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I can remember failing math class hard throughout my entire academic career. I never passed a math class past primary school, and ended up dropping out of high
by ramesh31 5y ago
I can remember failing math class hard throughout my entire academic career. I never passed a math class past primary school, and ended up dropping out of high school. The concepts simply never made sense to me, and as they were presented were just meaningless rote exercises of memorization. Math was something I had completely written off as ever being able to understand.
Then I took calculus and trig classes in college. Since I was also learning graphics programming at the time, I was able to actually make sense of math with a real world connection. Playing with little graph equations on shadertoy.com made me realize graphics was all just math. Everything immediately clicked. I was able to intuitively visualize the trig functions and graph equations and do transformations of them because I could picture what the resulting image would look like. Ultimately the problem for students I think is just creating this connection to reality.
- ajuc 5y agoMy experience too - I wanted to make games so when we had trigonometry and analytic geometry in class I was like "yes please, I can use this, more". Same with vector and matrix algebra later. Meanwhile I had little use for calculus so I only learnt it enough to get a good grade.
- pthread_t 5y agoIt would be incredible if trigonometry classes had a lab component where students work on a 2D game, such as tower defense. I ended up taking a fun programming elective in college where my team did exactly that -- we created a 2D game. That experience made me appreciate trigonometry more than my high school teachers and Khan Academy ever did.
- eschneider 5y agoHaving a real world problem to apply it to makes learning math far easier. I spent a lot of time in 2020-1 tutoring kids in math and the first thing I did was find out what they were into and then worked math into helping them do that thing.