191–200 of 268 posts
Always wanted to try this, but I've got a hangover from my highschool days. I was bad at math, or it was taught very badly, or both. I'm worried I'd need to start from zero, like Algebra 1 and Geometry
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> set her nose to the grindstone Worth calling out the key observation: it takes practice, and lots of it (for most people, anyway) to get good at math. Just reading about it does zilch.
please tell me that how can I get question for practice in math of university level? most of textbook even don't contain answers of practice in the book...
If you search long enough and look for older courses (before all of these online learning platforms like Canvas became popular), you can usually find lots of worked examples. There is no central location to find what you're looking for, but you should be able to find supporting resources.
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It does a little more than zilch. Exercise is important. Reading is also important. If you want to learn fast, you need a balance of both that works for you. Some people will spend months grinding hard problems on their own in a single chapter to make sure they really understand. Some people will read too fast and have to go back because they don't have solid foundations, and only thought they understood. Reading is…
This is just not true. Reading is necessary but hardly about as important. If you are lucky and get a good text, the exercises guide you to "invent" the important parts of the theory. Otherwise its just definitions and theorems, and its up to you to make your own examples to gain an intuition, which to be fair is closer to life outside of a classroom.
The school was then always disappointed by by their performance in mathematics competitions. After all, the other teams were "wasting" their times unimportant reading about algebra, geometry, and combinatorics while our team was "practicing" math with hours of manual long division nightly.
The practice is certainly vital, but it's useless without a good text to guide you. Unless you're lucky and grab a good one on the first go, you'll need to read a few texts to find the good one.
I'd say that reading is as important to learning mathematics as breathing. You'll be a lousy mathematician if you spend all your time focused on your breathing, but you'll be worse one if you skip breathing entirely.
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> sure, but you dont need to understand actual set theory How would you know? You sound like you understand set theory. Ironically, a body needs a rather extensive grounding in the theory and practice of set theory to look at something and think "I don't need to use the tools of set theory here" with deserved confidence. A lot of maths is about having a huge repertoire of tricks that you know won't help solve the pro…
He's saying you don't have to understand set theory to use and understand set notation. In the same way that you don't have to understand number theory and abstract algebra to use and understand numbers and their basic operations (such as +, -, ·, /).
About a year ago my wife and I made the joint decision to get her into college for a bachelor's degree in either English or computer science. Here in Finland, university admissions are based around how well you did on various end of school exams, and she fortunately did quite well on all of them a decade ago - except for math. She bombed math due to health and family problems as a teenager decimating her ability to p…
> set her nose to the grindstone Worth calling out the key observation: it takes practice, and lots of it (for most people, anyway) to get good at math. Just reading about it does zilch.
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> set her nose to the grindstone Worth calling out the key observation: it takes practice, and lots of it (for most people, anyway) to get good at math. Just reading about it does zilch.
OP described a specific type of practice to get good test grades using 'Anki cards' . Standardized tests test for grinding and dedication not expertise or 'getting good'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> set her nose to the grindstone Worth calling out the key observation: it takes practice, and lots of it (for most people, anyway) to get good at math. Just reading about it does zilch.
please tell me that how can I get question for practice in math of university level? most of textbook even don't contain answers of practice in the book...
I may be biased as I am a trained Mathematician, but I always feel when someone says "Math is Hard", that is because they had bad teachers. Math is easy if you build up from fundamentals, not like physics education where you say "but lets delete everything before because it had an oversimplifying assumption", rather if you build your knowledge entirely sequentially from things you know or assume, you build up a toolb…
IMHO when people say 'math is hard' they mean 'it takes more work than other subjects to be good at' - you're either a prodigy or you grind problems until you get the intuition. The easier subjects you can usually talk everyone and yourself into thinking you know them, or perhaps the ratio of memoization to practice is skewed more towards memoization. Maths is practice, practice, practice and then some more practice…
I think the main difference is that practicing language is far more rewarding for most people, than practicing math. They also have way more opportunities to practice it naturally, without even intending to do so.
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> set her nose to the grindstone Worth calling out the key observation: it takes practice, and lots of it (for most people, anyway) to get good at math. Just reading about it does zilch.
yes. learning to doing maths is a bit like learning to play an instrument in that you have to spend lots of times practicing scales or other simple stuff (doing the exercises) before you can really be creative on it. or like learning to write - you got to spend lots of time practicing and memorizing your letters before you can start getting to words and sentences and novels.
About a year ago my wife and I made the joint decision to get her into college for a bachelor's degree in either English or computer science. Here in Finland, university admissions are based around how well you did on various end of school exams, and she fortunately did quite well on all of them a decade ago - except for math. She bombed math due to health and family problems as a teenager decimating her ability to p…
I would love to know more about the study process you followed and resources because my wife is in a very similar situation, but here in Norway where they require her Math R1+R2. Great story, and congratulations!