I enjoy letters, maps, and languages more than numbers or puzzles. Geometry is the only math subject which holds some interest, but not really.
That's exactly how I have always been.
By "sucked at maths" you mean that you had a hard time trying to understand it or that you got bad grades?
Both, in my case one leaded to the other. Most of all, I had a hard time keeping focus. I understood well in the first 10 minutes but then I got bored, a random thought distracted me and I got lost for the rest of the hour. I was too shy to ask questions and get back on track, somehow I feared showing my lack of understanding in front of my classmates. Before long I couldn't even see how deep in shit I was, like, I didn't even know what I didn't know...
Of course, that leaded me to fail a lot.
Personally, I appreciate math, but by itself it's... tasteless.
[...]
Unless you have a good teacher, learning math in school is equivalent to eating eggshells- after a while you are convinced you don't like eggs.
PS: You say you never really tried so just do it and see where it leads you. Maybe you are talented. I read a while back about a mathematician who struggled with maths during his teens, switched schools and guess what? He met an awesome teacher too, got into it and the rest is history...
I know that solving a lot of problems doesnt work with me, because i cant see where im going while sloving them. I need to see the big picture, so this time i will start top-down. I will start with the theory and what was on their minds when they invented each theory. Perhaps this way it will be a lot easier and i will enjoy it too.
I love the eggshells metaphor.
I remember there was 2 years where I didn't sruggle with maths
as much as I usually do.
It was in elementary school, at a time where I quit public school to learn at home. My mom thaught me maths among other subjects I needed. She did not study to become a teacher, she just did it, and it went very well.
I learnt everything I had to learn in a normal year in half the time. The other half was just making sure I understood everything well and practizing to make sure I do not forget. I think there are two big reasons why it went so well :
My mom only had to teach to me and my brother. She could spend a lot of time on our sole education, unlike teachers who have strict class hours to follow and 20+ students to teach to at once.
It speeded up the process because
1 - she could adapt to the way we liked to learn the best, and
2 - once we understood something she could pass directly to the next thing. It can't be like that in a normal class because not everyone learn at the same speed, nor in the same way. It also allowed her to see immediatly if we were lunatic and bring us back to reality.
And whenever we asked her
why we had to learn something, she always had a satisfying answer, not just
to get good grades and then get a good job, like most people would say.
I still struggled in maths compared to other subjects, but I never learned this fast in my life.
I went back to public in high school, mainly because my mom couldn't teach more advanced subjects on her own. I had excellent grades in everything except maths and sciences, where I didn't started really bad but then slowly went downhill.
So I guess I could just never adapt to the
way STEM are thaught, and not to STEM
themselves.
I wish I hadn't been so intimidated by it when I initially graduated from high school. Now, I think that anyone can do it if they are realistic about how much information they can retain at a given speed and how much work it is and if they refuse to compare themselves to anyone else. Being humble enough to accept failure with grace and persistence has helped me a lot.
I wish I thaught like that when I first went through my classes in high school. I will have to retake them because I failed, and it just feels like a big waste of time. The hardest thing I will have to do in order to succed is to accept failure and fight the shyness of exposing it to others by asking questions when everybody already understood. I will also have to find a good source of motivation, a goal that learning those subjects will make me reach ( because learning in itself isn't a motivating goal to me ).
I'm thinking of maybe becoming an architect. It can become a nice goal, if the job definitively looks nice to me.
When it comes to science, I think that the expectations for student learning in the classroom are generally not well defined, so it's frustrating. Looking at it from an enneagram 5 perspective, I have always liked the idea of learning math in order to be able to strategize better, or becoming a scientist in order to become more secure- more of a lynch pin in a niche subject and not having to interact with the general public on a daily basis.
It sure sounds great.
I love mathematical concepts and solving mathematical problems. I was always very good at solving problems, but never using the standard method of finding a solution. I'd always look for multiple ways to come to the same solution. Back in high school, where we had to provide our working out, I completely struggled. I always got the right answer, but so much of my working was just automatic computations in my head that more often than not, I'd just write an answer by itself. I kept failing despite always getting the correct answer.
That's kinda how I work with language. I know, without knowing
how I know. The right ways to write or say something just pops in my head, and I'm not
always right, but I oftenly am. Happily for me, having to explain why a phrase is formulated in a specific way happens quite rarely, even in class.
