Part of the problem I'm having is that my basic number sense is excellent, but my higher math skills are weak, because sometime around grade ten or so, I stopped understanding what the math meant. But I could still do it - I could, and still can, solve for x, I knew all the rules, I even knew some of the reasons they were rules - but I didn't understand why I was doing it or what real-life situations it would apply to. If you give me a word problem that would be easy to solve with an equation, I probably won't come up with the equation. I might be able to figure it out by trial-and-error methods, because like I said, my number sense is excellent, but I can't use algebra for its original purpose: to solve problems involving change.
I'm going to get a high school teacher friend of mine to borrow a few textbooks for me and brush up over the summer. In the meantime, I can wax eloquent about how unconscionable it is that a kid like me, with number sense and a high level of interest and generally a teacher's dream student, could have gotten all the way through high school math with marks in the eighties and no clue why she was doing any of it.
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Date: 2010-03-18 05:43 pm (UTC)I'm going to get a high school teacher friend of mine to borrow a few textbooks for me and brush up over the summer. In the meantime, I can wax eloquent about how unconscionable it is that a kid like me, with number sense and a high level of interest and generally a teacher's dream student, could have gotten all the way through high school math with marks in the eighties and no clue why she was doing any of it.