The big blind spot in my education was mathematics. Great with humanities, decent with sciences, but I got to algebra and it stopped being a tangible thing with use-value. I can calculate an artillery shell's trajectory with the quadratic formula but the only mental understanding of that or why it's important is specifically the one example of it where I'm analysing something real. To get into the higher level algebra courses for my degree, the school required an algebraic literacy course. It's taught by a grad student whose research is on anxiety in mathematics testing. Twice a week for two hours you're doing algebra in the ideal environment for it which sounds great.
I don't know what that looks like in a classroom. On zoom it's a quick lecture where everything written is immediately out of frame followed by random groups working through a list of 10-20 problems. I see a bunch of numeric gibberish like I'm a CSI Miami investigator and then one or two classmates are staring me directly in the face and depending on me for time-sensitive problem solving. I'm doing work I don't understand, that I have to cram youtube videos for just to make sure the patterns look right, with two strangers I fuck over if I'm not as fast as them. Who are looking directly at my face for two hours.
That class made me actively unlearn algebra. I felt more anxiety before those sessions than I did in an ambulance riding to cardiac arrests.
Math is hilarious in that there are like, 15 different ways you can be taught a certain subject, and different people respond to different methods in radically different ways. But the way it works now, you get pretty much a random professor out of the three or so in a department, and they usually teach it the way they understood it, and if you don't get it then it's your fault. Definitely go to youtube for stuff your professor is unable or unwilling to help you with. I highly recommend Professor Leonard's youtube channel, he has a ton of college algebra and beyond stuff and a lot of people seem to react to him positively.
The big blind spot in my education was mathematics. Great with humanities, decent with sciences, but I got to algebra and it stopped being a tangible thing with use-value. I can calculate an artillery shell's trajectory with the quadratic formula but the only mental understanding of that or why it's important is specifically the one example of it where I'm analysing something real. To get into the higher level algebra courses for my degree, the school required an algebraic literacy course. It's taught by a grad student whose research is on anxiety in mathematics testing. Twice a week for two hours you're doing algebra in the ideal environment for it which sounds great.
I don't know what that looks like in a classroom. On zoom it's a quick lecture where everything written is immediately out of frame followed by random groups working through a list of 10-20 problems. I see a bunch of numeric gibberish like I'm a CSI Miami investigator and then one or two classmates are staring me directly in the face and depending on me for time-sensitive problem solving. I'm doing work I don't understand, that I have to cram youtube videos for just to make sure the patterns look right, with two strangers I fuck over if I'm not as fast as them. Who are looking directly at my face for two hours.
That class made me actively unlearn algebra. I felt more anxiety before those sessions than I did in an ambulance riding to cardiac arrests.
Math is hilarious in that there are like, 15 different ways you can be taught a certain subject, and different people respond to different methods in radically different ways. But the way it works now, you get pretty much a random professor out of the three or so in a department, and they usually teach it the way they understood it, and if you don't get it then it's your fault. Definitely go to youtube for stuff your professor is unable or unwilling to help you with. I highly recommend Professor Leonard's youtube channel, he has a ton of college algebra and beyond stuff and a lot of people seem to react to him positively.