> I don't know what is it about math -- especially when it involves manipulation of symbols as opposed to pictures or lay language -- that turns off so many people.
The biggest turn off about math is the way people are taught math.
Most people are taught math as if it's an infinite set of cold formulas to memorize and regurgitate. Most students in my statistics class didn't know where and when to use the formulas taught in real life; they only knew enough to pass the tests. Students who obtain As in Algebra 2 hardly know where the quadratic formula comes from (and what possibly useful algebraic manipulation could you do if you can't even rederive the quadratic formula?). It's not just math, I've been in a chemistry class where the TA was getting a masters in chemistry and yet she taught everyone in my class a formula so wrong that if interpreted meant that everytime a photon hits an atom, then an electron will be ejected with the same energy and speed as the photon. This is obviously wrong but when I pointed it out, everyone thought I was wrong because "that's not what it says in the professor's notes" (later, the professor corrected their notes). In my physics class, the people who struggled the most are the ones who tried the least to truly grasp where the formulas come from. I don't blame them, it's the way most schools teach.
> build things, and then fill the theoretical holes as needed, motivated by a genuine desire to understand.
I totally agree.
Source:
My experience with tutoring people struggling with math for the past eight years. I used to like math then I got to college where 95% of people don't understand the math they're doing and thus can't be creative with it; this includes the professors who teach math as the rote memorization of formulas. Yeah, call me arrogant, but I have found it to be true in my experience. I strongly believe the inability to rederive or truly grasp where things come from destroys the ability to be creative and leads to a lack of true understanding. But everyone believes they understood the material because they got an A on the exam. I'll stop ranting on this now.
This is exactly my experience! I breezed through math all the way until I got to calculus because I was excellent at rote memorization. Calculus made me realize that I didn't really understand most of what I had learned for the past several years.
Years later, I'm trying to relearn math, but I'm taking the exact opposite approach. No calculator, no rote memorization, just reading about the concepts and thinking about what they mean until I can do the manipulations in my head. When I do practice problems, I don't care so much about the specific numbers, but about my ability to understand what's happening to each part of an equation, what the graph looks like, etc.
The biggest turn off about math is the way people are taught math.
Most people are taught math as if it's an infinite set of cold formulas to memorize and regurgitate. Most students in my statistics class didn't know where and when to use the formulas taught in real life; they only knew enough to pass the tests. Students who obtain As in Algebra 2 hardly know where the quadratic formula comes from (and what possibly useful algebraic manipulation could you do if you can't even rederive the quadratic formula?). It's not just math, I've been in a chemistry class where the TA was getting a masters in chemistry and yet she taught everyone in my class a formula so wrong that if interpreted meant that everytime a photon hits an atom, then an electron will be ejected with the same energy and speed as the photon. This is obviously wrong but when I pointed it out, everyone thought I was wrong because "that's not what it says in the professor's notes" (later, the professor corrected their notes). In my physics class, the people who struggled the most are the ones who tried the least to truly grasp where the formulas come from. I don't blame them, it's the way most schools teach.
> build things, and then fill the theoretical holes as needed, motivated by a genuine desire to understand.
I totally agree.
Source: My experience with tutoring people struggling with math for the past eight years. I used to like math then I got to college where 95% of people don't understand the math they're doing and thus can't be creative with it; this includes the professors who teach math as the rote memorization of formulas. Yeah, call me arrogant, but I have found it to be true in my experience. I strongly believe the inability to rederive or truly grasp where things come from destroys the ability to be creative and leads to a lack of true understanding. But everyone believes they understood the material because they got an A on the exam. I'll stop ranting on this now.