it. I had to re-teach myself how to pro-rate for my job and I use it all the time, so I’ve gotten good at it, otherwise I would have forgotten how.

6

Thanks for the input,** Smeghead**. I do appreciate it very much. But, my problem is that I WANT to understand it. I am personally interested in stuff like quantum mechanics and there is a very low ceiling without the math. It really bothers me that I just can not read this fascinating stuff without some sort of fundamental understanding of calculus. OK, some of it requires a lot more than fundamental, but I thin kyou get my drift. Oh, if only there was just some way to get thru this barrier that I seem to have. Again, though, no really big deal in the grand scheme of things.

Alice The Goon: It’s great to hear from you, and I am tickled that you gave me some input. Maybe I should revisit my one bloody attempt at this an audit a class or two. Maybe I should take some analytic geometry and trigonometry first, though? The prof on my one attempt mentioned in my OP did tell me that I was really starting with a handicap from not having taken any of them beforehand. I do believe, as you said, it is some sort of a learning disability…a very minor kind, more of the “doesn’t have a real talent for it” than something that is really life-challenging. I just wish I understood it!

7

Thank you for the kind words. I guess what I am trying to say is that I just don’t “get” any sort of gut-level understanfing of what calculus is all about. I am sure that if I used it regularly in my job, I would some day achieve this. But it is completely outside my job and so I get no opportunity to work with it. Plus, I just seem to have some sort of blind spot with regards to it.

I do think it is a kind of learning disability, but would never want to trivialize those life-altering learning disabilities that we have heard of.

I mean, like when I was involved in the Reagan-era Star Wars program, I would have so much liked to be doing development on X-ray lasers and hit-a-bullet-with-a-bullet intercepts instead of the database support I was actually doing in support of the “real” science behind it.

Geez, reading my own post, I sound like a whiney kid. Such is not intended. I would really like to understand calc like I understand English, or literature.

I do so appreciate your posting to this.

8

I think this is the key with regards to my problem.

I mentioned my one calculus class. I had a math major classmate who tutored me in calculus. His help was great. But…in exchange, I was tutoring him of…of all things, the test of basic math skills that every student at my university had to pass. Things like fractions, percentages, and so on. Like if a car gets 20 mpg, and starts with a tank 3/4 full, how far until the next fill up? He just didn’t get it, and I kind of think as this being some sort of left-brain, right-brain sort of thing.

With his help, I damn near passed the course. Hope he did better with the TBMS. (Test of Basic Math Skills)

Strange stuff.

9

Hmm. Yeah, I get what you mean. I’m not sure I have any good advice, though. For me, it was simply a matter of time - as I worked with numbers and math, I eventually got a feel for them. And it is a feel. When I do calculations in my head, it feels very akin to Lego pieces slotting together in my brain. I know that people who work in this field have developed and are developing new methods for teaching math that may fit better into different types of brains, if that makes sense, but I don’t really know more than that. You might be able to find more if you google “innumeracy”.

10

You know, I think that is exactly what I am talking about. Maybe with enough practice (to the first part of your quoted post)…

And (to the second part of your quoted post) that is EXACTLY what I have experienced in other areas like computers/binary/hexadecimal notation that I am talking about! And what I want. Nicely phrased.

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Also, keep in mind that “math” is actually several disciplines. Part of the reason I had problems with multivariate calculus was that the professor (a chemical engineer who didn’t really understand the subject) liked making us use it to solve geometrical problems… which I solved via geometry! But of course, I couldn’t show it to his satisfaction; I was able to show it to the satisfaction of a friend of his, though: a mathematician whose specialty was geometry.

I’m a chemical engineer. Same as gladtobeblazed isn’t good at every discipline within math, I’m very good at some aspects of chemistry and bad at others, I’m good at some aspects of being an engineer and bad at others. There have been areas (crystalography comes to mind) where I knew I had to be good, but I couldn’t do what the teacher wanted until I found a way to translate between my language (images in 3D) and his (3x3 matrices). Get the dictionary, it all suddenly makes sense.

Another one was set theory. I didn’t understand it until someone explained it here in the Dope. All those years of asking my teachers “but what IS a ring?” and being told “that doesn’t matter, just learn the demonstration by rote” would have been a lot less painful if I’d had one teacher able to say “this list of properties that you’re supposed to learn is the definition of a ring. Same as a tree is an object with specific properties (being a vegetable, having a hard trunk, etc.), a ring is a group of mathematical objects which has these specific properties.” But they didn’t know! (I’ve only had one math teacher who was a mathematician; sadly, she wasn’t good at communicating with teenagers)

12

Regarding your arithmetic, that’s the way everyone does it. Anyone that’s good at math just rounds things to make it easy, and if necessary, “unrounds” after the answer. If I needed a more precise answer, I’d get the $6 and think “I added in .02 that doesn’t belong there, which then got cut roughly in half. So now there’s an extra penny in there. So $5.99.” You seem to understand it well enough.
Calculus is all about rates of change. It’s about what happens when things “get to infinity”. Derivatives give you the rate of change at any point of a graph.

Example: For any given position X, the derivative will give you the rate of change of X. Rate of change of position is called “speed”.

Integrals tell you how much you’ve changed from one point on the graph to another. The integral will give you how much the position has changed.

Example: A tank is filling with water. You know the rate of fill at any given time, but it’s not constant. In other words, you know the rate of change of the water level. The integral will tell you, at any given time, what the water level is.
I don’t expect to have taught you all of calculus in one post, but is that the sort of thing you’re looking for?

13

Yes and no. What you’ve said I do get.

At least, the concept. Like the acceleration constant I mentioned above (32t^2) I do get. I do understand what the calculus is addressing, and more or less how the equations help us to get there. I’m afraid that my basic problem is I don’t understand all the stuff in between!

I’m way oversimplifying here. Going down from the view from ten thousand feet, I just have NO ability at running the equations. I don’t understand what or why I need to do this or that.

It’s like I have a mental black hole w/regards to solving or understanfing the equations themselves. Does that make sense?

Would it help if I took some classes in analytical geometry and trigonometry first? My professor in the one calc course I took was kinda amazed that I took the course without having wither of those 2 courses.

Maybe my problem is deeper down, like with algebra?

14

For an intuitive understanding of what calculus is all about, see this old thread: Please explain Calculus to me.

You may also find it interesting to read I want to learn calculus.

To actually do Calculus, or to understand it at the level at which it’s taught in a calculus class, you really do have to have a firm grasp of algebra, analytic geometry, and (for many classes) trigonometry. As someone (RickJay, I think) said in an old thread about “Is Calculus hard?” that I can no longer find online but which I quote to my own Calculus students at the beginning of the semester, “Calculus involves a few conceptual leaps up from just standard algebra and trigonometry while requiring that you have those skills absolutely down flat.” Anyone who isn’t a math genius is going to really have trouble in a Calculus class if they haven’t had the prerequisites first.

There is such a thing as “dyscalcula” (See thread Is there such a thing as math dyslexia?) but it doesn’t sound like that’s your problem, at least not to a serious degree. I don’t know how much of your problem is due to innate difficulty, and how much is due to gaps in your education, but it sounds to me like you are capable of learning/doing/understanding math at least as well as the average-but-unmotivated person.

15

Y’see, that’s the weird thing. Set theory I get. In fact, it is a big part of what I do with relational databases…I mean, deep down in the relational theory, even to relatinal calculus. Except that I almost have a translator to explain where relational calculus crosses with relational algenra (which I do understand quite well).

It’s the damn…I dunno what it is. Some things, like you said, I have absolutely no problem with understanding and even teaching it at the university level. Other things, I just am no good at.

I wish I could express this better. But “blind spot” in some areas is the best I can do for now.

(Funny story, back about 1894 or 85, I was in a meeting with a missile targeting specialist, and we got into geodesy, and geodetic coordinates [I may have the terms misspelled] and the EEs had no freaking idea what the frig he was talking about, and I understood pretty much exactly what he was talking about. Veddy strange feeling…way outside my field, but I had this “gut” level understanding about the geodetic models he was explaining in the process of describing ICBM targeting)

Clearly, I am all screwed up. Part of one, part of another… understanding nothing…

16

Huh! This is kinda exactly reflecting something that one Calc prof of mine said…it was something like “You can do statistics without being good at algebra, but in Calculus you absolutely have to have it down.”

Now you have just said more or less the same thing. You know, kinda.

Perhaps my problem is not with concepts, but maybe with inadequate preparation? Perhaps there is hope for me if I just take the right prereq courses and really bear down on understanding them???

In any case, thak you so much for the reply!

17

I agree. I imagine it’d be something like me trying to play hockey without knowing how to ice-skate.

18

I’m not terribly good at math either, but I got significantly better when I came to realize that algebra could be looked at much like geometry–not just an amalgamation of unrelated tricks that you are supposed to use in solving a year’s worth of hairy problems, but as theorems that could be proved and understood, just like the ones in plane geometry.

In particular you need second-year algebra to be able to understand the underpinnings of basic calculus like differentiation and integration. Without that, you can still learn the formulas on an intuitive level, and this is how they are often taught in college calculus courses aimed at non-science/non-math majors, who often have never reached the second year of algebra in high school. But it’s a lot less satisfying to memorize formulas than it is to understand the general principles that bind all of the differentiation or integration formulas together.

19

This resonates strongly with my experience. I had no math in college whatsoever and for a variety of reasons ended up taking quite a bit of it in grad school. Earlier in life math was little more than memorization and application of templates to push symbols around on a page. The work I do not uses mathematics as a language to present clear arguments. It’s a world of difference.

I can’t recommend Sylvanus’ Thompson’s Calculus Made Easy enough. It’s about as close to bedtime reading as I think mathematics gets. It’s a sane and completely wonderful treatment of calculus.

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The brief Wikipedia page contains a link to the 1910 edition (as a PDF file) and a description of Martin Gardner’s modern update.