Looking at the responses, I’m guessing Lemmy isn’t a representative sample.

I was a bad student, but a great standardized test taker.

I placed into advanced classes, but had zero interest in learning or studying.

Once I hit high school I was done for.

Geometry, Calculus, etc. I could never wrap my head around why I would ever need to know any of it in my daily life, nor could I envision the practical application of any of it.

So I would zone out or sleep.

Now, trying to help my daughters with their math, it might as well be hieroglyphics.

Speaking personally, my brain switches off when it comes to maths. Instruction is like white noise.

Part of it has been how it is/was taught. Math was always the subject I had to work harder on than any other. The problem is that I was never taught to really conceptualize the problems. Once I started taking physics and real world applications came into play, it all sort of clicked and got much easier.

Edit: Also, math is really all about relationships and conceptualizing interesting problems or ideas. If it had been presented to me that way, I think I would have been more adept at it earlier.

• Teaching math is mostly done w/o context and history, IMHO a lot of math makes much more sense when the original problem is understood, before the level of abstraction is being raised.
• Math is a also a language and a notation. Unless one uses math regularly, there is simply not enough practice/repetition to read/speak this notation.
• Math is a tower of abstractions, depending on other abstractions. A lot of topics in math depends on people understanding a lot of basic parts, which means if a student just got by with a prior topic, it is near impossible to catch up/understand what is currently being taught. (Compare to other topics: For example, if a student is bad in their Greek history, they get a fresh start when the topic is industrialization in England w/o any penalty.)
• Math in the primary and secondary schools is mostly computation, ‘real math’ is only taught to people studying MINT.

tl;dr

• we need a better curriculum in the primary/secondary schools
• we need more exercises in reading/writing the mathematical notation (sorry, just understanding math is not enough, because understanding doesn’t make one fluent)
• at least in my school years, math was not repeated enough.
• reading/understanding math is really hard, at the higher levels, understanding 2-3 pages on a textbook per day is an acceptable pace. I guess all the entertainment nowadays makes it not easier to sit still in a room and get math into ones brain

For me the ‘breakthrough’ with math was, simply to accept that at the higher levels we are speaking about symbols (abstractions) that follow certain rules and everything else is derived by pure logic. Just accepting that one is manipulating symbols with rules to get to other symbols and learning the rules, made it click for me. Disclaimer: Was lucky with great math teachers in university, but even in my university there were people who simply could not accept the game of mathematics and were frustrated, because they wanted easy question/answer style formulas in the sense: When you see this, substitute PI with 3.14 and multiply r by r and write down the number that your calculator shows. They never made any effort to understand where PI comes from, where the radius comes from and why it makes sense.

What is insane, is how many people studied computer science but are totally unable to apply mathematics to the problems they try to solve. Supposedly most of them learned relational algebra and discrete mathematics during their studies (and formal languages/complexity theory)… it is like something is missing in their ability to transfer what they learned in the university to basically the same problems where the symbols have different names. That is something I would love to understand.

Mathematicians are shitty communicators who like feeling special because they can understand their obscure language.

I’m a programmer and in this field there have been tons of books published, conference talks, and heated internet arguments about how to make your code as readable as possible: formatting, function length, naming of variables and functions, keeping number of cross references low, how to document intent, etc. Mathematicians do none of that - it’s all single-character names (preferably from the Greek alphabet to complicate it further) and they rarely communicate intent before throwing formulas at you. You can easily tell when a mathematician has written code because it’s typically hot garbage in terms of readability.

In my case because I was in gifted classes so I got this idea that I was just brilliant and never needed to study for anything. Then as soon as a subject got hard enough for me to not ace it without effort I just quit instead of knuckling down and doing the work. Math was the only subject where I truly ran into a wall cause some of that stuff is just not at all intuitive, it’s loaded down with obscure rules and memorization, etc.

It felt less like instruction on how to use a vital tool to make my life easier and more like someone was intentionally making my life harder by making me learn math. It’s like someone came up to me and said ‘Oh, you’re walking 10 miles uphill? Here, since you’re going this way, carry this 40lb rock with you. it’ll be real useful at the end, trust me bro.’ And I was like ‘This is already a hard enough walk, the fuck am I carrying this rock for?’ so I set it down.

I have since picked some of it back up, and I now recognize the utility of learning it and wish I’d learned it when I was younger cause it’s even harder now.

Maybe a bit niche, but in higher level math courses, instructional material often seems out-of-touch, written by professionals for professionals. Inconsistent notation between authors and unexplained symbols in equations are also royal pains in the ass.

We never really back up and say ‘did you REALLY get that part, because you’re going to NEED it for the next 14 years?’. I can remember I was sick for multiple weeks when we were learning division. I came back, and we were already onto the next topic, and it was just assumed I knew it. Now, I was super-lucky, in that I understood multiplication well enough to puzzle it out. Not every student cares, especially when they are like 8 years old. Just want to learn it enough to pass and be done with Math. ‘What do you mean I have more Math next year too???’

As soon as you miss a single step in the mathematics education train, well, you’re going to be hating math for the rest of your schooling. It’s a series of incremental building blocks, but we never double check that each student really has each piece.

A lot of elementary school teachers don’t go into teaching to teach math.

I can only speak for myself, but honestly I’ve never been able to figure out that root of why it’s so complex to me and difficult to keep track of / understand. The only thing that seems to have a “rational” explanation to me is… Selective memory. It has been a burning question to myself for so long.

For a while I just said “It’s too arbitrary and not logical” except math is built upon logic - 1 + 1 is clearly 2 because if I hold one finger on one hand then bring another finger from my other hand I have two fingers held.

(Imaginary numbers though can fuck off)

I got into programming long ago because it is logical - there’s (almost) always a reason why a computer does $THING even if I can’t tell you, someone surely can. Though generally the answer is “someone told it to do the wrong thing”. If I dig deep enough, I can usually find the answer. My life is full of so many questions that I’ll probably never have the answer to, and I found refuge in the fact that I can get the answers here.

However… computers follow a set of rules, just like mathematicians do. So for me to call it arbitrary would just be wrong. I mean sure, a lot of the rules and formulas certainly seem arbitrary to me, there’s a reason why they are the way they are and it can be tracked down just like you can track down why a computer does $THING.

When it comes to numbers though, my brain just doesn’t seem to hold on to it properly. I can randomly recall weird functions and quirks in libraries that I use - even remember plenty of arbitrary “things” like Vim motions… Yet ask me what nine times seven is and I can’t tell you what the answer is without doing the weird finger trick.

So the only explanation that I can come up for that is just selective memory. I like computers and as such my brain is willing to actually memorize these things. Whereas I’ve never liked math and so my brain doesn’t see a reason to “memorize math”.

It really frustrates me because math and computer science intersect in a lot of ways, and I’ll always be held back by this. Games for example, they run really well on your GPU because GPUs happen to be excellent at math, specifically in parallel. Encryption? Fancy math equations! Almost everything at a low level comes down to math.

Similarly, for as much as I love logical things, I could never hold the concepts of logic gates in my head. I mean, logic is literally in the name! Even when I was heavily into Minecraft I couldn’t pick it up through Redstone.

As such, I think for me, the “logic” argument doesn’t hold up as much as I like to think it does. The analyst in me says that I want it to be something as logical as “math is illogical” because that’s easier to admit and sounds better than “I just don’t like math”. Even worse, perhaps that subconsciously stops me liking it, thus blocking myself from ever being able to excel at it… And yet, here we are (or rather, “here I am”).

I can’t speak to most people but I have dyscalculia.

Where in other subjects the knowledge you gain is related but not completely contingent on everything else you were taught, e.g. you don’t need to remember too many exact details about the Mayflower pilgrims to understand the American Civil War, math requires a solid throughline from the basic arithmetic, through algebra, geometry, and so on. You can’t really do anything with trigonometry if you didn’t understand algebra well. You can’t really do algebra if you didn’t understand arithmetic. You definitely can’t do calculus if you struggled with any of the previous areas.

So the problem is the continuity required, combined with the way most students learn simply not being thorough enough to completely internalize the intuition for each math concept they’re being exposed to. Ask a 9th grader about the differences between rational numbers and irrational numbers that they may have learned in 7th grade: you’ll probably get answers that are about right, but might start to get a little vague or confused. Thankfully I might be overstating the interconnectedness a bit, but I know I definitely had some hiccups in college related to how I had only learned some of the advanced concepts halfway in previous courses, which led to me just barely understanding the really abstract concepts I started to get into like Stokes’ Theorem and Greene’s Theorem at the end of Calc 3.

Science and math pedagogy is fucking trash world over and it only serves to raise students’ anxiety levels on the subject matters until they check out of them entirely and the only ones left are those who have somehow evaded the microtrauma imposed on them

Studying mathematics is a difficult but also rewarding activity. This requires having a positive relationship with the effort. By analogy we could compare this to sport. To give up practicing mathematics because it is difficult is equivalent to giving up sport because it tires.

For those interested in the education of mathematics, I would recommend this book by mathematician David Bessis.

Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and… by David Bessis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJafasuk4NQ