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> Instead, they are taught incantations and rituals to get to an answer. My early school math involved memorising multiplication tables. Later on, there was
by will_hughes 9y ago
> Instead, they are taught incantations and rituals to get to an answer.
My early school math involved memorising multiplication tables. Later on, there was rote memorisation of other aspects of math that I just never understood - you just "had to", and none of the teachers could explain why.
It was for this reason that I hated math, and it wasn't until I started understanding some of the more fundamental relationships many many years after school that I finally got it.
While this is but one anecdote, and having heard similar stories from others is just more anecdotes - there does seem to be research backing up that a lot of people don't understand the fundamental relationships between numbers and how math works.
I see Common Core math trying to teach relationships between numbers - showing that by being able to break down large unwieldy numbers you can get something that while it might have a bunch more steps, they're at least feasable without counting on fingers/toes or trying to remember times tables.
- smallnamespace 9y agoFor some reason, I immediately groked calculus and why it would be useful (maybe because I liked physics and the relationship between velocity and position is an intuitive one), but the point of linear algebra was a complete mystery to me. Why are we multiplying these big matrices of numbers, and what is this complicated determinant thing? Why would anyone ever care what a kernel is, and what are these subspaces that keep getting referenced? Now every other somewhat mathy problem I see can be broken down into linear algebra and I wish I had learned it better (and that it was taught with more intuition).
- 4e1a 9y agoI completely suck at calculus, but have a great need for kernels. I am an intermediate programmer/musician and I use them for audio convolution[0]. [0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_reverb https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_reverb