How to get better in maths
First take it easy:
Mathematics has a lot in common with cooking: applying “recipes” (algorithms) to cook up desired results. Math has a lot in common with sports and games: doing as much as you can while still following certain (sometimes arbitrary) “rules” to try and accomplish a goal. Math has a lot in common with exploring: discovering new things, even things you could never have imagined you’d find.
Take a nice look at teacher:
Many people are “traumatized” by poor math teachers in the early grades of school. Actually, to be honest, it has to be tough for even a great math
tecacher to breath life into early grade school math. When the curriculum calls for learning how to do arithmetic by hand, that’s pretty lame. People don’t usually do arithmetic by hand in the real world, certainly not long division.
Believe You’re Good At Math:
Whether or not the arbiters of society declare you Good At Math, hold the belief in your heart. Catholics believe that their priest can literally feed them the physical blood and flesh of Jesus Christ, so by comparison, it should be pretty easy to believe in something as mundane as being good at math.
The thing is, belief becomes reality. I experienced this in my own life, because until seventh grade, I did terrible in math classes, hated math (or at least, what I knew of math, which was just mind-numbing arithmetic), and generally believed I was terrible at math. (This, despite learning the BASIC programming language with my brother, which has a lot of overlap with algebra– I just didn’t know it yet) The way I got into math was actually pretty silly. I was going through a phase where I was interested in psychic power development.Of course I never developed psychic powers, but I got seduced by the D&D-ish stereotype of psionicists being extremely smart, and so that led me to start looking at the pictures in Euclid’s Elements. Mostly I didn’t understand them, but I struck out to do geometry on my own, kind of copying the general idea of following axioms and drawing lots of neat pictures with compass and ruler. That made me believe I was a mathematical genius, and by ninth grade everyone was pretty much going along with the “fantasy
CONCLUSION:
One thing I never mentioned in this article: doing lots of hard studying. Follow the five steps I gave, and the studying should become a joy, something you actually like doing, so it doesn’t seem hard at all. In any case, math is something you should do at your own pace, and this is partly why self-taught math is so much more powerful than school-taught math.
If you ever find yourself fed up with doing math exercises, you’re not studying math right. Like anything else, you’ll learn best when you’re having fun. Take your time, skip around to whatever extent the textbook allows, and have some fun.
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