Mathematical ineptness among generally capable people

[Ambi]

This thread was going to be about the relationship between verbal and mathematical intelligence or something but I decided to make it about learning maths in general to make it more broad.

There seems to be a stereotype that people who are into writing or art are terrible at maths*. Even many of the most witty, eloquent, and insightful people I've come across online mention they can't do maths despite being good at verbal reasoning/logic.

When I was nine, I was considered intelligent so I was in the top maths class. To the surprise of my peers I was an idiot at maths. Once I even said two times nine was twenty seven. I couldn't be bothered memorising multiplication tables (I still don't know them) and long division went completely over my head. Since then, learning things like the area of basic shapes, budgeting, understanding the concept of algebra etc. was easy, but I'm still prone to confusion when someone tries to explain other things. It seems to run in my family a bit, my dad's worked in journalism and seems to be awful at maths ("how do you work out a percentage?" "I never understood algebra") and my sister is a literature major who also struggled with maths. Now I'm trying to clarify why I found most of it so confusing and scary, maybe some others can relate. Btw, I'm confident I can learn how to solve these now, I know these look a bit stupid, I did them at about 2AM.

Spoiler: thought processes in maths class 5 large images ahead

So, reasons I can think of for why people find maths difficult:

- Some people have a slight rebellious streak that despises doing things a certain way just because that's the way they're done and you just have to do it. It's not necessarily intentional rebellion, it could just be curiosity; wanting to know why and how something works and why we do it, and not just how to do it, and not having any motivation until there's a sense of purpose that relates to a larger value system.

Also, natural tendencies for improvisation and especially approximation don't really go well with most maths. It annoyed me when teachers created word problems where I thought it wasn't even necessary to use maths. Really, those people don't need to work out right to the decimal point how many grams of chocolate they should each receive. Why don't they all just be nice and share or just guess and all be happy?

- Some people are so used to picking up things at ease that when something challenging that requires boring rote memorization comes along they just can't be bothered.

- Teachers give poor explanations. They seem to confuse explanations with instructions. I think if I'd focussed more on the instructions than being so clouded over with wondering how something works and why it seems to contradict other things I'd learned in maths I'd have done well. "Cancelling out numbers? How can you just do that? How does it just disappear? I don't get it at all."

- They can't envisage the concept. I had an epiphany when I noticed a poster with the Pythagorean theorem in a visual format with the squares coming out of the triangle and the cartoon of Pythagoras. I think I was about fifteen <_<

- Dyscalculia. Maybe I should have just read up about the disorder before writing all this. It could tie into the rest of the reasons, I don't know, maybe some people have a mild form or are sort of in between average and bad? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia

I think now that I've clarified reasons why I had trouble with it and I'm no longer sitting in class as a lazy, timid, distracted student who hardly ever ate lunch I might try learning a little maths just to see if I can do it if I concentrate on just following instructions. I think I tried opening my friends advanced maths textbook to do that last year but it was really confusing. *shrugs*


tl;dr version: some people have trouble learning maths, even otherwise smart people. It could be because of lack of motivation, intimidation, confusing teaching methods, and/or dyscalculia.


So, any experiences/opinions? Is anyone creatively inclined but bad at maths, or conversely, is anyone mathematically inclined but considers themselves uncreative? edit: Just to clarify, I don't mean that you can't be good at maths and creative things at the same time.

Also, does anyone have experience with other numeric systems and do you think they're better/worse? I wander if there's other numerical systems and methods of working things out that are less confusing. I thought Chinese multiplication looked kind of interesting because it looks so different.

*Yes, I'm saying maths. I'm tired of the math/maths/lolmathsematics/lolpseudoamericantool debate and I'm not American so I'll say maths.

 

[ChupathingyX]

At school I generally do very well at english, history(my favourite subject) and visual comm. and design. But I'm not very good at maths, not bad, but not very good, average.

I always love creating different things. When I was young at primary school I would always spend my spare time drawing pictures, and I was alos very bad at maths, I was generally considered one of the worst at mutiplication yet when it came to writing stories and art class I was one of the best.

 

[StraightToHeck]

I'm incredibly right-brained (literature, images, imagination, etc.), so math has always given me some degree of difficulty (especially now with these damn theorems and quadratic equations); I can grasp most mathematical concepts up to and including Pythagorean Theorem, after that it's pretty much gibberish

 

[Outright Villainy]

Most importantly for me, is that rote memorisation does not work. When I learn maths, I need to distill it to it's core, to work from absolute first principles and build from there.

Also, I think a lot can depend on the Maths teacher. I had one teacher who taught us our forumalas by making us recite them as fast as possible. Also, say I tried solving a problem in a different way, but got the right result, she'd give out because I wasn't doing it the way I was supposed to at that time. That maths teacher is an abject failure.

Another I had would encourage different thinking like that, or would give more in depth explanations of concepts before setting to work. Whilst more time consuming, the most important part of maths is to understand the concept, always.

A problem I've found is that too many people that are good at maths are idiosyncratic, and can't pass on their insight very well. I've only met 2 people ever who could do so adeptly. (one being that teacher)

As for my knowledge of math, I had a very natural aptitude for it, in secondary school at least. College maths wasn't so bad either, when I paid attention. I found it was often taught far too quickly though, with far too little derivation from first principles, which I find key to working effectively with maths. Mechanics was great though.

I miss maths, to an extent. Now that my course has become more physics focused, I don't really get taught as many pure concepts any more. I've grown to hate physics in most respects. (except astrophysics)

My problem is that I'm not a strong mathematician, and yet, I'm a scientist. This causes a lot of issues. My problem isn't with arithmetic, but instead with remembering formulae, particularly formulae incorporating Greek symbols. The situation with the incorporation of Greek symbols into mathematics is that I find it rather difficult to remember what they all mean.

This too. Also, my handwriting is particularly awful, so often I'll mistake 'row' (or whatever it's pronounced) with a P in my own notes, and get the whole business completely wrong.

 

[tharglet]

I see you mentioned seeing an image helped you more than seeing writing on a page - this is an important point - as people do learn differently.
We have a contractor at our company atm that was placing the various members of the office into this model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_style#Fleming.27s_VAK.2FVARK_model

I do think that there is a certain tendency to excel at certain "sets" of skills - not saying you can't learn them, but may find it a lot harder to. I know I see the world in a certain way, which makes certain tasks harder than others.

 

[darth.pixie]

I'm more inclined towards literature and art but...I go to college for computers, math and physics.

Personally, I think math is very easy if you grasp its essential concepts. There's nothing inherently difficult about it, except that it's hard to explain and very rigid.

 

[brumley53]

My main problem with maths was when everyone else just did things because "Thats what the teacher said" i would usually question them asking how it works and why it does it, they would then politely answer with "It just does". It didnt really help much but I eventually worked out how and why.

 

[Tzekelkan]

Well, I'm good at maths so therefore that must mean I suck at art because for the life of me I can't understand what you tried to represent in your images.

I cannot understand how people cannot grasp very, very basic mathematics. Sure, mathematics is a difficult subject, with derivatives and integrals and equations and all that (and you haven't seen anything in high school: if you thought maths in high-school were Chinese to you, take a maths course in college and proceed to speak fluent Chinese), but adding four eights to an eight gives you problems? How about we replace "eights" by apples. Now, four apples plus one apple gives five apples. Good. Replace "apples" with "eights" again and you have your solution.

Intelligent people that can form complex arguments and have a good understanding of debates, art and literature and say they're bad at maths must have never given it a chance. Seriously, you read and perfectly understood Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus but you can't imagine that number cancelling in fractions is because if you both divide and multiply something by the same number it has no net effect on it?

Sure, there are people that are bad at maths because they just can't wrap their heads around complex notions. Sure, if you've got "street smarts" and never seen a fraction before in your life because you've never been to school, it's fine. But supposedly "generally capable" people that have received academic education and say they're horrible at maths and refuse to even discuss anything related to numbers are just having a knee-jerk reaction due to a teacher they had that they didn't like, or whatever.

 

[Tipsy Giant]

Maths is one of the most important skills there are, mainly because it is the only real language and it is the only way to understand the universe...

I still don't know my multiplication tables, I really struggled with them, but I am actually pretty fast with mental arithmetic, in fact I would say I am the best at maths of all my friends even though I never learnt the tables, take that Maths class

 

[Duskwaith]

I am a published poet and author and i am awful at the likes of GCSE maths. I can count,subtract,divide multiply etc. which is all i need for my part time job in tescos on top of my studies

Im still yet to use trig or phythagoras therom etc. in the rest of my life

 

[Vet2501]

Luckily I'm good at maths, otherwise I'd end-up overdosing a patient and having it die on the table.

Conversely I'm shite at english and other such arty subjects.

 

[Timotheus]

1: In Math there's right and wrong. There's no matter of interpretation, unlike in the arts.
2: In Math everything's building up on itself. If you are unable to understand the basics and you and the teacher don't care, you lose trail. Instead of understanding things, which would reduce the time spent on learning, a lot of people start memorizing formulas for the moment for each time you'll have a test, making them hate the subject.
3: People don't realize it's pure logic. They see it as kind of magic unachievable for them.

I really love math (and I am going to study it). I do also understand arts, languages and rhetoric, but consider them less elegant than math. Unfortunately - which is kind of stereotypical - my abilities to communicate are not that good.

 

[BabyRaptor]

I fit that stereotype. I almost didn't graduate due to Math and once made a teacher so angry she kicked me out of her class. She kept asking me why I didn't understand what she was trying to teach, and finally out of sheer frustration I told her that letters don't make numbers, they make words. I wasn't trying to be a smart ass, but I guess she saw it that way.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

I think that, in general, people who are "bad" at math tend to be that way for a few reasons:

1) Math seems like an arbitrary set of rules. Unfortunately, until one progresses quite far in the field, it isn't possible to really understand that they are not, in fact, arbitrary.

2) Math, though useful in a huge number of areas, is not seen as being relevant for most career choices. This is generally true as there are few moments in life that require an understanding of anything beyond arithmetic or algebra unless one is pursuing a field in which producing a model of some phenomenon is common.

3) One is never able to forget any part of math. No matter how much you learn it is necessary to remember all the tiny details about what came before.

 

[tseroff]

I have this problem too, and it would be really bad if my dad wasn't an extremely capable mathematician and teacher. As it is, I had never got better than a C in any math class until last year, and that was a fluke. (Teacher's grade: C College's Grade: B) I think the most important thing, though, is to learn life's basic maths. Learn how to do accounting, that is the most useful, applicable, and easy to grasp math style out there, and hopefully it can help you with the rest.

 

[Azure-Supernova]

Addition and subtraction are easy in almost any form. Division and multiplication are easy in smaller numbers. However my brain just goes out to lunch when I'm asked to multiply double digits by triple digits or triple by triple. Or fractions. Or decimals (which are bigger 0.1, 0.01, 0.001!?).

I've never been able to grasp the more complicated numeracy.

 

[Fetzenfisch]

I am the best living example of the arts/language person stereotype. I suck at math. I kinda got quite well at higher biology, chemistry and lower grade physics, all the things where the calculations had to do with "squiggly little things that moved around and are easy to imagine" But when it got all theoretical i was out the game.
i failed math for years. the only surprise was when my endless line of "E"s and "F"s (actually 5s and 6s in germany, but i guess its the same) was stopped by a B+ (2+) in vectors, vectors can be imagined in a 3Dimensional room and i found it extremely easy.

So we got the answer in my case. I have to work with pictures or at least sound/rythm or i lose. The latter is what i need when analysing poetry.


Adding and subtracting and some easier multiplications is something i can solve quite quickly in my head. But i owe this not to school but years of Pen and Paper roleplaying

 

[MaximillionMiles]

Interesting topic. Intelligence is a very fuzzy concept because there are just so many skills you may learn, and it is very possible to be incredibly good at one but not at another. I think this is more of an experience/social thing than a genetic one.

Regarding maths, it's very important to have a solid base. If you miss or have trouble understanding stuff at the beginning, it can snowball into something much worse, so you can go from "doing ok" at maths to "sucking horribly" at maths in a few years if you're not careful. That actually happened to me when I moved to a different country. Maths was taught very differently there and I went from quite good at maths to an utter dunce. Mostly because there were gaps in my knowledge about stuff others had already learned and the questions were different (given no context and focusing on equations).

I still find maths interesting, and I've written a few short stories. And I draw too. It's not impossible to have both skills. They're just very, very different from each other. You have to learn each in their own way. And creativity? That's a whole different can of worms...

 

[Isalan]

I was always fairly good at maths, did it at college (thats UK college, so like end of high school?) and got as far as Calculus before it all got a bit gibberishy.

Of course, then I discovered strip pool in the common room and thats the point where my formal education died. Both a sad and awesome day.