Sometimes you just need it explained like you are five or something that was explained earlier in the “concepts” section of the textbook needs to be explained explicitly during the problem demonstration sections. And on top of that repeated explanation of the same concept is another key factor in solidifying concepts but I’ve found math and physics books to be so lacking in this that it’s as if they are trying to hit the absolute minimum number of word count a textbook can have. Was very frustrating during college.
Comment on I'm too stupid for this
ftp@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Mathematicians frequently use phrases like It’s obvious or It’s easy to see, which can be profoundly discouraging for a student who does not immediately find a concept simple. In math, grappling with extremely difficult problems is part of the learning process. “A challenging experience,” Ardila told me, “can easily become an alienating one.” It’s especially important to make sure that students are not discouraged during early challenges—what’s hard to see now may become easier in time. He struck this typically demoralizing math language from his teaching.
cashsky@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
This is something I’ve been thinking about recently, I’ll see something that is way too complex for me, and think “well this person is just smarter I could never do that.” After 3 months of doing simpler stuff, it now seems challenging but doable. Just doing something for long enough, even pretty complex things become second nature.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 day ago
Most things are hard until you get them. But that’s especially true in Maths. From elementary school to university until the necessary neurons in your head connect every problem seems daunting at first. But once you see what the actual problem is, once you see what tricks can be used they become trivial to solve.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
I’ve tutored calculus, and probably the biggest example I’ve seen of this is the difference quotient. The formula is exceedingly obvious once you understand it, but it takes a lot of people some time for it to “click”.
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 15 hours ago
Chemistry was worse than math for me. Somehow they expected you to remember a variation of a formula from way far back, and understand that you could now use a different notation system to derive another, third formula from a new formula that you had just learned… but didn’t explain that and just threw that new third formula (with entirely different units/inputs) at you and it always was a slog to go track down how it all went together because the mental concepts just didn’t flow. I don’t even remember the name of the textbook or the professor of the class, but I still remember those stupid blue boxes in the textbook where mental mindfuck took place.