Comment Re:How math is taught (Score 1) 210
Having sat through a number of maths classes, and lectures, I find that the people teaching the subject, often fail to appreciate that what they find easy is not necessarily the case for others. This means they don't show the necessary steps or fail to find techniques to facilitate the understanding. Sometimes its almost as if they want to make maths hard to learn. Of course people end up get anxious since they end up feeling stupid.
Having taught a number of math classes, I find that the people taking the subject often fail to appreciate that learning math takes a considerable amount of effort outside of class. You should not expect to go to math lectures for three hours a week and have the subject poured into your brain in that short amount of time. You should expect that there will be times in a math class when you don't understand what the instructor is saying. It is your responsibility as a student to go over and reconstruct what the instructor did in class. Keep track of the things you didn't understand and then actually spend some time thinking about them! If you still can't figure them out on your own, then ask questions about them later.
Although we talk about car analogies here, in order to make things easy to understand to the, I find the same can benefit maths. By trying to understand what the skill set of your audience is and adapting the teaching helps. For example the 'sum' sign looks hard until (if amongst computer people) you explain its just a 'for each' with addition and the 'pi' sign is a 'for each' with multiplication. In certain cases it is equivalent to the linguistic differences between English and Chinese, in that they both can talk about the same thing, but the way in which they do so is not the same.
Math is taught in an abstract way because that is its power: we want mathematical facts to be as widely applicable as possible. If all the instructor teaches is car analogies, then that is all the students will learn, and will end up being lost when they need to apply the same facts to chemical processes, for example. As well, an instructor is usually not guaranteed that all his/her students are computer science majors, so tailoring examples to the audience is not always practical. There isn't time in class to come up with one analogy for the biology majors, and another analogy for the chemistry majors, and then make it really abstract for the math majors, etc. Again, it is the student's responsibility to grapple with the concepts and notation on their own, and if they still can't figure it out, then ask for help!
