What specifically do you not like about it. And I don’t just mean “it’s too hard”, what specifically is hard?
I feel like most people would like mathematics, but the education system failed them, teaching in a way that’s not enjoyable.
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i used to not like it, because i struggled heavily, arithemetic was more annoying than algebra and higher, and not useful in the longrun. I think people have more problem with writing English papers than math. its a somewhat arbitrary subject, depends on the instructor(some are super-nazis of english writing, and others try to try to understand the gist of your essay, still need proper grammar) i struggled alot in english writing. surprisingly a lot of people arnt well practiced in grammar up to college level. Some instructors will rant on your paper how its inexcusable that its written a certain way.
I find it hard to keep numbers in mind, and memorizing huge lists of numbers doesn’t work well for me. I need a purpose, a story, a reason behind the numbers. I’m the weirdo who loves story problems.
I don’t like busywork, running meaningless numbers for the sake of doing it is dull to me.
Someone who used to dislike it in school and university here.
Having to cram a lot of information and formulas, and then reproduce it without error for an exam. None of it made sense, and I wasn’t even aware it was possible for it to make sense.
Only after many years did I understand it’s all connected, there’s a logic to it. It’s possible to understand rather than just blindly learn.
Btw the notation really doesn’t help.
I think this is true for lots of people. I also think there’s a bunch of us that have never had that feeling of it being a memorisation task.
In fact, the reason I liked maths and science was because it wasn’t memorisation. Unlike languages (for example) you could always work out the bit you forgot, and didn’t need to depend on some made-up aide-memoire that only applied 75% of the time and remember what 25% it didn’t apply to.
All I can think is that some early teacher failed you, and didn’t lay out how the foundations worked.
if the foundations of mathematics are dependent on a single early teacher… that’s a serious dependency for mathematics then.
The foundations of everything are dependent on those early teachers.
This is true in all cases. The proof is left as an exercise for the student.
I think the issue is that mathematical logical thinking is what needs to be taught, like that everything can be described as equations.
The teachers put too much emphasis on formulas and notation and equations and so we are led to believe that math is only about rote memory of math grammar and so it never makes sense.
I’ll offer a different perspective. I’m actually really good at math, and I hated it in school because I didn’t want to do dozens of homework problems because I already knew how to do it and it was pointless work.
And I didn’t, which led to me having to take my tests sitting next to the teacher because she wouldn’t believe I could make > 90% on the tests without doing any practice problems.
thats why theres always an ongoing debate on grading homework. what matters more are the exam grades to show if a given person understands a concept, but it runs the riak of more people failing out without the weight of graded homework easing up scores.
back in middleschool, i was basically told i would instantly fail a geometry class if i didnt start doing homework, despite aceing exams. The goal of homework is to teach students more about meeting deadlines, and that message often gets lost in education.
The main purpose of homework, at least in the stem classes, is to reinforce the subject. Some kids absolutely need that reinforcement and to have the teacher correct their work to help them understand the concepts.
Classic elementary/high school scenario: “This kid is ahead of the curve… a little too far ahead if you ask me. I’d better accuse them of cheating, given that the rest of the class sucks ass at long division/algebra/calculus…”
nah they just make you tutor the stupid kids. at least mine always did.
I feel seen, had forgotten all about that.
I was never made to “tutor” but my assigned groups for projects were conspicuously full of problem children I was expected to balance.
It was a tiny rural school and I was a kid from a major metropolitan area who was in honors classes before relocating to a school that had none.
In her defense, like 99% of students at the school not doing homework and acing the tests would have been cheating.
A big part of the increasing workload to play ratio in elementary school is for learning to do some hard work. If you coast and/or give up easily, there will be a tall wall waiting for you at university level if not earlier. It won’t be hard to scale if you’ve learned to put in the effort, but it will be too late to start practicing that then.
Same goes for figuring out how to make your brain retain information (association building). At some point rote memorization isn’t going to cut it anymore.
These things need to be built up along with the basic knowledge. And yes, schools and teachers all around the world are often failing the students in that. There’s no simple blame or simple cure. Education is a huge task.
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I never sucked but I’m bad at abstract thought (if you can call it that), so I never enjoyed math. I’m much more of a visual/ auditory learner. Things like geometry were easy, but once I got to calculus I said “fuck this”.
Asking why people don’t like something is probably the wrong way to approach this. Ask why people do like it and then you will say that some people will not appreciate the qualities mentioned.
But maths is hard, objectively. It’s abstract and it’s about logic and the precise application of rules and a lot of people are just not good at those things.
The heart of doing maths is solving puzzles. Not practical puzzles like “how do I build a cool robot” (though maths comes up in engineering of course) but puzzles that are posed without necessarily having any relation to the real world. “Prove that the limit of this sequence is 2” - “what for?” It’s like doing sudoku or crosswords, if that doesn’t tickle your brain, you won’t like it.
I love math. As long as i can look at it on paper and think about it. I absolutely hate math when someone throws numbers at my face and expect an answer.
Shit teacher. I had a good teacher one year and it turned out I wasn’t actually bad at maths.
Just don’t want to do it
it’s not that I don’t like it, I just don’t like it as much as I used to.
I wanted to be a math teacher once upon a time. then, one year the teacher I really looked up to held the entire class back for over two months because 3-5 students couldn’t grasp sin cos & tan. it should have taken us three weeks but instead took us almost three times as long.
by the end of it, the students that still didn’t grasp it still didn’t grasp it and the students that did grasp it no longer grasped it.
I was burnt out on it and honestly threw myself into tech just to get the fuck away from math.
worked out in my favor. teachers get paid three to four times less than I do currently, so it was a win.
I still couldn’t give a fuck about sin cos & tan.
It’s just extremely difficult for me to hold a value in my head and perform an operation against another. I do understand the operations though, the concept is fine, the problem is that of numerical values. Numbers. I’m horrible with them. Always had problems remembering important historical dates, my own personal numbers (ids, age, etc). Because it’s such a struggle it becomes very tiring very quickly, and frustrating. That’s what’s hard.
I like math just fine up until trigonometry and at that point my brain just can’t hold onto it. Failed college calculus three times. There’s something about the formulas and rules and applications that isn’t intuitive for me at that level. I’m much better at the Earth Sciences and had no problems with chemistry.
“Liking” math isn’t really accurate either. I don’t care about math, I care about things that require math. Geometry and algebra are useful in a ton of other disciplines and activities. Playing with numbers doesn’t make me feel smart or accomplished the way a puzzle does.
Probably all about the teaching. I understood maths up until we hit differential calculus. Then I didn’t understand what we were doing to numbers or why. And my teacher was incapable of explaining it.
It was fine until some insane motherfucker decided to get the alphabet involved. Nope, fuck your x to the power of a squared equals unknown, I’ll stay over here where the sane people are.
Geometry is okay I guess. Shapes and shit. Much better than letters.
Lol my son recently was struggling with a^2 + b^2 = c^2
Blast from the past. He wants to be a carpenter, so I told him it will help him with that. Ive no idea if that’s true but it got him to pay attention
Edit, that formatting came out great lmao
