Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf
I fully empathise with your experience and I think this is something a lot of educators fail to grasp, that certain people are able to grasp "abstract" concepts better than others. Conversely, there are people who are able to work with "concrete" ideas better than others.
I never enjoyed maths, though I didn't start to struggle with it until I was in Secondary 3 (the equivalent of Grade 9, I believe, or whatever grade you're supposed to be at 15). The main reason was that I couldn't "visualise" the way the equations or formulas worked. Whenever I asked classmates to explain, I would get puzzled stares, followed by the inevitable reply: "Just apply the formula, lah, why make things so difficult for yourself?"
There is a funny scene in the Ghibli movie, Omoide Poro Poro (Only Yesterday), in which the protagonist, a little girl in elementary school, was struggling with maths, specifically the division of fractions by fractions (eg, 1/2 divide by 1/2 = 1). Her elder sister, having been ordered by their mother to tutor her, quickly got exasperated, and scolded the protagonist for being dumb. "Why can't you simply apply the formula?" the sister demanded. The crestfallen girl meekly demonstrated her confusion by drawing a circle.
She said: "I can understand how dividing a circle in half gives you two pieces, but how do I draw the division of a half by a half? I don't understand how I get one whole circle again. Shouldn't it be one quarter?"
Her elder sister was momentarily dumbstruck, and protested weakly: "No, that's the multiplication of fractions (1/2 * 1/2 = 1/4)."
That only confused the poor girl further. "Ehhh.... how can that be?" she wailed. "Why does multiplication make the fraction smaller?"
(It would later turn out that the girl was a gifted actress and potentially a great writer but, alas, her father never allowed her to develop her artistic talents.)
The above, in a nutshell, encapsulates the problem I had with maths. A lot of the time, it was just a matter of teachers and fellow classmates telling me not to be dumb, just follow the rules and get your result, end of story. No further questions needed. No need to know why, just do.
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