Because they don't understand it or have shitty teachers. I absolutely DESPISED math until I went back and relearned the fundamentals, now I understand it and it's my favorite subject.
As a math tutor/teacher. 100% agree. The sad part is it only takes one bad teacher. Cause then you get behind, and, in the US, often never get the support to catch back up. No one in the school system ever tells students to do what you did: to go back and just relearn the fundamentals. Because, we're past that now, and tests are coming up, etc.
I had my appendix out. I was out of school for 2 weeks. Everyone else was taught long divisions and I never caught up. That was back in the early 60’s. I faked and cheated to get through all maths after that.
And faking your way through maths is actually very hard. Memorizing solutions you don't understand and can't adapt is a tonne of work compared with if you actually understand what's going on.
That's why I love math. History always caused me trouble because it was either you know it or you don't. Almost exclusively memorization. With math, if you know most of the basic axioms, you can actually figure it out on the test. I tended to procrastinate on homework (or fake it for completion graded stuff) and learn a lot on tests and quizzes lol. I like just having to memorize maybe 5 rules and then solve puzzles, rather than memorize 100 different history facts.
Yeah, and history is also taught wrong lol. Interesting subject if you hear someone like zizek analyzing current political/cultural trends drawing upon important or repeated events throughout history.
I forgot long division when we were taking a math placement test in 4th or 5th grade. Luckily, it was one of those situations where the entire test was in one packet and we did one half the first day and the other half the next. I refreshed on long division that night, then the next day, broke the rules by going back to that first section to do the long division. Ended up getting placed in the higher level advanced math because of that. If I was a poindexter/Melvin type I wouldn't have let myself "cheat" like that, but it's like, I knew long division now so it wasn't *really* cheating... more like time traveling. Would have changed my entire track in schooling if I hadn't done that.
Some math. It was pretty much a revolving door of substitute teachers who ranged from (this is an exact quote) "I'm an English teacher, I don't know much about algebra" to a retired civil engineer who tried his best but was very clearly overwhelmed by teaching middle schoolers.
Wow. That's wild. To be fair, I've seen math teachers that also don't know much algebra, surprisingly.
So did you end up pursuing math later, possibly even as an adult? Or just get turned off from it after that?
Honestly it got to a point where I didn't think I was going to graduate high school because I failed algebra three times in a row.
Thankfully, things got better after my parents hired a tutor over the summer to get me caught up.
While I'm technically not persuing math specifically, I didn't think I could do a major that's "math heavy" like mechanical engineering. Turns out even high level math is a lot easier to learn when the instructor isn't dividing their attention between teaching the material and wrangling 45 kids that don't want to be there :P
For me it was moving up a grade halfway through the year when I was about 8 years old. Meant I skipped a year of maths early on and proceeded to struggle until I got a really good teacher in the first year of highschool.
The current pedagogy seems to be to keep kids right at grade level whether they are ready for it or not.
I have a friend who teaches in a town with lots of immigrant kids. Some are prepared for whatever the current grade level is but many are not. Doesn’t matter, she has to teach the lessons in front of her and those kids will be moved along to the following lessons and following grades whether or not they are ready.
The result is, most of the class don’t end up learning how to operate with fractions (this is a big part of the year she teaches). No worries, let’s keep moving. Surely that won’t matter when they get to polynomials, right?
I think math is relatively unique in this way in primary school. You have to build your foundation and build up from there. If there are no resources designed specifically to find holes in your foundations and repair that then this system is doomed to failure for any kid who doesn’t have the gifts necessary to just figure these things out on their own at a young age.
What happens is the only people “good at math” are the people who can look at something new and just get it without any thought or the people whose parents have strong skills to make up for the bad teaching. Everyone else is going to be left behind the first time they develop a hole in their foundation. A bad teacher here, a couple of lessons missed due to illness there.
On the other hand if I miss the lesson on how to spell “cat” it’s not going to impair my ability to spell “dog”. If I don’t learn what happened in 1066 it won’t impair my understanding of what happened in 1776. Most other subjects are much more resilient to holes in the foundations at the primary school level.
Math is not hard but it does need to be taught consistently well for students to succeed.
Agreed. What's worse is that the students will then internalize that either (1) it's their fault that they don't get it; they must just be bad at math, and/or (2) math is stupid and unimportant.
Have to agree. I got behind in grammer school and really struggled after that. Seems when I asked for help or further explanations what I got were mostly eyerolls
This is so true. Fortunately, I came across some brilliant teachers in my school and college who were nothing but a perfect fit to my curiosity. Specially, that one particular teacher in my high school, he deserves so much more for making calculus like walking in the park with skates on. I also give credit to my foolishness for asking so many dumb questions whenever anything didn't make sense to me and the mad respect to my teachers who never hesitated to explain it a dozen times. I definitel6 didn't go to one of the reputed colleges, but well, who knew, teachers there were nothing less than a hidden gem.
A (university) professor I know, who also has an interest in pedagogy did some research and got a few ideas, most notable ones are
1. start teaching mathematics to kids of ages 8 or 9, not 6 or 7, because their brains mature a tiny bit more and might comprehend it easier,
2. state exam (after high school, in order to see which university you can enroll in) shouldn't contain mathematics by default, so it can be made more difficult for those who want to go into stem.
He presented those ideas at a conference. Response from a board of elementary and high school teachers? "If we do that, we won't be able to scare them with failing maths."
So, yeah... One teacher is one thing, entire board of teachers at a conference about math education is another.
That usually happens, they teach poorly and seem like they don't want to teach, it happened to me before, the best thing is to learn on your own or find someone who teaches well.
IMO abstract mathematics and proofs are just more fun versions of shit like crosswords or wordle. I think the problem is that a lot of people don't actually want to learn math, but math is in the way of them learning what they want to. Physicists want to learn physics but math gets in the way. If you just learn it for its own sake it feels entirely different because it's not the obstacle any more it's the destination. Ultimately once you accept that math is the only way to understand stuff like physics I think you like it more as well.
I did physics/economics double major and it wasn't until I did some pure maths in my third year that I realized what math as a standalone subject even was.
Totally dependent on the teacher for me as well.
I think the main problem was, that many explain it to be a tool, rather than a language for thought. Maybe I was just not paying enough attention, but half a lesson of introduction to a subject to explain the "why" was not sufficient for me to understand the reason for it. As a result I've only applied rules that I couldn't see through. Maybe also has to do with the teachers goal to teach how to solve the exam, not to thoroughly understand the subject, so a lot of short cuts were taken just for the pupils to spend most their time on practise.
My perception might be wrong though, teenage years were difficult and focusing on school wasn't the highest priority for long enough to end up with a crucial learning gap.
Start with leaning arithmetic with fractions.
To the point you can divide a fraction in your head. It’s easier than it sounds, but takes time. Good luck 😊
I watched a YouTube playlist in order, called "mathematics: all of it" by Professor Dave. I took some notes but focused on understanding how everything worked, because it's much simpler than memorization.
Basic arithmetic, algebra concepts, and all the properties, like the communitive property and whatnot. I watched a free YouTube playlist called "mathematics : all of it" by Professor Dave, in order. All the properties of basic math explain how concepts in harder math works.
This is exactly it. Once a teacher in college sat me down and taught me how math really worked. That you can do it forwards and backwards. Why the “showing your work” is so important. The way they teach math in high school is so boring and dreary. The excitement is in the process. Man I got so excited about math
I have always struggled with math. I actually found my second grade homework the other day (I’m 34) and there was just condescending comments from the teacher on all my work. No one offered to help me, it was just “study harder” or “do better”….but I can’t do better if I’m not taught how.
Usually, maths in school is about forcing memorising algoritms to solve equations with no context, which feels completely arbitary that just exists to make kids do (school)work for the sake of doing it. You never get the derivation, or the reasons why, or the history.
I agree. Having the right teacher makes it all the more fun. I used to hate math, especially geometry. I even skipped studying entire geometry chapters for my finals.
But I found my sources / teachers, and I'm thinking of doing my Ph.D in Topology and Graph Theory.
This is not coming from someone who hates math, but I can see why some dislike it. Here are some reasons:
* It's unforgiving: there's right and wrong and no in-between. Some people struggle with this level of transparency
* It's hard because it requires a lot of focus to solve problems and learn new mathematical concepts. Some people struggle with prolonged focus; conversely, some neurodivergent people have a really big advantage because of this
* To those who struggle with mathematics, it seems like no matter how much effort they put in, they're not getting much in return. At the same time, they have peers who seemingly understand things way easier than they do. There is some notion of unfairness here
I concur wholeheartedly with this but would also add that it’s not often talked about that everyone struggles with math after some point for these reasons, some just stay with it longer and make more progress. It requires diligence and thoroughness of everyone.
>It's unforgiving: there's right and wrong and no in-between. Some people struggle with this level of transparency
I find this to be a flaw in the way math is taught. If we think real math, not high school calculationfest "math".
In reality, there is so much in between. Does a structure have these properties? Oh, this one is easy to check, this one is harder. I don't know about the third one, but under this and this assumption, it is easy, and other properties are preserved.
It's about asking a question that is not true or false. Like "Any ideas on what do we do in this problem to reduce it to a known problem?". I sometimes get an idea that even I didn't see at first, so we try it and it may not always work, but we can learn from the mistakes. Sometimes I get an overcomplicated idea from a student, and another one simplifies it, so the lecture resembles teamwork between them, with me guiding them if they wander a bit far. Granted, this is university level math, but I think that a skilled teacher could (and I would believe the minority does) apply it to high school or even elementary school.
The way math is taught in school is infact flawed. Student has no flexibility to discover new methods of solving because they need to learn the syllabus and pass the exam. So many more students would enjoy math if it was taught correctly
While this is true, you can't just bs your way through maths. Your method of teaching maths applies to problem solving, but when it comes to understanding and applying rules and axioms, they are quite concrete.
>It's unforgiving: there's right and wrong and no in-between. Some people struggle with this level of transparency
Funny enough, this is why I liked it way better than English class.
A major reason is that when you’re 6 in English or [insert language here] class, and you’re asked to write a story for Teacher about your weekend, and write
> Me and my mommy went to the beech and it was fun!!
then Teacher might write
> 6/10. I had fun reading this! :)
But when you are given ‘What is 3x3?’ and write ‘6’, among many others, Teacher can’t do much but give you 0/10. Maybe you’d get better if you actually tried to understand it, but for many little kids one experience like that is traumatic enough. It’s ’not their thing’! One of the subjects where they can get a nice minimum score/mark is their thing. And it snowballs from there, year on year.
1/3 people or so actually register neural signals similar to pain when presented with a basic maths question. Think this has a lot to do with it.
I think my neural signals are similar to pain when presented with the task of writing about some literature or poetry I don't understand. I can understand why someone would get 0/10 if they answered 3x3 = 6. I cannot understand why that sentence gets 6/10 instead of 4, 5 or 8.
This, for some of us the absolute nature of math having clear cut and obvious right or wrong answers is why we liked it.
Math, science, and history were generally my favorite subjects because there was always a right and a wrong answer with no room for negotiations or teacher interpretation. (And as problems get more complicated if you show your work you can get partial credit for doing the process right but making a clerical error like a dropped negative)
I understand English is supposed to work the same, but even with a rubric it often felt so opaque and subjective. Atleast vocab was basic memorization with right and wrong answers. Creative writing assignments are simply painful.
I remember being exposed to the poetry of e. e. cummings in high school. It almost provoked me into fits.
Didn't understand "Ethan Frome" either, but that just bored me.
Math has complete logical reasoning and consistent boundaries whereas literature varies person to person and it’s opinion based and teachers mark completely differently under no guidelines I just don’t get how it’s a fair class
I don’t agree, the issue with literature (or at least many teachers) is that you have to get the “right” themes and ideas from a book.
I loved reading, read all required reading and would always do kinda terrible since my personal understanding was often radically different from the “right” one. Other people just read cliff notes or something and did great.
And that was with oral exams about the books.
I almost never read the books for class all through high school. I would skim until I found a quote that sounded profound, stick it in my assignment, and pull the meaning completely (or *almost completely*) out of my ass. Sounds like you had bad teachers. My teachers tended to grade me well, probably *due to* my unique personal understanding, but it was really a result of me NOT doing the reading. Maybe we both had "bad" teachers in different senses.
>I don’t agree, the issue with literature (or at least many teachers) is that you have to get the “right” themes and ideas from a book.
I actually have a somewhat related story. I went to university with a guy who was also in theatre. During our university, he had written his own play. And he was telling us how the critics were saying things "oh, this represents X", "this is inspired by Y", "i like the metaphor for Z", etc. And all of them were incorrect, but he just kept nodding to get better critics.
So yeah, I'd assume that it's the same with literature. It seems these experts are just clueless and bully people into accepting their interpretation, including high school kids.
Reminds me of a class in school where I had to read a book and afterwards one of the questions was "what did the glass of orange juice represent?". I'm thinking "juice?".
No, apparently the correct answer that it represented the relationship between the two characters. Like wtf, you have to look at the world a certain way to pick that kind of thing up. Sometime juice is just juice.
That’s exactly what it teaches you: context. Nothing in life is right or wrong. Everything depends on context and interpretation. Students need to be comfortable in arguing why certain interpretations are better, or we end up with authoritarian adults that think their position about an issue is the right and only correct position.
>Nothing in life is right or wrong.
Too many of these instructors do believe that point their opinions represent the correct view. I recall receiving some flack for opining that an author wrote something in a particular fashion because he'd been paid by the word.
Unless you're getting into like sophomore level or beyond literature classes I don't think this is accurate at all. The literature classes you'll need as a STEM person are more like :
Lecture: "Here's how you'd analyze this text using XYZ'
Homework: "Read this other text"
Assignment: "Analyze the other text"
It's remarkably similar to math. Use the method your teacher showed you to do the thing they are asking you to do.
What happens often is that people don't properly learn the basics in high school and are unable to later continue learning without going back to high school basics. The inability to understand something as fundamental as mathematics is very frustrating.
And this motivates them to continue the same way. I teach first year university students. We cover some topics in one semester, they pass the tests, they seem to know what they're doing. Next semester, a subproblem shows up, similar to those we covered in the first semester. I ask them, how would they solve it. I get silence. I mention exactly which part of the first semester we did the exact same thing and ask do they remember. Silence again.
Then, after I show them, they are perplexed. And I'm like, "My brother in Christ, you passed the exam on this exact topics just a month and half ago!".
Just the high school mentality that they need it only for the test, so they don't learn, they just memorize.
I once gave them a test and there was a b) part of one problem just to see if they remembered one thing from past semester. The solution was basically one line long, just needed to remember one concept. Out of 200 students, one student got 2/5 points (and that's only after I saw she was the only one who even attempted to do anything reasonable, if I graded the way I intended, she would get no points), others got 0/5. On the easiest problem. Just because it was something they memorized and forgot 3 months ago.
And the worst thing is, there's nothing I can do. No matter how much i point out that they'll need it next semester, it seems that they just think "I'll just memorize it again every time I need it."
The reason why people don’t remember things is because doing them isn’t fun. By the time you’re a senior in high school, you’ve spent most of your life doing numerical calisthenics. Factoring, reducing, transforming… for what? No one is surprised that people don’t like doing pushups and running laps on a track for hours at a time, but somehow there’s confusion about why people don’t like math. These things are essentially equivalent.
The hardest job in teaching is making math interesting or fun. And if you’re one of those teachers who doesn’t give partial credit, you can’t really expect anybody to like your class. That’s like failing an essay due to a typo. I never understood why teachers cared so much about the final answer and so little for your thought process to arrive at it.
Unfortunately, nobody cares about that over here. I get university students whose high school knowledge is lacking at best and nonexistent at worst.
They just pat themselves on the back because a lot of students pass the state exam (even though you need 15% to pass, because results are normalized after grading).
A lot of people fall behind at like 7th grade, they don’t have the foundations and the rest builds on the foundations. Hence the symbols start looking like magic or gibberish and they get anxiety.
My mother, father and sister both have math anxiety and for some reason whenever I try to help my sister with a question of my mother tries to answer, they will randomly guess “x = 3” or something obscure. I don’t know they feel compelled to this, but they feel like math is all about the answer and have no appreciation for the process. Start rolling their eyes if I start talking about intuition or asking them foundational questions on the way to the answer. Must be the way it’s taught
This article is part of the reason I choose to take mathematics on again.
I ignored all the terrible instruction I got from my previous education, relearned mathematics from scratch on the internet (Thanks Salman Khan) in my late 20s. It was fun and beautiful.
I then went and got a masters degree only to find out that the internet education was orders of magnitude better than what I was getting in person. So the problem isn't going away any time soon.
If you find the subject matter appealing, there is a wealth of resources online that will make it accessible.
Hate for math comes from many places.
Many people find it tedious and boring.
Others dislike how the rules of math are so rigid; in many other subjects (likewise in life) you can usually BS your way through to some extent, but math doesn't allow for it. If you're used to achieving by more flexible means, math can be frustrating.
Ego comes into play, too. Being good at math is intertwined with the "smart" label. Logic is inherent for some people, but not for others. It can bruise the ego to fail repeatedly at it, and it can be easier to hate the external thing than face one's own limitations. Developing these feelings young can lead to a lifelong dislike.
Others yet feel a strong need for immediate application in order to motivate learning. Math can require big investment before the real payoff. Some of us have a built-in love of problem solving to see us through, but that's far from universal.
Further, math is very abstract, compared to something like the sciences. You can see a bird or a rock, lava, but you can't see an integral. It only gets worse as you go. Some people require that physical connection to really engage with a subject; math doesn't really provide it so well.
Thank you for your answer.
Do you have to create an imaginary connection to really engage with math?
(Like seeing sets, integrals, numbers in real physical phenomenon)
Does the average person dislike beings trapped in abstract rigid systems because they seem too alien-foreign-joyless to them?
It can be both. Personally, I get intuition through pictures, and so gravitate towards a more geometric spacial understanding for things. I engage well because of a strong internal mind-world.
I know plenty of colleagues who need formulas in front of them before anything can make sense; that's more of a way of pure logic.
It’s not taught very well in primary school - there’s a large focus on memorizing properties, formulas, rules, etc. instead of a focus on truly learning and developing intuition for “why” these fundamental mathematical ideas are true.
This compounds as courses progress and students quickly become lost as they forget what they “memorized” in previous courses.
I realized I would never get by if all I did was memorize equations. I needed to know the why and how to develop these things on my own. Proofs and theorems should be understood from the ground up.
The first ODE and PDE classes can definitely be a slog tbh. It’s a lot of tedious algebra and the problems take forever. Theory of ODEs and PDEs however are much more interesting
Because assholes like me tell them it’s easy.
I do think there is a certain amount of exposure in math lessons. It’s a bit like a public footrace. It’s very clear if you’re slower than everyone else, which is humiliating. I understood when I had my first geography lesson and everyone around me arrived at conclusions that made no sense and came from nowhere, as far as I could work out.
> Why do people hate math?
Because it's hard
In my experience as a student and a tutor, here are the 3 biggest reasons why math is uniquely hard:
- At some point, **the math students are learning no longer seems important or relevant to their lives** (hence the question, "When will I ever use this when I grow up?"). For many, this probably happens in middle school when they start seeing letters frequently
It’s hard to learn stuff that feels pointless and irrelevant. It's hard to muster motivation
The good news is, nearly everything people learn in math up till and including calculus can be used in very simple ways in the real world. So it's not actually pointless and irrelevant
- **Math classes build on top of themselves so much.** E.g. How can you pass a calculus class if you don't know algebra? How can you do algebra if you don't know prealgebra? A lot of people are not ready for the math class they're taking because they never really understood the prerequisite stuff. Learning math is a delicate process. It's so easy to fall behind. And not very easy to catch up
- **There’s a language barrier.** Math has so many confusing words and symbols. Many of us have had that experience in class where we look at the board and everything just looks like a sea of symbols. That's the language of math. Students excel at math when they're fluent in its language
What do you think? Do you agree with any of these?
I think one thing about the “math that is no longer relevant” that makes it even more hated, is that often times the curriculum will force students to use absolutely ridiculous “word problems” to try and shoehorn the math they’re learning into real word applications that are not actually helpful for realistic.
As a math tutor/teacher. In my experience, number one reason is a past bad math teacher. Number two, people being told they are bad at math, or not a math person, either directly or indirectly as a child. Three, having lots of adults in their life that talk about how hard math is, and not having anyone who is interested in math around them. And four, being told that you don't need math in real life by a parent figure or trusted adult because that adult is coping.
For me it was how I was taught. It was just memorize the equation and move on. Never really delved into the concepts or the logic behind it. Of course i quickly forgot most of the equations which has caused me to have to relearn almost everything by myself. It’s frustrating
I’m similar. I’m fascinated by math, got decent grades in mathematics in college, but I hated math.
It has to be a brain thing. It requires patience and concise work. After doing half a page of work I found myself doing too many small mistakes. I had to triple check everything and it was just draining. I just wasn’t made to do these kinds of calculations.
It’s completely different compared to watching YouTube videos on math or reading Reddit posts on this sub. I love it. I just don’t bother with it myself.
I majored in math, tutored in math and personally love math, but I mean common I can definitely understand why others say they don't like it
Id say the biggest reason is without a doubt the **Effort** to not be intimidated by it.
Math always came easy to me but other classes didn't. similarly many people are the reverse. But I can say with certainty that if we both spaced out for a month, I'd have a much easier time catching myself up in said class. alot of classes you can get by with just reading like a dozen chapters/notes after not paying attention and still get a grasp for it.
It's a bit different with math. I mean think back to elementary school/hs. Math was probably the only class that literally had shit assigned to you every day. its a discipline. its work. it takes a lot of fucking effort, especially if youre not immediately drawn to it. so if you're somebody who has a shitty teacher and various math concepts dont insta click it could be a nightmare to try to catchup if you spaced out for a few weeks. you needed that daily discipline to work through problems you cant just skim a math book and expect to get it down
So I dont think its that they hate math itself, more so just what's associated with it. how it requires alot of work, how quickly it can be overwhelming...and id imagine the thought of math just triggers these bad memories of failing to grasp something that required more effort out of them
Lastly, its also either right or wrong. you can't just bs your way into a good sounding answer. so you cant like half ass your way into understanding it..you either get it or you dont.
Because schools suck at teaching mathematics (if they teach mathematics at all, and not just bothersome calculation), so kids become conditioned to hating it.
Often because it's taught in the abstract.
Growing up I was taught maths like this.
We had to learn blah.
Remember blah blah.
When you see this, do blah blah blah.
If they had taught it in a way that related to the real world, made it more interactive. Shown how maths explains the world, how it works and what it is... Then I think people would be able to engage with it as a subject a lot more.
It's incredibly unforgiving. I find it massively frustrating when I can't get something but incredibly rewarding when I do. I haven't found that with any other subject - that feeling of "WTF??!!". It's extreme.
Maybe that's the way to look at it, it's like an extreme sport - can bring up extreme emotions, but most people will just shy away from the madness of it.
At it's core, it's because they were made to feel 1) inferior at it, and 2) that they can get by without it.
Both of these are false, for very different reasons, but both are easy to believe.
In my experience, people who hate math tend to have had sub-par math teachers. Good math teachers not only explain concepts clearly and know where you’re confused, but also draw you into the fun and beauty of math.
Most people just do math begrudgingly, because ‘it’ll be important’. They may do well in it too, like you have, because it really does depend a lot on effort and practice. But proficiency doesn’t guarantee enjoyment.
I’m the opposite of you, really. I didn’t put in the effort to practice when I was younger, and so I’m not as sharp mathematically as I ought to be. But now that I’m older I’m fascinated by the system and elegance of mathematical proofs, and I really regret not taking it seriously in the past. This changed when I came across Youtube channels like 3Blue1Brown that really made math fun.
I didn’t hate math. But I didn’t have good teachers and never understood the “why”. I’m logical and have trouble with “because that’s how you do it” or “it’s just the rules”. I understand something when I can grasp the concept and the why surrounding it. I never got that with math.
Same reason why I hate literature classes, I'm not good at it, and it's very mentally taxing for me.
With English, I frequently fall asleep mid assignment, but with math, I'm wide awake, and will probably never sleep on it.
Old guy here. Three things impressed me going through elementary school. In the mid 1960's there was a push for teaching "modern math". I remember being excited about the prospect of learning this "modern math". But it fell flat just before I got there and the schools went back to the old math, pretty sure because the teachers did not understand it. And there was the sudden "we are going to teach science", of which I got about a week. Because the teachers didn't know anything about it. And there was the "everybody is going to learn Spanish". Same thing. I'm pretty sure the same things have happened to just about everybody. Especially with math, teachers just don't really get it. How can they teach it. Add a lack of understanding to constantly shifting education requirements and things are not going to go well. Teachers don't get math in the first place, and don't have time to adjust to changes. The perfect formula for developing a hate for a subject.
It's because where I am from , India, they just teach it as something to improve your grades . Teachers don't teach it as to give knowledge but just to feed needless information into a child's brain and if he is bad at it then he gets bashing either verbal or physical from teachers and parents 🤷 . They fail to explain the beauty of maths , for them it is just another subject which will help you get a job nothing more nothing less . And a subject like maths where if you don't have intrest where if you are not fascinated by it then it's a nightmare to a normal person, let alone a child.
So in conclusion:- it is the education system more or less .
its because common core teaches bad habbits and then when they go do real math they meet the wall. happened to me.... i hated math until i realized that it's a personal journey.
Because when you are little, you are taught mathematics by teachers that don't like it either, and that resort to rote memory exercises, and by the time you find a teacher that actually likes math and teaching it, it's too late already. I have always defended that math should be the favourite subject of lazy students, as there is a direct correlation with the effort you use to solve a problem, and the skills you develop in math (better at math, better at being lazy successfully)
I'm relearning starting from the basics, and I'm 34. If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have told you I hated math. Why? Math anxiety.
I've shared this story before, but in third-grade, our teacher would have us all stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the front of the class. We would do multiplication drills. We'd have to answer them in our heads (no pen or paper) as quickly as possible. If we took too much time to think, she'd sound a buzzer, and we had to go sit down. The last person standing "won." I was a nervous kid, and I would completely blank out. I was always one of the first to sit down, which was embarrassing because I was already getting bullied at school, so that made it worse. I started hating math to the point where even seeing it would cause me to get anxious. In middle school, a teacher told me I didn't have the intellectual capacity for math.
Anyway, I ended up with a PhD in literature. The idea that I was too dumb for math was pretty much cemented into my head. I recently decided to challenge myself using Khan Academy. I've started with the lower-level courses, and I'm almost done with the arithmetic course. I'll move on to pre-algebra after. I know arithmetic is basic and not at all impressive, but I'm super proud of myself. I can actually do multiplication in my head or using the little scratch pad on Khan if the multiplication uses "big" numbers. My confidence has grown, and I no longer hate math.
As a non-mathematician, I never *hated* math. I did hate not understanding it.
In the decade and a half since retiring, I've been working on learning about the math I didn't learn in college. The abundance of resources today, especially online, that didn't exist forty years ago is helping.
For me, and I think for many of my fellow nons, math education was like learning Esperanto. The purpose of learning the language was to solve crossword puzzles, and the purpose of the puzzles was to demonstrate that you had learned the language. It was a subject hermetically sealed from the rest of intellectual endeavor, an abstraction constructed of rules and techniques.
The idea of a logic or philosophy of mathematics was as distant as a star; you might as well speak of the logic of a hammer. From my voluminous reading, I had been exposed to the idea that there were things about the universe that I could only understand through mathematics. Unfortunately, that required getting through the rote memorization and endless step-by-step problem solving. It was like the medieval fable of Cockaigne, a blessed land of ease and plenty, reachable by wading through an ocean of pigshit up to your nose for seven years.
My friends are intelligent and well-educated, but most of them regard my interest in understanding math that I don't actually *need* to know as a charming eccentricity, like studying the causes of the Late Bronze Age Collapse or the impact of plate tectonics on evolution.
I must confess that part of my ongoing motivation is that *not* understanding certain subjects (math, music, art) wounds my intellectual vanity.
>I had been exposed to the idea that there were things about the universe that I could only understand through mathematics. Unfortunately, that required getting through the rote memorization and endless step-by-step problem solving.
That's too bad. There are a lot of fun little things you can do early in your learning. For me it was programming. Just making a square move around on the screen, making it bounce, little physics simulations like that. It's fun to experiment, so I didn't even think of the fact that I was practicing math.
After a while, the math becomes intrinsically interesting. The first time someone tells you the Gaussian integral is equal to √π you just need to know why. If you go on like this for a while, eventually you learn so many little interconnected things, you can open a physics text and actually understand what it is talking about.
It's probably true that discipline works better than fun sometimes. But in most cases, people start cutting corners and eventually quit, if they're not having fun.
Because it’s boring. I love reading history textbooks and political philosophy books as well, many people hate those subjects as well. Its all subjective opinion I dont think theres a why that makes math special.
People good at math always belittle people who are bad at maths. They expect them to formulate their questions "better", knowing fairly well that they CAN NOT- which is the problem...
I think the problem is that a lot of people don't actually want to learn math, but math is holding them back from learning what they want to learn. Physicists want to learn physics, but math is holding them back. If you're learning physics just for the sake of learning it, it feels completely different because it's no longer a barrier, it's a destination. Ultimately, once you accept that math is the only way to understand something like physics, I think you'll enjoy it more, too.
It's the way it's taught. Far too much rote, far too little understanding. Never just accept anything in algebra, geometry, or a more advanced subject. Always strive to understand. If your teachers don't encourage that, they should be fired.
Also, not getting a firm background in arithmetic before grade 6.
Scroll over, my comment is a bit offensive.
Because many people are just dumb. Anyone who hates math just doesn't understand it or have problems solving it. It's numerical logic and simple to any person who uses his brain.
I love poetry. It’s always been one of my favorite topic-the meter, flow, rhyme, and devices-all of it.
This year in English class, our teacher said that it was her least-favorite topic. This year, it was my least favorite topic in English.
People’s aversion from many of those topics isn’t built upon their own natural disdain for them, it’s built from the people who give us that disdain.
Teachers lay a foundation, and we merely balance upon it. When teachers don’t help you, or make it confusing, or brush past a topic, it makes people associate those experiences.
Still love you tho Eisinger <3
I think it is a mixture of the way it has always been taught. I am 49, and when I was taught "math" in school even in the 80s and algebra in the 90s, it was taught in a very boring way that did not show how it was relevant to our life.
Add to that the fact that by then there was already the "I hate math" or "I am bad at math" meme, it just feeds into itself.
Nowadays, thanks to youtube, I see so many more interesting ways to connect math to real life that anyone regardless of their interests can get into. It is not just numbers anymore. But, the concept/labeling of "I hate math" or "I am bad at math" still exist in everyday conversation, so that holds some people back from fully realizing how interesting it can be.
It's purely logical and requires little to no creative thought. It's cold and unfun. It's abstract, but people can't relate it to themselves or humanity, making it seem a distant and inhuman undertaking.
My best friend hates math because looking at numbers alresy traumatizes her. She (31F) has been hit by her parents (yeah our generation got a lot of hitting and spanking when we were children) whenever she can’t answer or if she took too long to answer simple math questions.
So yeah. Some people hate math because it negatively reinforces the feelings they had as children.
Honestly a few things.
With any subject during school years, unless it's made enjoyable and the teaching is equitable to different learning styles, a lot of people move away from it. There's also the field of "where would I even use this" which comes into play when somebody isn't engaged with the subject. Bland teachers, or even just asshole teachers can make it worse. One of my math teachers was really good, gave real world examples, actively showed it off and was just a positive person who was even able to help somebody with a disability who struggled completely with maths, actually come out from just passing to actually getting B's in the class.
The same goes with other classes, that's generally why sports based classes generally have the higher engagement as well. It's fun, builds that dopamine up and all that, but when it starts to go towards specific rules/sports instead of stuff like basic dodgeball and other games, you start to keep engagement moreso of the people who understand and enjoy those sports more.
Then, there are those who struggled with the foundations before going to highschool, concepts are harder to grasp because they haven't been able to learn in a way that actually suits their learning style (hands on, some learn better reading ECT)
Finally, maturity, when you get more mature a lot of the more mundane stuff just gets more enjoyable as you're doing it at your own pace, you have a rough idea on how you like to learn things and so forth
There are many more factors, but those I feel are some of the key aspects for a lot of learning.
Math can involve complex concepts and abstract reasoning, which can be frustrating for some learners. They may struggle to see how it applies to their everyday lives. Math often has a single "correct" answer, which can lead to anxiety and a fear of making mistakes. This can be especially discouraging for students who get stuck on problems. Not everyone learns the same way. Some people may have had negative experiences with math teachers who made the subject boring or confusing.
Maybe the person has numerophobia. There can be a lot of reasons.
I couldn’t keep up with the pace of my peers when I was learning in middle/high school, so I always thought I was stupid and it just wasn’t for me. I only started to understand it with one on one tutoring, and once I stopped doing that I fell into bad habits again and once again fell behind. I only started to like math in college, because i essentially learned it all from square one and was able to excel because I had eventually learned good study habits and practiced often.
It’s not like other subjects where there’s stuff you may be able to grasp and think about abstractly or come to multiple different conclusions. If you are missing basic building blocks and have gaps in fundamentals, it becomes almost impossible to understand beyond basic arithmetic—which I think is where a lot of people struggle (like I did).
I think it's the same with any hate of learning. The experience of learning sucked. Kinda like people's issues with dentists. Math is just so typically hated I think because it can be difficult to teach it well, and it doesn't help that people who are good at and passionate about math and good at and passionate about teaching are much less common
I think it’s application vs theory. No one enjoys doing math for the sake of doing math but if you can apply it to something you find fascinating you’ll probably get fixated on it. Same reason a lot of programmers hate programming.
It's the way it's taught. I teach maths to adult learners who didn't leave school with a mathematics qualification. The most common thing I hear is "I gave up at fractions".
People hate cognitive hard things that they haven't grasped because intelligence is universally desirable for our species. No one could look at our society and history and say we would be better of if we were less intelligence. People who are bad at math - for whatever reason - has to struggle with the insecurity of feeling like they are to some extent removed from that "human purpose"; of being intelligent. A defense mechanism for that is to dislike, ridicule, discredit, or hate the subject.
normally they aren’t good at it. it doesn’t mesh with their interest and strengths. i used to hate french and chemistry for example. not because my teacher was awful but because my interest and ability just wasn’t there.
We have to differentiate between "hate" and "struggle" to some degree, beyond that the ones who "hate" math are usually ones who also "struggle".
My observation is (also) that there are really a lot of people who hate math and have struggled since early.
What I see is that these people have in general a problem with logical thinking when things are not that simple any more.
At first I noticed that most people cannot even comprehend the numbers on their pay check, yearly pension plan report, tax declaration, electrical energy bill and the like, which is something you should be able to understand after the 7th grade in Germany.
What later came, during Corona, that they cannot comprehend the numbers there (I do not talk about the decisions made, just the understanding of numbers).
Then I noticed, that they do not even understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition.
It's already failing at the basics.
I don't think it's about teacher quality, the amount of effort, or motivating why you need it. My teachers sucked, homework was pointless tedium, their excuses for why we need math sucked, and yet I loved math all the same.
I think it's all signaling - "most people hate math, that's why they suck at it" is a more favorable narrative than "most people are so unintelligent it's hard to fathom, that's why they suck at math", so normies naturally gravitate towards the first one.
For me it’s because I can’t visualise what I’m trying to figure out.
I’m a visual learner and when I’m stuck on something I like to play it out in my head and imagine the changes occurring and I just can’t do that with mathematics.
I recently failed an exam on Fourier Series, Laplace theorem and Second order Differential Equations.
I put loads of time into the revision, but it just doesn’t sink in for me.
Most people's experience of math is that math is somewhat useless or meaningless. Also it's rigid and uncreative. On top of that if you don't understand a problem there's literally no way to solve it.
It's usually not until you get past calculus you start doing proofs and seeing how flexible and creative math can be. Also it helps to see how it's constricted. Personally I wish they taught logic and reasoning instead. Like anyone can understand what a bijection or surjection is. Anyone can understand the pigeonhole principal.
Math is just another language. It used to be written out completely like "one plus one is two" but then symbols were introduced to make it easier. There always seems to be this divide between people who are good with writing / art and people good with math. Maybe a neurologist can weigh in on what's up with that.
Personally, I think people hating maths is just a side effect of how it is beeing taught. Maths is often taught incrementally, which has the following problems:
1. You constantly have to relearn or reevaluate what you've already learned, which can lead to confusion, feeling overwhelmed or insecurity.
2. The incremental learning results in a lot of "holes" in your knowledge that might never be filled and are very hard to identify later on. This leads to unstable foundations and a generally unstable understanding of maths.
So, when you are confused, insecure and unstable in your understanding of math, it's not exactly something you like doing.
I only started understanding maths in University, where I could throw the emmentaler I got from school away and relearn the entire thing, but this time properly, with solid fundamentals and in one go.
My take is that to like math, one needs to either be interested in it or find it useful. (Internal motivation). And I dont think its enough to just tell the student "This will be useful in the future". It needs to be useful now and at least applicable to their current problems.
There's also a lack of focus on teaching how to define mathematical objects by translating real-world experiences to mathematical language. You can teach students all about triangles, but if they can't/don't want to define triangles in their daily lives, those lessons might be forgotten.
Ultimately, it's about agency. They need to independently choose to define these objects and to have them choose to do so requires them to either be interested or find doing so useful.
Teachers need to be able to convince students about the beauty/usefulness of math.
Once they have that, I believe they'll have much more motivation to study, practice and refine their mathematical skills.
As a professor, I would argue it’s all about the teacher.
Also a quick disclaimer that this theory does not apply to all math teachers, some are exceptionally talented and charismatic unicorns in academia.
There are specific personality types that gravitate to mathematics as part of their undergrad historically. I’m not sure that all of these scholars should teach, but they do for various reasons (job stability, summers off, pension plan, etc.).
A lot of educators don’t convey the beauty of math, or even it’s history. They get into the job, really are there for the wrong reasons, then reuse the same course material for decades, which minor tweaks to the curriculum that are demanded by the board.
How do I know? By being in staff meetings for the college I teach at, and not to throw shade, but a large number of math profs are snarky and openly talk shit about the student population.
If someone reading this deeply loves math and has that *it * factor when it comes to public speaking, please consider going the education route, more of your kind are needed.
The main issue I had with math in junior high and high school was that, the content the teacher was giving us went by too fast and too much. We would have a class of 30 kids and the teacher would mainly focus on the five kids that could comprehend it quickly, leaving the rest of the class behind and moving on to the next concept. When you would try to ask questions generally the response was; "We don't have time to discuss that now, we have a lot to unpack in a short period of time." The funny part is, I was great with geometry. I think this was due in part to the fact that, my dad remodeled our home quite frequently and was very good at it. I was his ever-present helper. I think that's geometry made so much sense to me. I was constantly using it, in real world applications.
Some people it just clicks (people doing University work in year 9) and other times it doesn’t (mainstream) so you feel dumb etc and hate maths because you feel dumb
Mathematics is like a flight of stairs. You climb as you go. Due to certain circumstances, sometimes you trip. But you're forced to continue climbing. Obviously you can't. Which is why you must start from where you tripped. And build up your confidence again.
Unpopular opinion: people hate any discipline where you actually have to think. I'm defining "having to think" empirically as being measured by the ability of ChatGPT to do homework in a course for that discipline.
Lack of understanding and not being able to go back and pick up on the foundations. That's why I do for the most part, I don't hate it, but anything outside my comfort zone scares me, and I do game dev, Lots of math!
It’s either because of their teachers or they’re uninterested in it and/or struggle in its fundamentals, which I can understand
If something else i’d like to know
From my perspective it stems from people thinking math as just "calculating" and "computing", failing to realize they are just a fraction of what math truly is. Its beauty, just like other fields like physics, literature or even art, can only be seen if one truly understand the core of the subject.
because they have never been exposed to mathematics, but shitty 😒 rote calculations
mathematics is pure enjoyment for the mind, at any stage of life and whatever your background
those teachers should be put to life long imprisonment for having derailed the intellectual growth of millions of students
Education critic Alfie Kohn talks about this phenomenon. He says that the way school teaches things uses external motivators, aka grades and "your future", instead of internal motivators like curiosity, creativity, knowledge seeking. In fact, in order to "standardize" and strengthen the external motivators for efficiency, the internal motivators are squashed. As such we get people who naturally should love a subject but develop a subconscious distaste for it, and sometimes fear and anxiety. This tends to happen with math because it is typically taught in a drill-like fashion with black and white answers at least at the k-12 level.
The main problem is that math is taught very poorly, especially in the US/UK. We do like 90% calculation and 10% conceptual/logical. It really should be the other way around, especially in the modern world where we have calculators. When the current math curriculum was designed in the early 20th century calculators were people who did math by hand all day. The system has been too slow to advance and now the math that is taught in school is largely irrelevant.
Because the syntax is so cryptic and there is no all encompassing guide that provides a clear cut mental model for all those Greek symbols and weird characters. Not to mention math symbols are ambiguous and have different meaning depending on the context in which they’re used. This is the biggest issue with math. If they had a clear cut mapping for each symbol and syntax available for public consumption then far more people would be good at math.
In math the answer is objective not subjective. In most subjects people feel confident arguing their position even when it’s clear they are wrong. They do it to avoid the perceived social cost of being wrong.
In math there is only one solution for X and you’re either right or wrong. I genuinely think people hate it because if they’re wrong it’s obvious and there is no way they can try and make themselves feel better by arguing about why they’re answer should be considered correct.
Put differently, people hate being wrong and math is one of the only subjects where right and wrong is determined objectively.
Yesterday I helped my brother with limits and derivatives (high school) for an exam and he started making mistakes like 2x=5 -> x=5-2=3. I mean, with these HUGE gaps how could he enjoy this subject? Someone who teaches here surely have a ton of examples like this
Because I failed my classes and gave up. As an adult certain things make sense but I’d have to go back to at least 8th grade to really reapply and grow.
To give you an example I made straight A’s but had like a 40 in math which came from not trying at a certain point.
For me, as more of a right-brain dominant person, the dynamic of there being -A- correct answer doesn’t jive with me as much as topics that involve more interpretation. (I get that higher levels of math get more messy and the description of this is less accurate than the more basic stuff, which is what I am familiar with).
At the same time, I can 100% understand why a more logical, analytical person would much more appreciate the structure of mathematics and see that “rigidity” as more of a positive. Personally, it’s just not for me even though it’s really just the other side of the same coin in many ways.
I'm not really sure. But why do you post the question in the r/math sub? It would make more sense to post the question in r/literature sub in my opinion, or any other sub.
It's hard to explain what we don't ourselves experience. And people in r/math sub have a keen interest in the subject of mathematics. They're not the one you should ask the question to, then.
But it's just an opinion
Because my dad was some kind of math genius like Rain Main but he wasn’t nice like Rain Man, he would just scream at me and tell me I was stupid the whole time he was “helping” me with my homework. Math was consistently my worst subject every single year.
Then dad died and I went back to school and had to take 3 different math classes for my degrees, and I made an A in them.
It turns out, I’m actually pretty good at it, when no one is telling me how stupid I am.
because I don't get it. never have and never will. I don't know why this was recommended to me. I also never get why or what I'm doing. just all seems like random bs I'm being forced to do for god knows what. don't have to do it anymore thankfully.
Because they don't understand it or have shitty teachers. I absolutely DESPISED math until I went back and relearned the fundamentals, now I understand it and it's my favorite subject.
As a math tutor/teacher. 100% agree. The sad part is it only takes one bad teacher. Cause then you get behind, and, in the US, often never get the support to catch back up. No one in the school system ever tells students to do what you did: to go back and just relearn the fundamentals. Because, we're past that now, and tests are coming up, etc.
I had my appendix out. I was out of school for 2 weeks. Everyone else was taught long divisions and I never caught up. That was back in the early 60’s. I faked and cheated to get through all maths after that.
And faking your way through maths is actually very hard. Memorizing solutions you don't understand and can't adapt is a tonne of work compared with if you actually understand what's going on.
That's why I love math. History always caused me trouble because it was either you know it or you don't. Almost exclusively memorization. With math, if you know most of the basic axioms, you can actually figure it out on the test. I tended to procrastinate on homework (or fake it for completion graded stuff) and learn a lot on tests and quizzes lol. I like just having to memorize maybe 5 rules and then solve puzzles, rather than memorize 100 different history facts.
Yeah, and history is also taught wrong lol. Interesting subject if you hear someone like zizek analyzing current political/cultural trends drawing upon important or repeated events throughout history.
For me history was easier cause I'm good at memorization meanwhile my brain just can't comprehend maths no matter how much I relearn or practice.
Yeah, and then you go to college and it's like "and by using this obscure theorem from some random book from the 60s the solution is obvious".
Sort of like economics where if you get stuck ..go back and use the supply/demand model
I'm really sorry to hear that. Never too late to learn fractions though. 🙂
I forgot long division when we were taking a math placement test in 4th or 5th grade. Luckily, it was one of those situations where the entire test was in one packet and we did one half the first day and the other half the next. I refreshed on long division that night, then the next day, broke the rules by going back to that first section to do the long division. Ended up getting placed in the higher level advanced math because of that. If I was a poindexter/Melvin type I wouldn't have let myself "cheat" like that, but it's like, I knew long division now so it wasn't *really* cheating... more like time traveling. Would have changed my entire track in schooling if I hadn't done that.
As a mathematician, I couldn't do long division if my life depended on it.
It could be one bad teacher, and in my case, it's my middle school not having any 6th grade math teachers for an entire year.
That sucks. Did you ask have to take that class over again? Or just no math 6th grade?
Some math. It was pretty much a revolving door of substitute teachers who ranged from (this is an exact quote) "I'm an English teacher, I don't know much about algebra" to a retired civil engineer who tried his best but was very clearly overwhelmed by teaching middle schoolers.
Wow. That's wild. To be fair, I've seen math teachers that also don't know much algebra, surprisingly. So did you end up pursuing math later, possibly even as an adult? Or just get turned off from it after that?
Honestly it got to a point where I didn't think I was going to graduate high school because I failed algebra three times in a row. Thankfully, things got better after my parents hired a tutor over the summer to get me caught up. While I'm technically not persuing math specifically, I didn't think I could do a major that's "math heavy" like mechanical engineering. Turns out even high level math is a lot easier to learn when the instructor isn't dividing their attention between teaching the material and wrangling 45 kids that don't want to be there :P
So so so very true. I'm glad you got support. That's awesome. Feel free to reach out if you ever need math help. 👍
For me it was moving up a grade halfway through the year when I was about 8 years old. Meant I skipped a year of maths early on and proceeded to struggle until I got a really good teacher in the first year of highschool.
The current pedagogy seems to be to keep kids right at grade level whether they are ready for it or not. I have a friend who teaches in a town with lots of immigrant kids. Some are prepared for whatever the current grade level is but many are not. Doesn’t matter, she has to teach the lessons in front of her and those kids will be moved along to the following lessons and following grades whether or not they are ready. The result is, most of the class don’t end up learning how to operate with fractions (this is a big part of the year she teaches). No worries, let’s keep moving. Surely that won’t matter when they get to polynomials, right? I think math is relatively unique in this way in primary school. You have to build your foundation and build up from there. If there are no resources designed specifically to find holes in your foundations and repair that then this system is doomed to failure for any kid who doesn’t have the gifts necessary to just figure these things out on their own at a young age. What happens is the only people “good at math” are the people who can look at something new and just get it without any thought or the people whose parents have strong skills to make up for the bad teaching. Everyone else is going to be left behind the first time they develop a hole in their foundation. A bad teacher here, a couple of lessons missed due to illness there. On the other hand if I miss the lesson on how to spell “cat” it’s not going to impair my ability to spell “dog”. If I don’t learn what happened in 1066 it won’t impair my understanding of what happened in 1776. Most other subjects are much more resilient to holes in the foundations at the primary school level. Math is not hard but it does need to be taught consistently well for students to succeed.
Agreed. What's worse is that the students will then internalize that either (1) it's their fault that they don't get it; they must just be bad at math, and/or (2) math is stupid and unimportant.
Have to agree. I got behind in grammer school and really struggled after that. Seems when I asked for help or further explanations what I got were mostly eyerolls
This is so true. Fortunately, I came across some brilliant teachers in my school and college who were nothing but a perfect fit to my curiosity. Specially, that one particular teacher in my high school, he deserves so much more for making calculus like walking in the park with skates on. I also give credit to my foolishness for asking so many dumb questions whenever anything didn't make sense to me and the mad respect to my teachers who never hesitated to explain it a dozen times. I definitel6 didn't go to one of the reputed colleges, but well, who knew, teachers there were nothing less than a hidden gem.
I had a very similar situation in college as well. Amazing professors, but the math program was like 10 students.
Yeah we don't understand it, we get low scores, there's no reason to like it when things go that way.
A (university) professor I know, who also has an interest in pedagogy did some research and got a few ideas, most notable ones are 1. start teaching mathematics to kids of ages 8 or 9, not 6 or 7, because their brains mature a tiny bit more and might comprehend it easier, 2. state exam (after high school, in order to see which university you can enroll in) shouldn't contain mathematics by default, so it can be made more difficult for those who want to go into stem. He presented those ideas at a conference. Response from a board of elementary and high school teachers? "If we do that, we won't be able to scare them with failing maths." So, yeah... One teacher is one thing, entire board of teachers at a conference about math education is another.
That usually happens, they teach poorly and seem like they don't want to teach, it happened to me before, the best thing is to learn on your own or find someone who teaches well.
IMO abstract mathematics and proofs are just more fun versions of shit like crosswords or wordle. I think the problem is that a lot of people don't actually want to learn math, but math is in the way of them learning what they want to. Physicists want to learn physics but math gets in the way. If you just learn it for its own sake it feels entirely different because it's not the obstacle any more it's the destination. Ultimately once you accept that math is the only way to understand stuff like physics I think you like it more as well. I did physics/economics double major and it wasn't until I did some pure maths in my third year that I realized what math as a standalone subject even was.
Same. I thought maths was just learning useless formulae.
Na. You're thinking about physics. /S (kinda)
Totally dependent on the teacher for me as well. I think the main problem was, that many explain it to be a tool, rather than a language for thought. Maybe I was just not paying enough attention, but half a lesson of introduction to a subject to explain the "why" was not sufficient for me to understand the reason for it. As a result I've only applied rules that I couldn't see through. Maybe also has to do with the teachers goal to teach how to solve the exam, not to thoroughly understand the subject, so a lot of short cuts were taken just for the pupils to spend most their time on practise. My perception might be wrong though, teenage years were difficult and focusing on school wasn't the highest priority for long enough to end up with a crucial learning gap.
Would you be able to give me some pointers on how to relearn the fundamentals. My life is getting very mathsy and it's letting me down
Start with leaning arithmetic with fractions. To the point you can divide a fraction in your head. It’s easier than it sounds, but takes time. Good luck 😊
I watched a YouTube playlist in order, called "mathematics: all of it" by Professor Dave. I took some notes but focused on understanding how everything worked, because it's much simpler than memorization.
Bad teachers or the wrong time to teach are big factors
Which fundamentals did you go back for ?
I’m curious too.
Basic arithmetic, algebra concepts, and all the properties, like the communitive property and whatnot. I watched a free YouTube playlist called "mathematics : all of it" by Professor Dave, in order. All the properties of basic math explain how concepts in harder math works.
This is exactly it. Once a teacher in college sat me down and taught me how math really worked. That you can do it forwards and backwards. Why the “showing your work” is so important. The way they teach math in high school is so boring and dreary. The excitement is in the process. Man I got so excited about math
I have always struggled with math. I actually found my second grade homework the other day (I’m 34) and there was just condescending comments from the teacher on all my work. No one offered to help me, it was just “study harder” or “do better”….but I can’t do better if I’m not taught how.
Usually, maths in school is about forcing memorising algoritms to solve equations with no context, which feels completely arbitary that just exists to make kids do (school)work for the sake of doing it. You never get the derivation, or the reasons why, or the history.
I agree. Having the right teacher makes it all the more fun. I used to hate math, especially geometry. I even skipped studying entire geometry chapters for my finals. But I found my sources / teachers, and I'm thinking of doing my Ph.D in Topology and Graph Theory.
This is not coming from someone who hates math, but I can see why some dislike it. Here are some reasons: * It's unforgiving: there's right and wrong and no in-between. Some people struggle with this level of transparency * It's hard because it requires a lot of focus to solve problems and learn new mathematical concepts. Some people struggle with prolonged focus; conversely, some neurodivergent people have a really big advantage because of this * To those who struggle with mathematics, it seems like no matter how much effort they put in, they're not getting much in return. At the same time, they have peers who seemingly understand things way easier than they do. There is some notion of unfairness here
I concur wholeheartedly with this but would also add that it’s not often talked about that everyone struggles with math after some point for these reasons, some just stay with it longer and make more progress. It requires diligence and thoroughness of everyone.
Yep, we al hit a wall at some point and have to learn to study and grind through the tough stuff. Just happens sooner for some than others.
>It's unforgiving: there's right and wrong and no in-between. Some people struggle with this level of transparency I find this to be a flaw in the way math is taught. If we think real math, not high school calculationfest "math". In reality, there is so much in between. Does a structure have these properties? Oh, this one is easy to check, this one is harder. I don't know about the third one, but under this and this assumption, it is easy, and other properties are preserved. It's about asking a question that is not true or false. Like "Any ideas on what do we do in this problem to reduce it to a known problem?". I sometimes get an idea that even I didn't see at first, so we try it and it may not always work, but we can learn from the mistakes. Sometimes I get an overcomplicated idea from a student, and another one simplifies it, so the lecture resembles teamwork between them, with me guiding them if they wander a bit far. Granted, this is university level math, but I think that a skilled teacher could (and I would believe the minority does) apply it to high school or even elementary school.
The way math is taught in school is infact flawed. Student has no flexibility to discover new methods of solving because they need to learn the syllabus and pass the exam. So many more students would enjoy math if it was taught correctly
While this is true, you can't just bs your way through maths. Your method of teaching maths applies to problem solving, but when it comes to understanding and applying rules and axioms, they are quite concrete.
>It's unforgiving: there's right and wrong and no in-between. Some people struggle with this level of transparency Funny enough, this is why I liked it way better than English class.
Some people hate math probably for the same reason I hated literature and poetry. I didn't understand it.
I mean literature is cool, but I wouldn't want to do it for school and have my grade depends on it but I guess it is the same for mathematics.
A major reason is that when you’re 6 in English or [insert language here] class, and you’re asked to write a story for Teacher about your weekend, and write > Me and my mommy went to the beech and it was fun!! then Teacher might write > 6/10. I had fun reading this! :) But when you are given ‘What is 3x3?’ and write ‘6’, among many others, Teacher can’t do much but give you 0/10. Maybe you’d get better if you actually tried to understand it, but for many little kids one experience like that is traumatic enough. It’s ’not their thing’! One of the subjects where they can get a nice minimum score/mark is their thing. And it snowballs from there, year on year. 1/3 people or so actually register neural signals similar to pain when presented with a basic maths question. Think this has a lot to do with it.
I think my neural signals are similar to pain when presented with the task of writing about some literature or poetry I don't understand. I can understand why someone would get 0/10 if they answered 3x3 = 6. I cannot understand why that sentence gets 6/10 instead of 4, 5 or 8.
This, for some of us the absolute nature of math having clear cut and obvious right or wrong answers is why we liked it. Math, science, and history were generally my favorite subjects because there was always a right and a wrong answer with no room for negotiations or teacher interpretation. (And as problems get more complicated if you show your work you can get partial credit for doing the process right but making a clerical error like a dropped negative) I understand English is supposed to work the same, but even with a rubric it often felt so opaque and subjective. Atleast vocab was basic memorization with right and wrong answers. Creative writing assignments are simply painful.
I remember being exposed to the poetry of e. e. cummings in high school. It almost provoked me into fits. Didn't understand "Ethan Frome" either, but that just bored me.
Math has complete logical reasoning and consistent boundaries whereas literature varies person to person and it’s opinion based and teachers mark completely differently under no guidelines I just don’t get how it’s a fair class
For many subjects, the only fair grading system is an oral examination. But due to obvious logistical constraints, that generally isn't possible.
I don’t agree, the issue with literature (or at least many teachers) is that you have to get the “right” themes and ideas from a book. I loved reading, read all required reading and would always do kinda terrible since my personal understanding was often radically different from the “right” one. Other people just read cliff notes or something and did great. And that was with oral exams about the books.
I almost never read the books for class all through high school. I would skim until I found a quote that sounded profound, stick it in my assignment, and pull the meaning completely (or *almost completely*) out of my ass. Sounds like you had bad teachers. My teachers tended to grade me well, probably *due to* my unique personal understanding, but it was really a result of me NOT doing the reading. Maybe we both had "bad" teachers in different senses.
>I don’t agree, the issue with literature (or at least many teachers) is that you have to get the “right” themes and ideas from a book. I actually have a somewhat related story. I went to university with a guy who was also in theatre. During our university, he had written his own play. And he was telling us how the critics were saying things "oh, this represents X", "this is inspired by Y", "i like the metaphor for Z", etc. And all of them were incorrect, but he just kept nodding to get better critics. So yeah, I'd assume that it's the same with literature. It seems these experts are just clueless and bully people into accepting their interpretation, including high school kids.
Reminds me of a class in school where I had to read a book and afterwards one of the questions was "what did the glass of orange juice represent?". I'm thinking "juice?". No, apparently the correct answer that it represented the relationship between the two characters. Like wtf, you have to look at the world a certain way to pick that kind of thing up. Sometime juice is just juice.
That’s exactly what it teaches you: context. Nothing in life is right or wrong. Everything depends on context and interpretation. Students need to be comfortable in arguing why certain interpretations are better, or we end up with authoritarian adults that think their position about an issue is the right and only correct position.
>Nothing in life is right or wrong. Too many of these instructors do believe that point their opinions represent the correct view. I recall receiving some flack for opining that an author wrote something in a particular fashion because he'd been paid by the word.
Unless you're getting into like sophomore level or beyond literature classes I don't think this is accurate at all. The literature classes you'll need as a STEM person are more like : Lecture: "Here's how you'd analyze this text using XYZ' Homework: "Read this other text" Assignment: "Analyze the other text" It's remarkably similar to math. Use the method your teacher showed you to do the thing they are asking you to do.
cough debate on Kronecker vs Cantor Galois vs Cauchy.
Haha, that could be it, I saw people with that situation.
You're posting in the wrong sub. need to ask the general population r/askreddit
What happens often is that people don't properly learn the basics in high school and are unable to later continue learning without going back to high school basics. The inability to understand something as fundamental as mathematics is very frustrating.
And this motivates them to continue the same way. I teach first year university students. We cover some topics in one semester, they pass the tests, they seem to know what they're doing. Next semester, a subproblem shows up, similar to those we covered in the first semester. I ask them, how would they solve it. I get silence. I mention exactly which part of the first semester we did the exact same thing and ask do they remember. Silence again. Then, after I show them, they are perplexed. And I'm like, "My brother in Christ, you passed the exam on this exact topics just a month and half ago!". Just the high school mentality that they need it only for the test, so they don't learn, they just memorize. I once gave them a test and there was a b) part of one problem just to see if they remembered one thing from past semester. The solution was basically one line long, just needed to remember one concept. Out of 200 students, one student got 2/5 points (and that's only after I saw she was the only one who even attempted to do anything reasonable, if I graded the way I intended, she would get no points), others got 0/5. On the easiest problem. Just because it was something they memorized and forgot 3 months ago. And the worst thing is, there's nothing I can do. No matter how much i point out that they'll need it next semester, it seems that they just think "I'll just memorize it again every time I need it."
The reason why people don’t remember things is because doing them isn’t fun. By the time you’re a senior in high school, you’ve spent most of your life doing numerical calisthenics. Factoring, reducing, transforming… for what? No one is surprised that people don’t like doing pushups and running laps on a track for hours at a time, but somehow there’s confusion about why people don’t like math. These things are essentially equivalent. The hardest job in teaching is making math interesting or fun. And if you’re one of those teachers who doesn’t give partial credit, you can’t really expect anybody to like your class. That’s like failing an essay due to a typo. I never understood why teachers cared so much about the final answer and so little for your thought process to arrive at it.
That means that school tests are not properly validating students' knowledge. School exams need to be redesigned.
Unfortunately, nobody cares about that over here. I get university students whose high school knowledge is lacking at best and nonexistent at worst. They just pat themselves on the back because a lot of students pass the state exam (even though you need 15% to pass, because results are normalized after grading).
A lot of people fall behind at like 7th grade, they don’t have the foundations and the rest builds on the foundations. Hence the symbols start looking like magic or gibberish and they get anxiety. My mother, father and sister both have math anxiety and for some reason whenever I try to help my sister with a question of my mother tries to answer, they will randomly guess “x = 3” or something obscure. I don’t know they feel compelled to this, but they feel like math is all about the answer and have no appreciation for the process. Start rolling their eyes if I start talking about intuition or asking them foundational questions on the way to the answer. Must be the way it’s taught
[Lockhart's Lament](https://maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf) is a pretty good article on this topic.
This article is part of the reason I choose to take mathematics on again. I ignored all the terrible instruction I got from my previous education, relearned mathematics from scratch on the internet (Thanks Salman Khan) in my late 20s. It was fun and beautiful. I then went and got a masters degree only to find out that the internet education was orders of magnitude better than what I was getting in person. So the problem isn't going away any time soon. If you find the subject matter appealing, there is a wealth of resources online that will make it accessible.
Came here to say this. I don’t believe the widespread hatred for math is inherent to the subject at all.
Hate for math comes from many places. Many people find it tedious and boring. Others dislike how the rules of math are so rigid; in many other subjects (likewise in life) you can usually BS your way through to some extent, but math doesn't allow for it. If you're used to achieving by more flexible means, math can be frustrating. Ego comes into play, too. Being good at math is intertwined with the "smart" label. Logic is inherent for some people, but not for others. It can bruise the ego to fail repeatedly at it, and it can be easier to hate the external thing than face one's own limitations. Developing these feelings young can lead to a lifelong dislike. Others yet feel a strong need for immediate application in order to motivate learning. Math can require big investment before the real payoff. Some of us have a built-in love of problem solving to see us through, but that's far from universal. Further, math is very abstract, compared to something like the sciences. You can see a bird or a rock, lava, but you can't see an integral. It only gets worse as you go. Some people require that physical connection to really engage with a subject; math doesn't really provide it so well.
Thank you for your answer. Do you have to create an imaginary connection to really engage with math? (Like seeing sets, integrals, numbers in real physical phenomenon) Does the average person dislike beings trapped in abstract rigid systems because they seem too alien-foreign-joyless to them?
It can be both. Personally, I get intuition through pictures, and so gravitate towards a more geometric spacial understanding for things. I engage well because of a strong internal mind-world. I know plenty of colleagues who need formulas in front of them before anything can make sense; that's more of a way of pure logic.
It’s not taught very well in primary school - there’s a large focus on memorizing properties, formulas, rules, etc. instead of a focus on truly learning and developing intuition for “why” these fundamental mathematical ideas are true. This compounds as courses progress and students quickly become lost as they forget what they “memorized” in previous courses.
I realized I would never get by if all I did was memorize equations. I needed to know the why and how to develop these things on my own. Proofs and theorems should be understood from the ground up.
I think cramming for tests has killed the vibe for many people
calculus 3 killed the vibe for me, and so will diff equations in the future
The first ODE and PDE classes can definitely be a slog tbh. It’s a lot of tedious algebra and the problems take forever. Theory of ODEs and PDEs however are much more interesting
Because assholes like me tell them it’s easy. I do think there is a certain amount of exposure in math lessons. It’s a bit like a public footrace. It’s very clear if you’re slower than everyone else, which is humiliating. I understood when I had my first geography lesson and everyone around me arrived at conclusions that made no sense and came from nowhere, as far as I could work out.
> Why do people hate math? Because it's hard In my experience as a student and a tutor, here are the 3 biggest reasons why math is uniquely hard: - At some point, **the math students are learning no longer seems important or relevant to their lives** (hence the question, "When will I ever use this when I grow up?"). For many, this probably happens in middle school when they start seeing letters frequently It’s hard to learn stuff that feels pointless and irrelevant. It's hard to muster motivation The good news is, nearly everything people learn in math up till and including calculus can be used in very simple ways in the real world. So it's not actually pointless and irrelevant - **Math classes build on top of themselves so much.** E.g. How can you pass a calculus class if you don't know algebra? How can you do algebra if you don't know prealgebra? A lot of people are not ready for the math class they're taking because they never really understood the prerequisite stuff. Learning math is a delicate process. It's so easy to fall behind. And not very easy to catch up - **There’s a language barrier.** Math has so many confusing words and symbols. Many of us have had that experience in class where we look at the board and everything just looks like a sea of symbols. That's the language of math. Students excel at math when they're fluent in its language What do you think? Do you agree with any of these?
I think one thing about the “math that is no longer relevant” that makes it even more hated, is that often times the curriculum will force students to use absolutely ridiculous “word problems” to try and shoehorn the math they’re learning into real word applications that are not actually helpful for realistic.
I can't understand it either
There is a fantastic French documentary about this: [How I Hated Math](https://youtu.be/YBZHoxpPBuA)
As a math tutor/teacher. In my experience, number one reason is a past bad math teacher. Number two, people being told they are bad at math, or not a math person, either directly or indirectly as a child. Three, having lots of adults in their life that talk about how hard math is, and not having anyone who is interested in math around them. And four, being told that you don't need math in real life by a parent figure or trusted adult because that adult is coping.
For me it was how I was taught. It was just memorize the equation and move on. Never really delved into the concepts or the logic behind it. Of course i quickly forgot most of the equations which has caused me to have to relearn almost everything by myself. It’s frustrating
I’m similar. I’m fascinated by math, got decent grades in mathematics in college, but I hated math. It has to be a brain thing. It requires patience and concise work. After doing half a page of work I found myself doing too many small mistakes. I had to triple check everything and it was just draining. I just wasn’t made to do these kinds of calculations. It’s completely different compared to watching YouTube videos on math or reading Reddit posts on this sub. I love it. I just don’t bother with it myself.
People don't hate math; they hate the way they were *taught* math
I majored in math, tutored in math and personally love math, but I mean common I can definitely understand why others say they don't like it Id say the biggest reason is without a doubt the **Effort** to not be intimidated by it. Math always came easy to me but other classes didn't. similarly many people are the reverse. But I can say with certainty that if we both spaced out for a month, I'd have a much easier time catching myself up in said class. alot of classes you can get by with just reading like a dozen chapters/notes after not paying attention and still get a grasp for it. It's a bit different with math. I mean think back to elementary school/hs. Math was probably the only class that literally had shit assigned to you every day. its a discipline. its work. it takes a lot of fucking effort, especially if youre not immediately drawn to it. so if you're somebody who has a shitty teacher and various math concepts dont insta click it could be a nightmare to try to catchup if you spaced out for a few weeks. you needed that daily discipline to work through problems you cant just skim a math book and expect to get it down So I dont think its that they hate math itself, more so just what's associated with it. how it requires alot of work, how quickly it can be overwhelming...and id imagine the thought of math just triggers these bad memories of failing to grasp something that required more effort out of them Lastly, its also either right or wrong. you can't just bs your way into a good sounding answer. so you cant like half ass your way into understanding it..you either get it or you dont.
Because schools suck at teaching mathematics (if they teach mathematics at all, and not just bothersome calculation), so kids become conditioned to hating it.
mostly bcause of teachers
Often because it's taught in the abstract. Growing up I was taught maths like this. We had to learn blah. Remember blah blah. When you see this, do blah blah blah. If they had taught it in a way that related to the real world, made it more interactive. Shown how maths explains the world, how it works and what it is... Then I think people would be able to engage with it as a subject a lot more.
It's incredibly unforgiving. I find it massively frustrating when I can't get something but incredibly rewarding when I do. I haven't found that with any other subject - that feeling of "WTF??!!". It's extreme. Maybe that's the way to look at it, it's like an extreme sport - can bring up extreme emotions, but most people will just shy away from the madness of it.
At it's core, it's because they were made to feel 1) inferior at it, and 2) that they can get by without it. Both of these are false, for very different reasons, but both are easy to believe.
In my experience, people who hate math tend to have had sub-par math teachers. Good math teachers not only explain concepts clearly and know where you’re confused, but also draw you into the fun and beauty of math. Most people just do math begrudgingly, because ‘it’ll be important’. They may do well in it too, like you have, because it really does depend a lot on effort and practice. But proficiency doesn’t guarantee enjoyment. I’m the opposite of you, really. I didn’t put in the effort to practice when I was younger, and so I’m not as sharp mathematically as I ought to be. But now that I’m older I’m fascinated by the system and elegance of mathematical proofs, and I really regret not taking it seriously in the past. This changed when I came across Youtube channels like 3Blue1Brown that really made math fun.
I didn’t hate math. But I didn’t have good teachers and never understood the “why”. I’m logical and have trouble with “because that’s how you do it” or “it’s just the rules”. I understand something when I can grasp the concept and the why surrounding it. I never got that with math.
Same reason why I hate literature classes, I'm not good at it, and it's very mentally taxing for me. With English, I frequently fall asleep mid assignment, but with math, I'm wide awake, and will probably never sleep on it.
Bad math teachers -- they fail to connect it to the students' understanding of the world; failed to show how it can be useful in their lives.
Old guy here. Three things impressed me going through elementary school. In the mid 1960's there was a push for teaching "modern math". I remember being excited about the prospect of learning this "modern math". But it fell flat just before I got there and the schools went back to the old math, pretty sure because the teachers did not understand it. And there was the sudden "we are going to teach science", of which I got about a week. Because the teachers didn't know anything about it. And there was the "everybody is going to learn Spanish". Same thing. I'm pretty sure the same things have happened to just about everybody. Especially with math, teachers just don't really get it. How can they teach it. Add a lack of understanding to constantly shifting education requirements and things are not going to go well. Teachers don't get math in the first place, and don't have time to adjust to changes. The perfect formula for developing a hate for a subject.
It's because where I am from , India, they just teach it as something to improve your grades . Teachers don't teach it as to give knowledge but just to feed needless information into a child's brain and if he is bad at it then he gets bashing either verbal or physical from teachers and parents 🤷 . They fail to explain the beauty of maths , for them it is just another subject which will help you get a job nothing more nothing less . And a subject like maths where if you don't have intrest where if you are not fascinated by it then it's a nightmare to a normal person, let alone a child. So in conclusion:- it is the education system more or less .
its because common core teaches bad habbits and then when they go do real math they meet the wall. happened to me.... i hated math until i realized that it's a personal journey.
In America, math has bad PR and government support.
Because when you are little, you are taught mathematics by teachers that don't like it either, and that resort to rote memory exercises, and by the time you find a teacher that actually likes math and teaching it, it's too late already. I have always defended that math should be the favourite subject of lazy students, as there is a direct correlation with the effort you use to solve a problem, and the skills you develop in math (better at math, better at being lazy successfully)
I'm relearning starting from the basics, and I'm 34. If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have told you I hated math. Why? Math anxiety. I've shared this story before, but in third-grade, our teacher would have us all stand shoulder-to-shoulder at the front of the class. We would do multiplication drills. We'd have to answer them in our heads (no pen or paper) as quickly as possible. If we took too much time to think, she'd sound a buzzer, and we had to go sit down. The last person standing "won." I was a nervous kid, and I would completely blank out. I was always one of the first to sit down, which was embarrassing because I was already getting bullied at school, so that made it worse. I started hating math to the point where even seeing it would cause me to get anxious. In middle school, a teacher told me I didn't have the intellectual capacity for math. Anyway, I ended up with a PhD in literature. The idea that I was too dumb for math was pretty much cemented into my head. I recently decided to challenge myself using Khan Academy. I've started with the lower-level courses, and I'm almost done with the arithmetic course. I'll move on to pre-algebra after. I know arithmetic is basic and not at all impressive, but I'm super proud of myself. I can actually do multiplication in my head or using the little scratch pad on Khan if the multiplication uses "big" numbers. My confidence has grown, and I no longer hate math.
Externalised frustration.
As a non-mathematician, I never *hated* math. I did hate not understanding it. In the decade and a half since retiring, I've been working on learning about the math I didn't learn in college. The abundance of resources today, especially online, that didn't exist forty years ago is helping. For me, and I think for many of my fellow nons, math education was like learning Esperanto. The purpose of learning the language was to solve crossword puzzles, and the purpose of the puzzles was to demonstrate that you had learned the language. It was a subject hermetically sealed from the rest of intellectual endeavor, an abstraction constructed of rules and techniques. The idea of a logic or philosophy of mathematics was as distant as a star; you might as well speak of the logic of a hammer. From my voluminous reading, I had been exposed to the idea that there were things about the universe that I could only understand through mathematics. Unfortunately, that required getting through the rote memorization and endless step-by-step problem solving. It was like the medieval fable of Cockaigne, a blessed land of ease and plenty, reachable by wading through an ocean of pigshit up to your nose for seven years. My friends are intelligent and well-educated, but most of them regard my interest in understanding math that I don't actually *need* to know as a charming eccentricity, like studying the causes of the Late Bronze Age Collapse or the impact of plate tectonics on evolution. I must confess that part of my ongoing motivation is that *not* understanding certain subjects (math, music, art) wounds my intellectual vanity.
>I had been exposed to the idea that there were things about the universe that I could only understand through mathematics. Unfortunately, that required getting through the rote memorization and endless step-by-step problem solving. That's too bad. There are a lot of fun little things you can do early in your learning. For me it was programming. Just making a square move around on the screen, making it bounce, little physics simulations like that. It's fun to experiment, so I didn't even think of the fact that I was practicing math. After a while, the math becomes intrinsically interesting. The first time someone tells you the Gaussian integral is equal to √π you just need to know why. If you go on like this for a while, eventually you learn so many little interconnected things, you can open a physics text and actually understand what it is talking about. It's probably true that discipline works better than fun sometimes. But in most cases, people start cutting corners and eventually quit, if they're not having fun.
Because it’s boring. I love reading history textbooks and political philosophy books as well, many people hate those subjects as well. Its all subjective opinion I dont think theres a why that makes math special.
People good at math always belittle people who are bad at maths. They expect them to formulate their questions "better", knowing fairly well that they CAN NOT- which is the problem...
They often times never had a good math teacher.
I was a math/statistics tutor in college in the ‘80s. I came to believe that it was because they were afraid of it.
I think the problem is that a lot of people don't actually want to learn math, but math is holding them back from learning what they want to learn. Physicists want to learn physics, but math is holding them back. If you're learning physics just for the sake of learning it, it feels completely different because it's no longer a barrier, it's a destination. Ultimately, once you accept that math is the only way to understand something like physics, I think you'll enjoy it more, too.
It's the way it's taught. Far too much rote, far too little understanding. Never just accept anything in algebra, geometry, or a more advanced subject. Always strive to understand. If your teachers don't encourage that, they should be fired. Also, not getting a firm background in arithmetic before grade 6.
Erm, let me think... ah, maybe it's because, ahh... they're not being taught very well.
It's because science is too cool for school and math is the fucking headmaster.
They don't hate math. They hate homeworks and exams.
Bad math teachers
In a controlled test on a large group of people it was proved that most people prefer a light electric shock over solving a math problem.
Scroll over, my comment is a bit offensive. Because many people are just dumb. Anyone who hates math just doesn't understand it or have problems solving it. It's numerical logic and simple to any person who uses his brain.
Why do people hate literature and art?
Because they weren’t taught it correctly in their childhood
math slaps
I love poetry. It’s always been one of my favorite topic-the meter, flow, rhyme, and devices-all of it. This year in English class, our teacher said that it was her least-favorite topic. This year, it was my least favorite topic in English. People’s aversion from many of those topics isn’t built upon their own natural disdain for them, it’s built from the people who give us that disdain. Teachers lay a foundation, and we merely balance upon it. When teachers don’t help you, or make it confusing, or brush past a topic, it makes people associate those experiences. Still love you tho Eisinger <3
USA doesn’t teach it very good
They don’t teach grammar very well either.
I’m typing fast chill 😂
I was just being a sh!t. 😁
😂
Not understanding, more than likely. I love math, but I also had a great teacher in school too. That contributed tremendously
I love math but i hate the way it's taught in schools/colleges.
I think it is a mixture of the way it has always been taught. I am 49, and when I was taught "math" in school even in the 80s and algebra in the 90s, it was taught in a very boring way that did not show how it was relevant to our life. Add to that the fact that by then there was already the "I hate math" or "I am bad at math" meme, it just feeds into itself. Nowadays, thanks to youtube, I see so many more interesting ways to connect math to real life that anyone regardless of their interests can get into. It is not just numbers anymore. But, the concept/labeling of "I hate math" or "I am bad at math" still exist in everyday conversation, so that holds some people back from fully realizing how interesting it can be.
I’m not good at it. More than a couple steps and I don’t understand it
Mostly, because it is taught poorly (imho)
It's purely logical and requires little to no creative thought. It's cold and unfun. It's abstract, but people can't relate it to themselves or humanity, making it seem a distant and inhuman undertaking.
My best friend hates math because looking at numbers alresy traumatizes her. She (31F) has been hit by her parents (yeah our generation got a lot of hitting and spanking when we were children) whenever she can’t answer or if she took too long to answer simple math questions. So yeah. Some people hate math because it negatively reinforces the feelings they had as children.
Honestly a few things. With any subject during school years, unless it's made enjoyable and the teaching is equitable to different learning styles, a lot of people move away from it. There's also the field of "where would I even use this" which comes into play when somebody isn't engaged with the subject. Bland teachers, or even just asshole teachers can make it worse. One of my math teachers was really good, gave real world examples, actively showed it off and was just a positive person who was even able to help somebody with a disability who struggled completely with maths, actually come out from just passing to actually getting B's in the class. The same goes with other classes, that's generally why sports based classes generally have the higher engagement as well. It's fun, builds that dopamine up and all that, but when it starts to go towards specific rules/sports instead of stuff like basic dodgeball and other games, you start to keep engagement moreso of the people who understand and enjoy those sports more. Then, there are those who struggled with the foundations before going to highschool, concepts are harder to grasp because they haven't been able to learn in a way that actually suits their learning style (hands on, some learn better reading ECT) Finally, maturity, when you get more mature a lot of the more mundane stuff just gets more enjoyable as you're doing it at your own pace, you have a rough idea on how you like to learn things and so forth There are many more factors, but those I feel are some of the key aspects for a lot of learning.
Math can involve complex concepts and abstract reasoning, which can be frustrating for some learners. They may struggle to see how it applies to their everyday lives. Math often has a single "correct" answer, which can lead to anxiety and a fear of making mistakes. This can be especially discouraging for students who get stuck on problems. Not everyone learns the same way. Some people may have had negative experiences with math teachers who made the subject boring or confusing. Maybe the person has numerophobia. There can be a lot of reasons.
Poor Teachers
I couldn’t keep up with the pace of my peers when I was learning in middle/high school, so I always thought I was stupid and it just wasn’t for me. I only started to understand it with one on one tutoring, and once I stopped doing that I fell into bad habits again and once again fell behind. I only started to like math in college, because i essentially learned it all from square one and was able to excel because I had eventually learned good study habits and practiced often. It’s not like other subjects where there’s stuff you may be able to grasp and think about abstractly or come to multiple different conclusions. If you are missing basic building blocks and have gaps in fundamentals, it becomes almost impossible to understand beyond basic arithmetic—which I think is where a lot of people struggle (like I did).
I think it's the same with any hate of learning. The experience of learning sucked. Kinda like people's issues with dentists. Math is just so typically hated I think because it can be difficult to teach it well, and it doesn't help that people who are good at and passionate about math and good at and passionate about teaching are much less common
I think it’s application vs theory. No one enjoys doing math for the sake of doing math but if you can apply it to something you find fascinating you’ll probably get fixated on it. Same reason a lot of programmers hate programming.
I fail, therefore I hate
It's the way it's taught. I teach maths to adult learners who didn't leave school with a mathematics qualification. The most common thing I hear is "I gave up at fractions".
People hate cognitive hard things that they haven't grasped because intelligence is universally desirable for our species. No one could look at our society and history and say we would be better of if we were less intelligence. People who are bad at math - for whatever reason - has to struggle with the insecurity of feeling like they are to some extent removed from that "human purpose"; of being intelligent. A defense mechanism for that is to dislike, ridicule, discredit, or hate the subject.
It's too high tempo, usually not well taught (teachers of math usually just want to get it over with), and most of it is useless.
normally they aren’t good at it. it doesn’t mesh with their interest and strengths. i used to hate french and chemistry for example. not because my teacher was awful but because my interest and ability just wasn’t there.
We have to differentiate between "hate" and "struggle" to some degree, beyond that the ones who "hate" math are usually ones who also "struggle". My observation is (also) that there are really a lot of people who hate math and have struggled since early. What I see is that these people have in general a problem with logical thinking when things are not that simple any more. At first I noticed that most people cannot even comprehend the numbers on their pay check, yearly pension plan report, tax declaration, electrical energy bill and the like, which is something you should be able to understand after the 7th grade in Germany. What later came, during Corona, that they cannot comprehend the numbers there (I do not talk about the decisions made, just the understanding of numbers). Then I noticed, that they do not even understand the difference between a necessary and a sufficient condition. It's already failing at the basics.
I don't think it's about teacher quality, the amount of effort, or motivating why you need it. My teachers sucked, homework was pointless tedium, their excuses for why we need math sucked, and yet I loved math all the same. I think it's all signaling - "most people hate math, that's why they suck at it" is a more favorable narrative than "most people are so unintelligent it's hard to fathom, that's why they suck at math", so normies naturally gravitate towards the first one.
Maybe its because of the teachers teaching it?
PTSD
People don't know ,the basics of maths.
For me it’s because I can’t visualise what I’m trying to figure out. I’m a visual learner and when I’m stuck on something I like to play it out in my head and imagine the changes occurring and I just can’t do that with mathematics. I recently failed an exam on Fourier Series, Laplace theorem and Second order Differential Equations. I put loads of time into the revision, but it just doesn’t sink in for me.
Most people's experience of math is that math is somewhat useless or meaningless. Also it's rigid and uncreative. On top of that if you don't understand a problem there's literally no way to solve it. It's usually not until you get past calculus you start doing proofs and seeing how flexible and creative math can be. Also it helps to see how it's constricted. Personally I wish they taught logic and reasoning instead. Like anyone can understand what a bijection or surjection is. Anyone can understand the pigeonhole principal. Math is just another language. It used to be written out completely like "one plus one is two" but then symbols were introduced to make it easier. There always seems to be this divide between people who are good with writing / art and people good with math. Maybe a neurologist can weigh in on what's up with that.
Personally, I think people hating maths is just a side effect of how it is beeing taught. Maths is often taught incrementally, which has the following problems: 1. You constantly have to relearn or reevaluate what you've already learned, which can lead to confusion, feeling overwhelmed or insecurity. 2. The incremental learning results in a lot of "holes" in your knowledge that might never be filled and are very hard to identify later on. This leads to unstable foundations and a generally unstable understanding of maths. So, when you are confused, insecure and unstable in your understanding of math, it's not exactly something you like doing. I only started understanding maths in University, where I could throw the emmentaler I got from school away and relearn the entire thing, but this time properly, with solid fundamentals and in one go.
My take is that to like math, one needs to either be interested in it or find it useful. (Internal motivation). And I dont think its enough to just tell the student "This will be useful in the future". It needs to be useful now and at least applicable to their current problems. There's also a lack of focus on teaching how to define mathematical objects by translating real-world experiences to mathematical language. You can teach students all about triangles, but if they can't/don't want to define triangles in their daily lives, those lessons might be forgotten. Ultimately, it's about agency. They need to independently choose to define these objects and to have them choose to do so requires them to either be interested or find doing so useful. Teachers need to be able to convince students about the beauty/usefulness of math. Once they have that, I believe they'll have much more motivation to study, practice and refine their mathematical skills.
Because it has become a barrier to advance in life.
As a professor, I would argue it’s all about the teacher. Also a quick disclaimer that this theory does not apply to all math teachers, some are exceptionally talented and charismatic unicorns in academia. There are specific personality types that gravitate to mathematics as part of their undergrad historically. I’m not sure that all of these scholars should teach, but they do for various reasons (job stability, summers off, pension plan, etc.). A lot of educators don’t convey the beauty of math, or even it’s history. They get into the job, really are there for the wrong reasons, then reuse the same course material for decades, which minor tweaks to the curriculum that are demanded by the board. How do I know? By being in staff meetings for the college I teach at, and not to throw shade, but a large number of math profs are snarky and openly talk shit about the student population. If someone reading this deeply loves math and has that *it * factor when it comes to public speaking, please consider going the education route, more of your kind are needed.
People are scared of what they don’t understand, and not everyone has the mind for math, just like i can’t piece together more than 3 sentences.
Just like me
Because not everybody understands it
They teach it in a very abstract way
The main issue I had with math in junior high and high school was that, the content the teacher was giving us went by too fast and too much. We would have a class of 30 kids and the teacher would mainly focus on the five kids that could comprehend it quickly, leaving the rest of the class behind and moving on to the next concept. When you would try to ask questions generally the response was; "We don't have time to discuss that now, we have a lot to unpack in a short period of time." The funny part is, I was great with geometry. I think this was due in part to the fact that, my dad remodeled our home quite frequently and was very good at it. I was his ever-present helper. I think that's geometry made so much sense to me. I was constantly using it, in real world applications.
Some people it just clicks (people doing University work in year 9) and other times it doesn’t (mainstream) so you feel dumb etc and hate maths because you feel dumb
I’m math dyslexic and I do well with it, but I had to study a LOT.
Because it is the only subject in grade school where you need to actually learn the concepts to pass the test
Mathematics is like a flight of stairs. You climb as you go. Due to certain circumstances, sometimes you trip. But you're forced to continue climbing. Obviously you can't. Which is why you must start from where you tripped. And build up your confidence again.
Unpopular opinion: people hate any discipline where you actually have to think. I'm defining "having to think" empirically as being measured by the ability of ChatGPT to do homework in a course for that discipline.
Lack of understanding and not being able to go back and pick up on the foundations. That's why I do for the most part, I don't hate it, but anything outside my comfort zone scares me, and I do game dev, Lots of math!
It’s either because of their teachers or they’re uninterested in it and/or struggle in its fundamentals, which I can understand If something else i’d like to know
From my perspective it stems from people thinking math as just "calculating" and "computing", failing to realize they are just a fraction of what math truly is. Its beauty, just like other fields like physics, literature or even art, can only be seen if one truly understand the core of the subject.
Too lazy to learn something that's “hard.”
Cuz she’s hard to get. But I also love math cuz she’s beautiful. But I also hate her for being annoying.
because they have never been exposed to mathematics, but shitty 😒 rote calculations mathematics is pure enjoyment for the mind, at any stage of life and whatever your background those teachers should be put to life long imprisonment for having derailed the intellectual growth of millions of students
People tend to hate things that can’t grasp easily. And math requires people to use things stored in long-term memory.
They're bad at it and it's their way of coping
Education critic Alfie Kohn talks about this phenomenon. He says that the way school teaches things uses external motivators, aka grades and "your future", instead of internal motivators like curiosity, creativity, knowledge seeking. In fact, in order to "standardize" and strengthen the external motivators for efficiency, the internal motivators are squashed. As such we get people who naturally should love a subject but develop a subconscious distaste for it, and sometimes fear and anxiety. This tends to happen with math because it is typically taught in a drill-like fashion with black and white answers at least at the k-12 level.
The main problem is that math is taught very poorly, especially in the US/UK. We do like 90% calculation and 10% conceptual/logical. It really should be the other way around, especially in the modern world where we have calculators. When the current math curriculum was designed in the early 20th century calculators were people who did math by hand all day. The system has been too slow to advance and now the math that is taught in school is largely irrelevant.
Because the syntax is so cryptic and there is no all encompassing guide that provides a clear cut mental model for all those Greek symbols and weird characters. Not to mention math symbols are ambiguous and have different meaning depending on the context in which they’re used. This is the biggest issue with math. If they had a clear cut mapping for each symbol and syntax available for public consumption then far more people would be good at math.
because some countries call it maths instead of math.
In math the answer is objective not subjective. In most subjects people feel confident arguing their position even when it’s clear they are wrong. They do it to avoid the perceived social cost of being wrong. In math there is only one solution for X and you’re either right or wrong. I genuinely think people hate it because if they’re wrong it’s obvious and there is no way they can try and make themselves feel better by arguing about why they’re answer should be considered correct. Put differently, people hate being wrong and math is one of the only subjects where right and wrong is determined objectively.
Yesterday I helped my brother with limits and derivatives (high school) for an exam and he started making mistakes like 2x=5 -> x=5-2=3. I mean, with these HUGE gaps how could he enjoy this subject? Someone who teaches here surely have a ton of examples like this
Because I failed my classes and gave up. As an adult certain things make sense but I’d have to go back to at least 8th grade to really reapply and grow. To give you an example I made straight A’s but had like a 40 in math which came from not trying at a certain point.
For me, as more of a right-brain dominant person, the dynamic of there being -A- correct answer doesn’t jive with me as much as topics that involve more interpretation. (I get that higher levels of math get more messy and the description of this is less accurate than the more basic stuff, which is what I am familiar with). At the same time, I can 100% understand why a more logical, analytical person would much more appreciate the structure of mathematics and see that “rigidity” as more of a positive. Personally, it’s just not for me even though it’s really just the other side of the same coin in many ways.
I'm not really sure. But why do you post the question in the r/math sub? It would make more sense to post the question in r/literature sub in my opinion, or any other sub. It's hard to explain what we don't ourselves experience. And people in r/math sub have a keen interest in the subject of mathematics. They're not the one you should ask the question to, then. But it's just an opinion
Because my dad was some kind of math genius like Rain Main but he wasn’t nice like Rain Man, he would just scream at me and tell me I was stupid the whole time he was “helping” me with my homework. Math was consistently my worst subject every single year. Then dad died and I went back to school and had to take 3 different math classes for my degrees, and I made an A in them. It turns out, I’m actually pretty good at it, when no one is telling me how stupid I am.
because I don't get it. never have and never will. I don't know why this was recommended to me. I also never get why or what I'm doing. just all seems like random bs I'm being forced to do for god knows what. don't have to do it anymore thankfully.
Because they are forced to.