Re:Poor math skills of 1st year physicists (Score 1)

See I see a problem here. You say you were a physics tutor, which I would say means minimum post-graduate education. What's missing here is your assumption that YOU learned your critical thinking in high school which might not have been the case. We tend to forget, and i've done this myself, how hard things are when learning them for the first time. I have a younger brother, and when helping him with some maths stuff, I would do like you did, try and get him to work problems out for himself with no guiding. Didn't work. I could see the path to go down, and I thought it was easy, but its because I had all this extra knowledge as well, it had nothing to do with the current state of the school system or anything like that.