Throughout your school career, how did you view people who were really bad at math...

Throughout your school career, how did you view people who were really bad at math? The kind of kid that made the rest of the class facepalm or sigh in frustration whenever they asked a question that was so basic it hurt. Have you ever met any kids like that who were legitimately smart but for some reason were god awful at math?

yes, all the physicists I've met.
t. math grad student

yes, all of the engineers i've ever met

t. math professor

yes, all the girls I've met.
t. computer engineering student

there's 0 motivation for rote high school math so in hindsight i dont really blame them, i found it incredibly boring myself until i got to university and found out it actually had depth to it

>how did you view people who were really bad at math?
Via a mirror

I have 5+ years tutoring and teaching math. Surely far and few between there are students who are generally intelligent but struggle with a specific topic. It is always due to three things:

1) Shitty teacher, method of teaching or lack of variety in the method.

2) Math anxiety, typically born out of insecurities developed by the student and enforced by parents

3) Lack of effort by the student to learn the subject. IE not reading pre-req material or giving up after 10 seconds.

With that said there are also "dumb" students. Their only problem is not having a secure understanding of the previous material which the current material is reliant on. IE gaps in knowledge that bite them in the ass 1 and a half years later. The tricky part is figuring out where the gap is and reeducating them, after which they are as smart as anyone.

Then there is the third class of kids who legitimately have learning disabilities with anything ranging from intellectual disability to ADD.

TL;DR Almost everyone is easily capable of mastering math up to the calc level, but most people get really shitty teachers.

I was very good at mental arithmetic but had difficulty learning less logical and more procedural aspects of math. I ditched it entirely when the "order of operations", in the faulty way it was taught, began to yield results I was told were incorrect. It seemed arbitrary, and I said fuck dealing with someone else's hackjob excuse for a system. I can build better tools myself.

Unfortunately no one corrected this and I had a lot of shit going on anyway. It took me until I was ~21 to finally admit quantities and their relationships might well be a fundamental part of the universe, and that dealing with the ways we've created to manipulate them might well be worth it. It was as much "someone else's system" as it was part of the universe itself.

I also have a major hole in my mental faculties when it comes to foresight with spatial transforms, like folding paper, etc. Takes GABA-A agonists to partly correct this.

>how did you view people who were really bad at math?
Thought it was whatever since that's common

>Have you ever met any kids like that who were legitimately smart but for some reason were god awful at math?
Yeah. Math isn't for everybody senpai.

>Have you ever met any kids like that who were legitimately smart but for some reason were god awful at math?
Literally never. I've met very gifted people who weren't that interested in it but they certainly didn't "struggle".