Re: Why is math so difficult for some people?

I have taught math for many years, both in a classroom setting and one
on one, and more often than not, the main problem lies in students not
understanding the basic ideas behind the formulas, rather than just
memorizing the formulas. For many students, there is the mistaken
belief that "knowing" the formulas is enough.

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Barb Knox) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> [added sci.edu, comp.edu]
> 
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Carlos Moreno
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> >Leah Lidtorf wrote:
> >> I don´t get it.I´m a perfect 0 at math.
> >> 
> >> Some people have no problems at all with it.
> >
>  [snip]
> >
> >> Am I too dumb for math?
> >
> >You're asking the wrong question -- you're not
> >"dumb" for math;  you *might* have a brain/mind that
> >works in a way that is not compatible with the way
> >of thinking that you need for understanding maths
> >(emphasis on the *might* -- you claim to be "dumb"
> >for maths, but who knows, maybe you're much better
> >than 90% of the people that writes and reads this
> >newsgroup and just don't know it, or maybe you're a
> >"high-expectation" kind of person, and then anything
> >below Newton, or Gauss, or Fourier's brains means
> >"too dumb for math" in your mind?  :-))
> 
> I've come across various students who viewed that they were missing the
> "mathematics gene" (or "programming gene", or whatever the particular
> subject happened to be).  In those cases it was uniformly the case that
> their difficulty was emotional/attitudinal, rather than cognitive.  As you
> mention, one unhelpful attitude is perfectionism, especially in hard-edged
> subjects where some answers are clearly objectively *wrong* and thus the
> student has no wiggle room to avoid the conclusion that they made an
> error.
> 
> >Anyway, this, plus many of the things that have
> >been already said (mainly about math being genuinely
> >hard -- the more sophisticated level of math, the
> >harder, of course)
> 
> Several of the "missing gene" students had the unhelpful attitude that
> they expected maths to be easy, since they had found their schooling easy
> so far.
> 
> ISTM that cognitive issues do kick in when dealing with high levels of
> abstraction where there are no readily-accessible concrete models.  For
> example, my brain hit the wall trying to visualise non-Hausdorff spaces,
> and my painful memory of the rest of that topology course is of generally
> mindless memorizing and proof cranking.
> 
> 
> >HTH,
> >
> >Carlos