4 ms·

I'm of the opinion that no one is bad at math. But as the article says, math is challenging and precise, in ways other subjects aren't. There isn't always one

by ethbr0 3y ago

I'm of the opinion that no one is bad at math. But as the article says, math is challenging and precise, in ways other subjects aren't. There isn't always one and exactly one English answer: they have smoother correct/incorrect gradients. What I think people actually hate about math is (a) having to practice/memorize to get up to the baseline, (b) being unsupported when they're not getting it ("dumb question" fear), & (c) as a consequence of being unsupported and never learning topics, future topics are impenetrable. And naturally, instead of saying "I didn't invest enough time in practicing and/or ask my teachers enough questions," people in bad math learning situations default to "I'm bad at math." No one to blame. Nothing to be done. Everyone forgiven.

iinnPP 3y ago
There are absolutely dumb questions. Such as sitting in class not paying attention and asking the teacher a question where the answer was mentioned 30seconds beforehand. 100+ times in a semester. When said teacher has three of these students, the rest of the class suffers.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  It’s all relative. In a class full of high iq (>150) people, many questions would be seen as dumb that wouldn’t be seen as dumb by a class full of people with learning disabilities. The spectrum is wide. Everything alas is dumb. Never assume you’re the smartest person in the room.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    There is no classroom full of students 3+ standard deviations above the norm. (15 is a standard deviation. 145 is 3 standard deviations). And if there were, the reasons stupid questions would be asked is because kid#11 was not paying attention and nothing to do with their intelligence. Which happens plenty of times with average students. These are subjects a decidedly average person can understand with effort and study. But if distracted by well... Life... Things happen. ---------- No joke, one of the smartest people I know was distracted in class because he won Jeopardy and the NDA / don't tell anybody was kinda stressing him out. That kinda thing. Life finds a way to distract us, even the smartest of us.
    - golergka 3y ago
      > There is no classroom full of students 3+ standard deviations above the norm. May be 145 is unrealistic, but 130 is not. It's only 1 in 44, which should be a pretty realistic figure. My own high school had a similar ratio of admission.
    - 2devnull 3y ago
      “was not paying attention and nothing to do with their intelligence” You might be surprised to learn that people with an iq of 80 have a hard time paying attention to much of anything. My point was not to quibble over the likelihood of a classroom of 150’s, but to illustrate a point, that what counts as a dumb question is largely a function of the average cognitive capacity of the reference group. You may disagree and find context doesn’t matter, and to some extent I can see where you are coming from: mistakes like not paying attention seem to be results of a slightly different thing than pure g intelligence. I see that, but suspect the correlation is so high that the distinction matters only a little.
      - dragontamer 3y ago
        > My point was not to quibble over the likelihood of a classroom of 150’s, but to illustrate a point, that what counts as a dumb question is largely a function of the average cognitive capacity of the reference group. And in my experience, a "dumb question" is asked all the time by highly smart people who happened to have lost their attention span at that moment. > I see that, but suspect the correlation is so high that the distinction matters only a little. I was a very distracted student growing up. I made it a point to ask stupid questions, because it was more important to hold the class back and make sure I got my learning, than to otherwise pretend I was smarter than who I really was. I get that teachers got pissed off at me for not paying attention. I also get that I was holding back the class. But alas, the name of the game is learning. You can't learn if you've missed the material. If you've missed the material, better ask the question right now (while you still remember), than wait later in the week when you've really forgotten everything.
        2devnull 3y ago
- rileymat2 3y ago
  I am not sure that this is true, if they are asking about some of the harder concepts even if someone thought they understood it at the time, repetition is key to learning. Repeating some of the harder things may make the rest of the students in the class better.
- 6510 3y ago
  This is why you can rewind video. What is the excuse for the desire for it to be like a theater play with the same actor/teacher reading the same script every year? The irony is that it is the system that is stubborn, unable to learn from its mistakes, unable to just try things and fail, unable to comprehend why and when it fails. When subjected to school I think I could have listed thousands of components of the formula that do not compute. Now I know the most significant and most outlandish mistakes are reasonably documented by sufficiently credible people. There are lots of much less obvious but hilarious and spectacular ideas and experiments. A guy making a quality children TV program here said that teachers should have the highest salaries. Our smartest people should want to become teachers one day, as the ultimate career goal.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    Indeed. I think the most cost, effective, and resource-efficient pedagogical method for undergrad would be {best video} + {played in a lecture all} + {with a TA breaking the video into chunks and asking for questions} + {TA session with smaller groups}. Redoing 90% of the same lecture yearly, by faculty whose time could better be spent researching, is insane. But any change in teaching upsets a lot of academia economics, which are tenuous as-is. I expect it'd take a federal mandate to make the above shift (a la ACA and electronic health records).
coffeefirst 3y ago
I'm bad at math. This doesn't mean I can't do math, but it means its 5x as hard for me as it is for you. I find math people actually wind up enjoying the puzzle and the mastery; I never did. This isn't a problem. Most people find some things come easier to them or are more rewarding than others. But it seems to me there's a line between helping people do stuff they're bad at and insisting that there's no such thing as being bad at them.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Do you remember the first time you found math "hard"? What was your teacher like? What was your experience like? Honestly curious! (as someone who cried memorizing multiplication tables)
  - coffeefirst 3y ago
    Huh, that's an interesting question. I'm not sure. There was a moment when they broke out the honors tracks and I knew I should be in advanced history/english/science/everything except for math. I was doing fine at the regular pace, but would struggle to keep up with the kids who actually enjoyed the challenge and picked it up easy. But that tells me the split happened much earlier. On the other hand, I know when I realized I was good at writing. I read constantly as a kid and started writing fiction by age 9. And from that angle I can relate: I would help friends with writing in college. It's almost always possible to help someone who struggles to capture their thoughts clearly on paper or just approach a blank page, but that doesn't mean they're ever going to like the craft or develop a proclivity towards it.
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      Further curiosity, did you do extra math at home before the honors split? I went to a college prep school, and our math teacher from ~3-5 grades was excellent. (We were lucky and she moved up with our class every year) But I had a sneaking suspicion that by the time the honors split happened (5th grade?), there was a substantial "home" work delta between future-advanced kids and everyone else. I certainly didn't like math, but my father was dead-set on my learning it. So I know I completed every bit of school homework + a ton of extra practice problems + reviewed problems with him, before honors began. I expect to everyone else it looked like I "got" math, but there was a lot of burning the candle, and it wouldn't have been my own choice. (That said, mostly grateful, as it did carry me through college math well)

by ethbr0 3y ago

iinnPP 3y ago

There are absolutely dumb questions. Such as sitting in class not paying attention and asking the teacher a question where the answer was mentioned 30seconds beforehand. 100+ times in a semester. When said teacher has three of these students, the rest of the class suffers.

2devnull 3y ago
It’s all relative. In a class full of high iq (>150) people, many questions would be seen as dumb that wouldn’t be seen as dumb by a class full of people with learning disabilities. The spectrum is wide. Everything alas is dumb. Never assume you’re the smartest person in the room.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  There is no classroom full of students 3+ standard deviations above the norm. (15 is a standard deviation. 145 is 3 standard deviations). And if there were, the reasons stupid questions would be asked is because kid#11 was not paying attention and nothing to do with their intelligence. Which happens plenty of times with average students. These are subjects a decidedly average person can understand with effort and study. But if distracted by well... Life... Things happen. ---------- No joke, one of the smartest people I know was distracted in class because he won Jeopardy and the NDA / don't tell anybody was kinda stressing him out. That kinda thing. Life finds a way to distract us, even the smartest of us.
  - golergka 3y ago
    > There is no classroom full of students 3+ standard deviations above the norm. May be 145 is unrealistic, but 130 is not. It's only 1 in 44, which should be a pretty realistic figure. My own high school had a similar ratio of admission.
  - 2devnull 3y ago
    “was not paying attention and nothing to do with their intelligence” You might be surprised to learn that people with an iq of 80 have a hard time paying attention to much of anything. My point was not to quibble over the likelihood of a classroom of 150’s, but to illustrate a point, that what counts as a dumb question is largely a function of the average cognitive capacity of the reference group. You may disagree and find context doesn’t matter, and to some extent I can see where you are coming from: mistakes like not paying attention seem to be results of a slightly different thing than pure g intelligence. I see that, but suspect the correlation is so high that the distinction matters only a little.
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      > My point was not to quibble over the likelihood of a classroom of 150’s, but to illustrate a point, that what counts as a dumb question is largely a function of the average cognitive capacity of the reference group. And in my experience, a "dumb question" is asked all the time by highly smart people who happened to have lost their attention span at that moment. > I see that, but suspect the correlation is so high that the distinction matters only a little. I was a very distracted student growing up. I made it a point to ask stupid questions, because it was more important to hold the class back and make sure I got my learning, than to otherwise pretend I was smarter than who I really was. I get that teachers got pissed off at me for not paying attention. I also get that I was holding back the class. But alas, the name of the game is learning. You can't learn if you've missed the material. If you've missed the material, better ask the question right now (while you still remember), than wait later in the week when you've really forgotten everything.
      - 2devnull 3y ago
rileymat2 3y ago
I am not sure that this is true, if they are asking about some of the harder concepts even if someone thought they understood it at the time, repetition is key to learning. Repeating some of the harder things may make the rest of the students in the class better.
6510 3y ago
This is why you can rewind video. What is the excuse for the desire for it to be like a theater play with the same actor/teacher reading the same script every year? The irony is that it is the system that is stubborn, unable to learn from its mistakes, unable to just try things and fail, unable to comprehend why and when it fails. When subjected to school I think I could have listed thousands of components of the formula that do not compute. Now I know the most significant and most outlandish mistakes are reasonably documented by sufficiently credible people. There are lots of much less obvious but hilarious and spectacular ideas and experiments. A guy making a quality children TV program here said that teachers should have the highest salaries. Our smartest people should want to become teachers one day, as the ultimate career goal.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Indeed. I think the most cost, effective, and resource-efficient pedagogical method for undergrad would be {best video} + {played in a lecture all} + {with a TA breaking the video into chunks and asking for questions} + {TA session with smaller groups}. Redoing 90% of the same lecture yearly, by faculty whose time could better be spent researching, is insane. But any change in teaching upsets a lot of academia economics, which are tenuous as-is. I expect it'd take a federal mandate to make the above shift (a la ACA and electronic health records).

coffeefirst 3y ago

I'm bad at math. This doesn't mean I can't do math, but it means its 5x as hard for me as it is for you. I find math people actually wind up enjoying the puzzle and the mastery; I never did. This isn't a problem. Most people find some things come easier to them or are more rewarding than others. But it seems to me there's a line between helping people do stuff they're bad at and insisting that there's no such thing as being bad at them.

ethbr0 3y ago
Do you remember the first time you found math "hard"? What was your teacher like? What was your experience like? Honestly curious! (as someone who cried memorizing multiplication tables)
- coffeefirst 3y ago
  Huh, that's an interesting question. I'm not sure. There was a moment when they broke out the honors tracks and I knew I should be in advanced history/english/science/everything except for math. I was doing fine at the regular pace, but would struggle to keep up with the kids who actually enjoyed the challenge and picked it up easy. But that tells me the split happened much earlier. On the other hand, I know when I realized I was good at writing. I read constantly as a kid and started writing fiction by age 9. And from that angle I can relate: I would help friends with writing in college. It's almost always possible to help someone who struggles to capture their thoughts clearly on paper or just approach a blank page, but that doesn't mean they're ever going to like the craft or develop a proclivity towards it.
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    Further curiosity, did you do extra math at home before the honors split? I went to a college prep school, and our math teacher from ~3-5 grades was excellent. (We were lucky and she moved up with our class every year) But I had a sneaking suspicion that by the time the honors split happened (5th grade?), there was a substantial "home" work delta between future-advanced kids and everyone else. I certainly didn't like math, but my father was dead-set on my learning it. So I know I completed every bit of school homework + a ton of extra practice problems + reviewed problems with him, before honors began. I expect to everyone else it looked like I "got" math, but there was a lot of burning the candle, and it wouldn't have been my own choice. (That said, mostly grateful, as it did carry me through college math well)