What specifically do you not like about it. And I don’t just mean “it’s too hard”, what specifically is hard?

I feel like most people would like mathematics, but the education system failed them, teaching in a way that’s not enjoyable.

  • Madzielle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 hours ago

    I had to take algebra 1 twice in highschool. The fist time I took a college level course, and failed, but passed my second year in the gen course. I then failed algebra 2 miserably, though I will say that year was wild for me, and I didn’t really have fucks for math class. I half assed it and was not surprised I failed. You can’t half ass math class.

    For me, was that if I missed one lesson, it began this giant snowball effect where I couldn’t catch up, so in case of my first year algebra, I gave up and failed. It’s the only class I ever failed.

    The class moved really fast, and I have adhd (unknown to me then). I could thrive in English, History ect because the lessons are structured differently. Math, you dont viciously pay attention, or need more time, I couldn’t keep up with its pacing in highschool. Once imaginary numbers were introduced, I just, yeah.

  • Waldelfe@feddit.org
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    2 hours ago

    I just really really don’t care for it. Not the math, not physics. I don’t care if you can calculate the velocity of a car downhill. I don’t care how heavy the tower of our local castle is. I’ve yet to meet a math problem apart from grocery cost that I care to know the answer of.

    I was actually always pretty good at math, I had Bs and sometimes As. I can memorize the formulas and fill them in and do the equations. But none of it interested me even in the slightest.

    I started actively disliking math when people around me pushed it on me as this be-all-end-all definition of intelligence. Understanding math isn’t enough, you have to actually LOVE calculating advanced math problems in your head, otherwise you’re not smart.

  • slaneesh_is_right@lemmy.org
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    4 hours ago

    I love math. As long as i can look at it on paper and think about it. I absolutely hate math when someone throws numbers at my face and expect an answer.

  • Electricd@lemmybefree.net
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    5 hours ago

    I like the concept and learning about the history and all, but putting it in practice is annoying

    Making imports and running some code functions to apply math things is a lot less annoying

  • FishFace@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Asking why people don’t like something is probably the wrong way to approach this. Ask why people do like it and then you will say that some people will not appreciate the qualities mentioned.

    But maths is hard, objectively. It’s abstract and it’s about logic and the precise application of rules and a lot of people are just not good at those things.

    The heart of doing maths is solving puzzles. Not practical puzzles like “how do I build a cool robot” (though maths comes up in engineering of course) but puzzles that are posed without necessarily having any relation to the real world. “Prove that the limit of this sequence is 2” - “what for?” It’s like doing sudoku or crosswords, if that doesn’t tickle your brain, you won’t like it.

  • Lamplighter@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    I loved math. In 8th grade I was taking 10th grade math. Going into high school, they didn’t accept the advanced course credit and made me retake 9th and 10th grade math. I slept through the classes, passing all the same. From my perspective the teachers appeared to dislike me, not caring about content I already knew, disrespecting them by sleeping and coasting through their class. By 11th grade when I finally reached new content, I didn’t care anymore; math class remained naptime all the same.

  • Soggy@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    I like math just fine up until trigonometry and at that point my brain just can’t hold onto it. Failed college calculus three times. There’s something about the formulas and rules and applications that isn’t intuitive for me at that level. I’m much better at the Earth Sciences and had no problems with chemistry.

    “Liking” math isn’t really accurate either. I don’t care about math, I care about things that require math. Geometry and algebra are useful in a ton of other disciplines and activities. Playing with numbers doesn’t make me feel smart or accomplished the way a puzzle does.

  • Leather@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    It doesn’t answer any questions I’m interested in.

    I do the basics because I have to budget. Interpreting and understanding statistics are helpful at work. Sometimes I build things, and sometimes math helps.

  • Mothra@mander.xyz
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    9 hours ago

    It’s just extremely difficult for me to hold a value in my head and perform an operation against another. I do understand the operations though, the concept is fine, the problem is that of numerical values. Numbers. I’m horrible with them. Always had problems remembering important historical dates, my own personal numbers (ids, age, etc). Because it’s such a struggle it becomes very tiring very quickly, and frustrating. That’s what’s hard.

  • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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    11 hours ago

    Because the mathematics literature fucking sucks.

    It is written by math nerds for math nerds. Show me all the fucking proof, you just spent 10 pages talking about anything and everything but you can’t expand on how your formula has been transformed because of whatever theorem.

    How many god damn time have I read something akin to “the proof is left to the reader. The resulting formula is [something entirely new].”

    Like fuck you, show me how it’s done.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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    9 hours ago

    the education system failed them, teaching in a way that’s not enjoyable.

    Yeah, pretty much. I had to learn a ton of math, where I never got explained what it could be used for. And when it can be applied in an obvious way, namely physics, most of the complexity lays in memorizing a ton of one-letter-abbreviations and formulas, which feels pointless, too.

    I’m a programmer now. That was always easy to me, because the best way to learn that is by gradually solving harder puzzles. You don’t just sit in a classroom and get told all the solutions to all the puzzles…

  • GreenKnight23@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    it’s not that I don’t like it, I just don’t like it as much as I used to.

    I wanted to be a math teacher once upon a time. then, one year the teacher I really looked up to held the entire class back for over two months because 3-5 students couldn’t grasp sin cos & tan. it should have taken us three weeks but instead took us almost three times as long.

    by the end of it, the students that still didn’t grasp it still didn’t grasp it and the students that did grasp it no longer grasped it.

    I was burnt out on it and honestly threw myself into tech just to get the fuck away from math.

    worked out in my favor. teachers get paid three to four times less than I do currently, so it was a win.

    I still couldn’t give a fuck about sin cos & tan.

  • SmokeyDope@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    I enjoy the concepts and structures of mathematics. Fractal geometry, holomorphic dynamics, computational theory, uncertainty principles and all that are fascinating as hell. Discrete systems dancing with continuous integrals at process limits.

    I DO NOT ENJOY working with math. Specifically I cant read complex equations. I don’t have an attention disorder but I swear the moment I try reading anything that looks like this I get overloaded and nope out. If it aint highschool algebra with PEMDAS I cant do it. If you put a bullet to my head and pinned my survival on properly solving a quadratic equation I’d just tell you to shoot me.

    The concepts are cool once you can get past the notation to understand the ontology of whats trying to be conveyed. The actual expanded out notations and trying to do work with them is a fuckin nightmare.

    Also since im ranting can I just say, across STEM the biggest problem is the naming convention. Math and science would be at least 60% more accessable if we went back and renamed all theorems, hypothesis, proofs, to be what they are about instead of just shouting out the guy who discovered it. “eulers identity” doesnt mean a fucking thing. Neither does scrodingers equations or the riemann hypothesis or turing machines. THESE ARE NOT ACCESSABLE NAMES THEY CONVEY NOTHING INTRINSICALLY BESIDES SOME DEAD GUYS LAST NAME. GET SOME PROGRAMMERS WHO KNOW HOW TO ACTUALLY DECLARE HUMAN READABLE STRINGS FOR YOUR FUCKING ABSTRACTION OBJECTS.

    • ProperlyProperTea@lemmy.ml
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      1 hour ago

      This is basically how I feel. I love physics…concepts. Relativity is really cool. Optics is really cool. Magnetism is really cool.

      Sitting down to calculate the force a charged particle feels in an electric field if fired at a certain velocity? That sucks. It’s so easy to make a mistake and a chore to do.

      Also, to your point about naming conventions, it’s an unfortunate side effect of always building on top of existing work. Why is integral symbol the way it is? Isaac Newton wrote an S next to his calculations (I think for “sum”, but I could be wrong). A lot of math is really old. What was a good way of keeping track of math concepts 300 years ago? Idk, but that Riemann guy came up with a way to add an infinite amount of numbers.

      Sure we could rename everything, but then all the textbooks written beforehand would be really confusing.