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Rightly on Wrongly some areas of study have the reputation/stigma of being difficult attached to them. Back when I was a high school student math (not just cal

Rightly on Wrongly some areas of study have the reputation/stigma of being difficult attached to them. Back when I was a high school student math (not just calculus - but the entire subject of mathematics) had this reputation as being a "hard" subject as a result scores of my fellow students just decided math is to difficult I'm not going to engage with this. I suspect this is related to a fear of failure or kids being afraid of "looking dumb" in front of their friends - There was a definite "if I don't try then it doesn't matter if I can't do it." attitude, so they just switched off in those particular classes. A lot of these attitudes carry forward into adulthood. I'm almost 40 and amongst my generation programming has a similar reputation. People I grew up with think if you can read or write code you are some kind of mystical wizard with powers beyond the understanding of mere mortals. I see it today at my day job - I work as an engineer (the non software kind). I've seen my coworkers completely baulk at computer code I hear all the same things I heard back in high school. "This is too hard, I can't learn this stuff, I'm not going to bother attempting to understand it". Fluid Dynamics was a hard subject (in my opinion), Solid Mechanics was challenging a dozen lines of python code is not on the same level.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
> math (not just calculus - but the entire subject of mathematics) had this reputation as being a "hard" subject To me it seems like a lot of the fault was with the curriculum: basically full steam ahead regardless of the class’ understanding. That’s especially bad in math when each chapter uses what the previous taught. But the point about adult salaried professionals complaining that they supposedly can’t figure something out is disappointingly relatable. I generally believe that most people are "smart" and just don’t tend to bother using their brain as a muscle and that seems to make it doubly irritating to hear such complaints.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

> math (not just calculus - but the entire subject of mathematics) had this reputation as being a "hard" subject To me it seems like a lot of the fault was with the curriculum: basically full steam ahead regardless of the class’ understanding. That’s especially bad in math when each chapter uses what the previous taught. But the point about adult salaried professionals complaining that they supposedly can’t figure something out is disappointingly relatable. I generally believe that most people are "smart" and just don’t tend to bother using their brain as a muscle and that seems to make it doubly irritating to hear such complaints.