Community Chat

[on the bay]

The thread about did anyone ever tell you you should be something made me think of experiences with math thru the years.

I'd love to hear others experiences with this.

Here's an example.

I'm really good at Algebra and geometry but when I've tried to get chemistry or trig or reading maps! its is awful. I just can't get it.

Yet ,I've taught a gifted and talented math class (middle school) and developed my own math formula.

I hate reading maps or seeing drafts of rooms.

I'm the last to get the simplest joke!

Someone told me that people who don't get jokes don't like to read maps.Also charts! They look like a puzzle to me.

There are definitely different parts of our brains that learn and understand these different forms of mathematics.

[Ruby Laine]

@on the bay, that is so funny. I mentioned on another thread from a few months ago that I have those exact issues. The only reason I passed inorganic chemistry is because I was dating the lab TA. 

I love anatomy & physiology, biology, and lots of life sciences. But I have fake laughed through many, many jokes. Good friends explain jokes to me. 

Hate maps. They are like a foreign language. We all have our strengths and weaknesses for sure. 

[on the bay]

@Ruby Laine-

That is so neat!!

I knew or was hoping there would be others like me!

My family explains jokes to me too!😁

[Q4u]

I can tell you rounded up by only a half dollar or so how much 35% off a sale item is without a calculator or pencil... which blew DH out of the water when I did this in front of him..... yet Math in general.... I can do the functions and have it turn out ok, but it can be a struggle.  I can read maps and don't mind doing so and get most jokes, but time in my brain is "sometime in the future", I have to write down an appt and put it on my calendar.  I have to see it in relationship to the month or I don't get it (my older son with an IQ of 163 inherited this!) ... yet he was teaching MIT students over Skype Physics 23)..... and for me, remembering systems in the human body and medicines seem to come easily to me.... 

Interesting how different we all are... maybe we''ve been given this as some kind of gift so we have to rely on others for what is lacking.....      

[Noel7]

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@on the bay wrote:

The thread about did anyone ever tell you you should be something made me think of experiences with math thru the years.

I'd love to hear others experiences with this.

Here's an example.

I'm really good at Algebra and geometry but when I've tried to get chemistry or trig or reading maps! its is awful. I just can't get it.

Yet ,I've taught a gifted and talented math class (middle school) and developed my own math formula.

I hate reading maps or seeing drafts of rooms.

I'm the last to get the simplest joke!

Someone told me that people who don't get jokes don't like to read maps.Also charts! They look like a puzzle to me.

There are definitely different parts of our brains that learn and understand these different forms of mathematics.

---

Hi @on the bay

I didn't know you were a math teacher!  That's wonderful!  My husband and daughter are also math people, but not I   My third grade teacher used to line us up for quick multiplication tables and if anyone missed, she'd slap us girls on our bare legs with a yardstick.  I was always nervous about math after that.  I liked new math in college and made it through physics but I was sure out of my element. 

Congratulations to you!  I do get jokes, no matter how subtle, and I can read a map, also complicated science studies and graphs, but ask me a quick multiplication problem and I break out in a sweat

[Mom2Dogs]

My dh does math in his head, if we happen to be shopping together he always calculates the sale for me......plus adds up in his head what I should owe if I have other things to purchase....a gift I don't have!

[SilleeMee]

I never 'got'  trig or geometry. Struggled with them in fact. But give me a map or a chemistry equation and could tell you all about  those things. I have a MS in clinical chemistry and I studied cartography in college. 

"whoooosh"...that's the sound of many jokes over my head. @on the bay

[hennypenny]

I love to paint and draw, I love to read, enjoy social studies, anthro, many earth sciences, but for the life of me I don't get math.

It took me two tries to get through algebra. did fine in geometry, but the rest was a giant waste of time.

I had friends who took bone head english in college. Not I. I took baby math.

My counselor at the time said he couldnt believe my test scores. Off the charts in English etc and a total bust in math.

I was fired from a job where I was supposed to make change at a store.

I also find that reading instructions sometimes doesn't work for me. Being shown is a much easier way for me to learn.

I do get jokes.

[on the bay]

I think its totally amazing that we can feel brilliant in some areas of mathematics or even daily uses, maps and charts and graphs or jokes and other parts just don't compute and never will.

@Noel7-

See you are good at graphs, maps and science studies😳es, @SilleeMee-you at chemistry!😵, @Q4u-well, I don't even know what to say😁,

and @Ruby Laine-I fake laugh along with you lol!

There are definitely different parts of the brain that go with all these different things.

and @Noel7-

I only got that one GT math class over the summer, but was mostly with emotionally disturbed and autistic kids as they mainstreamed in classes. The math class was so much fun and the kids were so great. I did a science class too but that was not as much fun.

That is awful what your teacher did to you. Was it a Catholic school by any chance? That's the only schools i've heard of that hit kids like that.

My neighbor talks about that all the time.

I think its kind of strange that they don't talk about this (the different parts of the brain and how it understand things) that I've ever heard of in schools, all the time I was in them anyway, especially the math teachers. Just the different "types" of learning-auditory, musical etc.

I do remember when my kids were in school, their math teachers told all the parents-"Please dont' help your children with their homework anymore lol!"

They had entirely new methods of teaching. I thought their long division was so much more complicated than how we learned it, but not to them I guess.

Anyway, we should all be proud of ourselves! And good we have family and or husbands to explain jokes or go grocery shopping with us! 👏

[SilleeMee]

My highschool math teacher called me in one day to discuss my falling grades. 'Mr. Brodie' said to me: "You can do anything if you put your mind to it". Well, I guess I could never put my mind to math. It just was never in my cards. I still count on my fingers and forget about doing the math in my head.