
How has your learning experience in school shaped your attitude towards math? - sonabinu
My school experience still makes me nervous about math. I love the subject and apply it extensively at work.People reach out with math question at work and I help but even today I feel a slight shortness of breath when I struggle with a math problem because of how school shaped my thinking.
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Mz
When they were still in elementary school, I pulled my two sons out of school
to homeschool them. My oldest hated math because of his negative school
experiences. My only goal was to teach him "math is your friend." I eventually
succeeded.

So it is possible to get past this, if you want.

I had my sons play math based games, read math books full of paragraphs and
not problems, and so on. You might try engaging in math as recreation. Read
books like "The Number Devil" and "Alice in Flatland" and "The cartoon guide
to statistics" (or any cartoon guide book ever on any subject, because they
are all basically awesome) and "How to lie with statistics."

Try to figure out what pieces make you stressed and look for a way to fix that
piece of it. For example, if it is about dealing with people face to face,
then email them an answer. Something like that can help break the pattern of
stress and help you reboot your emotional relationship to the subject.

Best of luck.

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drakonka
My school experience made me not care about math as much as I wish I did. Or
rather, nobody "made" me not care as much as I wish I did. That was my fault.
It's more like when I started school in my country of birth math was _forced_
on us and we _had_ to be good at it. When we moved countries this was no
longer the case and I allowed myself to fall into math-mediocrity.

I did my first few years of school in Ukraine, where the importance of math
was drilled into us regularly. My grandmother was a retired teacher and
insisted on us learning our multiplication tables before we started first
grade. My mom absolutely loved math and drilled its importance into us. At
school math seemed like one of the most important subjects. We'd get a lot of
homework in all subjects, but my most concrete memory of homework was sitting
sometimes for hours in my room at home solving math problems.

In 1999 we moved to the US. School was very hard, but mostly because of the
language barrier. I excelled at Math because a) it was something I didn't have
to know much English for and b) it seems like for the first few years the
things we were taught in Math class in the US were things we had already
learned in class in Ukraine. Aside from the other kids laughing at my "weird"
way to do long division on the board I was really good at it. The thing is - I
wasn't good at it because I was enthusiastic about math at that point, just
because we were going over stuff I had already learned in Ukraine.

As I started middle school I was still ahead of everyone for a couple of
years, but eventually our US schooling caught up with our Ukrainian schooling.
Suddenly we weren't going over stuff I already knew anymore, and our teachers
didn't seem to drill math into us as much as they did in Ukraine on the whole.
My grandmother was no longer there to insist that we practice aggressively and
my parents kind of adopted a more Americanized attitude as well, I think.

By the time I graduated high school (by that time in Australia), I was "ok" at
math - maybe a little above average. But I wasn't excited about it and didn't
go out of my way to really internalise the concepts we were going over in
class.

I now regret this deeply. I had the perfect opportunity to learn, both with
that original approach from Ukraine and parents who were _very good_ at math.
But I fell into complacency when importance of math wasn't pushed onto us as
much anymore and didn't learn as much as I wish I did. I think I would be a
much stronger programmer today if I had, and now I'm considering taking some
sort of math course independently to get better.

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TheAndruu
I was never particularly good at math.

Junior year in highschool, I bombed the first math test (37/100 points) and
was about to drop the class, when the teacher pulled me to the hallway and
urged I stay with it.

This guy was known for being the toughest teacher in the school and I was
afraid of him, as was just about everyone.

I gave it a 2nd chance, still convinced I'd fail because this guy was
impossibly hard. He'd assign 4 hours of homework each night, that even the
smartest kids couldn't regularly complete. I'm not kidding, I'd regularly be
up past midnight working on these assignments. You were afraid to not complete
them.

So I tried real hard, and got better. By the end of the year I had the highest
overall average in the class, mainly because his expectation of hard work
urged me to put in effort I didn't know I could do.

Years later I took on Math as a 2nd major in college, directly because this
guy taught me I could do it, even though I wasn't good at it.

The learning experience taught me that I could solve any problem if I had
enough determination.

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Raed667
I used to be good at maths. No, let me rephrase, I used to __like __maths
(Yes, in french math is plural).

Then came my last high-school year, and I got the worst teachers ever. I
started neglecting math in favor of more enjoyable subjects like Chemistry and
Physics. And my grades started dropping.

After high school I got into software engineering, and I aced most courses,
but math.

And until today, I say that those teachers may have cost me a lot. As I
screwed-up many interviews when math questions came up. (I'm talking signal,
and Fourier series, etc, ..)

I may be in a totally different career now if only I had teachers that cared a
little more.

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partisan
I had a negative math experience as well. I skated by most of the time, never
really learning the concepts.

I really learned calculus 1 after taking it during summer classes for the
third time in college. Learning it really well did something for me. It gave
me confidence that other subjects within math were within my reach as well. I
am not a mathematician. My eyes glaze over when I see funny symbols. But I
know I can learn it if I have to.

So my advice: Give yourself a really good chance to learn some core math
concepts. It will do wonders for your confidence.

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075
I am in school, so maybe I don't count, but I love the way my math teacher
teaches! He has fun lessons and I love math in general thanks to him.

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aftabh
tl;dr

It's clear that it's a psychological thing. If I were you, I would go watch
'Good Will Hunting' movie (and watch it again if I think I had already watched
it) and substitute Hunting's negative 'personal experience' with 'mathematics
related experience' and assume that I'm 'Will Hunting' (while watching the
movie :-).

Comment

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My personal experience is little different. I didn't have any negative
experience/memory when I was learning mathematics (and science) at school;
instead, I always felt comfortable with any STEM related course/subject. But I
had a very miserable experience when I had to learn English as a second
language[1] at school.

At that time, I started strongly believing in the idea that no matter what I
do, I will never be able to learn English as ESL as it always felt like an
alien subject (literally :-)) and there was nothing I can use to get a handle
on it. No wonder, I felt nervous and hopeless in my English classes.

Somehow I was able to reach college (in my country it corresponds to the grade
11-12 of high school education in most western countries) with shear brute
force[2]. In the 11th grade, for the very first time, I had an English
language teacher who gave me some _hope_ that one can learn and overcome all
language related problems. Though he only taught English literature (which can
be more intimidating when one is at beginners' level with lots of self-doubts
and anxiety), his teaching style was really inspiring[3] and it changed my
whole perspective about learning a new language. Later on, I realized that it
wasn't my (or other students who couldn't afford tuition fees of private ESL
teachers) faults that couldn't learn the language, it was the teachers' fault
as they were not really qualified to be English language teachers, at the very
first place.

Now I feel quite comfortable with English language[4] and afore-mentioned
story is only a memory now, one from the distant past.

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1- to be precise, it was my third language I had to learn at school in a non-
English-speaking country; I lived in a deprived part of the country and had a
financially humble background.

2- memorized anything English related to get into the next class and didn't
let any English language related handicaps stop my progress.

3- at-least that's how I felt at that time. I distinctly remember, some of the
students, I personally knew, were only finding insignificant flaws in his
English language related skills.

4- I'm very far away from being an expert in English language but I'm very
happy with my progress I've made till now.

