Why is math so difficult to learn?

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Can you tell your own experiences?

Learning how to solve maths problems melts my brain. Honestly, all the info just gets scrambled together and I just can't do it.
Supposedly maths are supposed to be logical, but I just can't make sense of them. 35 years old and I still can't recite all my times tables.

I had some difficulties with math in elementary school--learning multiplication tables, etc. My elementary school teachers really emphasized memorization and that's not how I learn at all. As I got older I learned that I could visualize the computations and mathematical concepts as different kinds of shapes, and it got a lot easier. I got really fond of math in high school and I'm a math major now...lol.

Not everyone does but I certainly do. I think it has to do with a poor working memory.

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Last edited by nat4200 on 19 Apr 2012, 4:50 am, edited 1 time in total.

I just simply cannot make sense of it

Too much to remember and algebra was hard to understand. It kept going over my head. It took me a year to understand how to do fractions. I don't think I was ready for it yet and my teacher kept saying i was and it took me a year to finally get it. Then we move to Montana and it's already algebra.

I learned addiction and subtraction pretty fast when I was six and seven but when I was eight it took me a while to understand how to borrow and carry. Then one day a 6th grader told me every time the answer is ten or above, that is when you carry the one. Then I all of a sudden got it. I wish someone told me that in the first place but they couldn't make it that simple?

With borrowing, I got told to change the top number to one number lower and put the one next to the number I am working on. I don't know why I didn't get it before. Maybe I just needed someone to sit next to me and tell me than listening to the teacher explaining in front of the whole class how to do it. For some reason I have a harder time with that and I have an easier time if someone is talking to me only than to the whole class.

I also learned multiplication pretty quick and division. With times tables, I memorized. Then with division, it was using times tables to know the answer to the problem. Then it was having to use addition and subtraction to get the answer. But yet when I was in 5th grade, they said my math was below the age level despite the fact I was doing grade level math like all the other students in my class. When the problems get too complicated, I get overloaded with concentrating and trying to work it out.

I'm naturally great at maths... this post doesn't seem to be developing much

Never understood memorization. How ridiculous.

It just seems to me that if you want to teach someone to travel around a city you show them how to reference a Map, but you don't make them memorize the entire map.

That's how I feel about memorizing multiplication tables. Just explain the concept to people. Instead of memorizing it you can reason it out to discover the number.

I swear instead of knowing all the multiples of 12 I'd rather just find it through addition by doing 12+12+12+12+12+12. Eventually through experience I might just remember it along with better comprehension from adding it myself.

The human brain is optimized for probable reasoning, not deductive reasoning. We are born to do induction. We struggle to do deduction. That is why the principles of geometry were discovered early by induction and by trial and error. The Egyptians could build pyramids almost exactly aligned to the cardinal directions but they did not know about proving theorems. Theorems and logic were invented late in the game by the Greek philosophers. Thales was the first to prove a theorem in a deductive manner that we would recognize as such today. Aristotle was the first to work out the rules of logic and valid deduction. Even his teacher Plato did not write such a set of rules nor was his reasoning (in the dialogues) always correct. Perhaps there were others before Aristotle in lands other than Greece to work out correct logic, but Aristotle is the first that we know did the deed.

Once reasoning was made rule based, others improved and expanded the logic used by mathematicians. Even so mathematics was not rendered "logical" until mid 19 th century and logic was not expressed in a mathematical manner until late 19 th century (Boole, Frege, Russel, Whitehead, Kantor and others).

ruveyn

Why is writing and speaking so difficult to learn? It is completely arbitrary. Without maths there is nothing.

"Oh it's easy for me. Why can't you do it?"

Why do people need a this? I don't consider it helpful.

practical geometry and surveying are things i wld excel at; algebra and equations baffled me .. i cannot get a 'picture' in my mind eye of it.

i am a gifted practical engineer/ workshop man but my achlles heel stopped me from being a so called 'professional engineer' ie degree etc.

I've noticed a correlation - not necessarily a connection - between a person's poor math skills and their unwillingness adhere to standards of performance, and to follow orders and established procedures.

^

- Paul Lockhart , A Mathematicians Lament

Sure but then we might as well say that most people who are "good at something" are really not. Living one's life is not about following directions...oh wait, it is.