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ArishMell · 70-79, M
I have not met anyone "scared" by mathematics, but have met plenty who dislike it because they cannot understand it.
Including me: it was probably my weakest subject at school. (My second weakest was French, with trying to remember all its complicated irregular verbs and random gendering of almost all nouns.)
So why the incomprehension?
That is highly individual but I can suggest it starts in school, with a combination of:
- low personnel ability to understand abstracts,
- text-books and teachers not showing real applications for abstruse concepts like Cyclic Quadrilaterals and dx/dy (x^y), or merely making the subject dull;
- being unable to see any point to it.
The text-books rarely explained anything anyway.
My own generation was lucky enough to have a had a cohesive, coherent course in Arithmetic and Mathematics throughout our school careers: and the individual topics within the syllabus skills were and still are used in real life, although we did not always know that then.
This appears to have been broken up and drastically watered-down since then. Also, many parents can recount being bewildered when trying to help their own children, by some very peculiar ways concocted to make basic arithmetic needlessly awkward.
We started with counting then simple Arithmetic in Infants' School, and progressed to more difficult Arithmetic in Primary School. It was never pretentiously called "Mathematics", although in the final Year there my form's teacher introduced us to logarithms (for multiplying awkward numbers). At the time we then took the "11-Plus Examination" which determined your next five years of Secondary education - I was one who thus went on to take the GCE "Ordinary Level" course, leading to the school-leaving / further-education choice.
It was all a steady progression, eventually embracing higher-level arithmetic, logarithms, algebra, plane geometry, Euclidean geometry, mensuration, trigonometry, graphs, equations, basic calculus. All in a single syllabus of one curriculum subject.
Yet at no time do I recall being show any link to real life for most Maths topics, apart from a few unlikely examples such as the cyclist from Town A passing the walker from Town B. Or the height of a flagpole by the length of its shadow.
I also suffered from two, frankly bad, Maths teachers in succession for the last 3 years of the O-Level syllabus. One in his last year before retiring so probably long past being able to make Maths interesting: he was probably bored with teaching it. The second was a better teacher but a bombast interested in only the bright, keen pupils likely to gain good O-Level passes, to reflect on his teaching skill.
So I left school with very low Mathematical skills, and not liking it!
It was years before I started to grasp it, and indeed use some of it.
Only by sheer chance did I finally twig Differentiation; by an indirect "anchor" through one of my hobbies. While I understood logarithms finally, by having to know decibel scales of measurement at work.
So now a sort of uneasy relationship with Mathematics, comprehending enough to use in my work and hobbies, now just the latter and mainly just mensuration and trigonometry. Yet I realise my weakness had stymied my early dreams of being a professional scientist or engineer - as both disciplines are intensely mathematical.
I don't "hate" Maths, nor "love" it, just rub along with what I need of it.
+++++
[Until the development of electronic calculators, Logarithms and their Slide-rule cousins were the only practical and easy way to perform difficult multiplications, divisions and power-calculations; but many scientific and engineering laws are intrinsically logarithmic. For example, the "decibel" is not a discrete unit like the metre or volt, but based on a logarithmic ratio specific to purpose. ]
Including me: it was probably my weakest subject at school. (My second weakest was French, with trying to remember all its complicated irregular verbs and random gendering of almost all nouns.)
So why the incomprehension?
That is highly individual but I can suggest it starts in school, with a combination of:
- low personnel ability to understand abstracts,
- text-books and teachers not showing real applications for abstruse concepts like Cyclic Quadrilaterals and dx/dy (x^y), or merely making the subject dull;
- being unable to see any point to it.
The text-books rarely explained anything anyway.
My own generation was lucky enough to have a had a cohesive, coherent course in Arithmetic and Mathematics throughout our school careers: and the individual topics within the syllabus skills were and still are used in real life, although we did not always know that then.
This appears to have been broken up and drastically watered-down since then. Also, many parents can recount being bewildered when trying to help their own children, by some very peculiar ways concocted to make basic arithmetic needlessly awkward.
We started with counting then simple Arithmetic in Infants' School, and progressed to more difficult Arithmetic in Primary School. It was never pretentiously called "Mathematics", although in the final Year there my form's teacher introduced us to logarithms (for multiplying awkward numbers). At the time we then took the "11-Plus Examination" which determined your next five years of Secondary education - I was one who thus went on to take the GCE "Ordinary Level" course, leading to the school-leaving / further-education choice.
It was all a steady progression, eventually embracing higher-level arithmetic, logarithms, algebra, plane geometry, Euclidean geometry, mensuration, trigonometry, graphs, equations, basic calculus. All in a single syllabus of one curriculum subject.
Yet at no time do I recall being show any link to real life for most Maths topics, apart from a few unlikely examples such as the cyclist from Town A passing the walker from Town B. Or the height of a flagpole by the length of its shadow.
I also suffered from two, frankly bad, Maths teachers in succession for the last 3 years of the O-Level syllabus. One in his last year before retiring so probably long past being able to make Maths interesting: he was probably bored with teaching it. The second was a better teacher but a bombast interested in only the bright, keen pupils likely to gain good O-Level passes, to reflect on his teaching skill.
So I left school with very low Mathematical skills, and not liking it!
It was years before I started to grasp it, and indeed use some of it.
Only by sheer chance did I finally twig Differentiation; by an indirect "anchor" through one of my hobbies. While I understood logarithms finally, by having to know decibel scales of measurement at work.
So now a sort of uneasy relationship with Mathematics, comprehending enough to use in my work and hobbies, now just the latter and mainly just mensuration and trigonometry. Yet I realise my weakness had stymied my early dreams of being a professional scientist or engineer - as both disciplines are intensely mathematical.
I don't "hate" Maths, nor "love" it, just rub along with what I need of it.
+++++
[Until the development of electronic calculators, Logarithms and their Slide-rule cousins were the only practical and easy way to perform difficult multiplications, divisions and power-calculations; but many scientific and engineering laws are intrinsically logarithmic. For example, the "decibel" is not a discrete unit like the metre or volt, but based on a logarithmic ratio specific to purpose. ]
Picklebobble2 · 56-60, M