I may have been bagging on Lance Mannion a lot lately, but we have in common that we are basically incapable of math.
Personal prejudice: Most people can’t do math. What we call math is actually simple arithmetic. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Calculating. What Jethro Bodine in his pride at his sixth grade education called cipherin’. Nobody does math, and can do math, until they understand why multiplying two negative numbers together produces a positive number. I’ve never understood that one. So I can’t do math.
I can explain that, but I still am utter shit at math. I can spend 100 times as long as someone who is capable in this field studying, learn far less, and then forget it all irretrievably in a week like I’d never studied it even once. It’s not because I don’t like it or that I don’t try, or that I have a block. Blocks are easy for me to overcome; I just do it. Always have, always will.
It’s just not a block, as much as math people like to believe that for some reason. I guess it makes them feel better. I don’t know.
As the son of a physicist and computer scientist who, hard as he tried, never could get me to follow his math when he helped me with my homework, and as someone who was an A student in math in grade school but was stymied by ninth grade algebra and defeated in eleventh grade by calculus, and as the father of someone who has struggled with a severe math learning disability—dyscalculia they’re calling it these days—and is two daunting math courses shy of completing his degree, I’m here to tell you…
Math ain’t natural.
Yep! Math people just have no idea how hard it is — how impenetrable — to those not so inclined. It’s like someone who when encountering another person who doesn’t speak their language, they just talk progressively louder until they are nearly screaming.
Yeah, that does a lot of good.
I think math people are so very delusional about this because it is easy for them. They just get it, even if they have to work at a little. Like me reading Nietzsche or Wittgenstein or Schopenhauer, even if I don’t understand it right away (which I often do not), I can tell that there is something there, and that if I just keep thinking about it, I will eventually comprehend it fully. I imagine that is what math is like for those who can grasp it, because that it what reading something very hard is like for me. No matter how difficult, I know I will eventually parse it out (and probably explain it to the math person who won’t be able to understand it).
With math, I start out confused, and it never gets better — in fact, it gets worse, more tangled, less comprehensible as I go along. It never makes any more sense, but rather less sense over time. In that realm, it’s obvious that there is nothing I can do or try to get closer to any sort of answer or even basic comprehension. There is no path forward.
It’s strange that these delusional people are so talented at math, but so bad at understanding that for some people, this mathematical implement that they were born with is just not in the math-deficient person’s toolbox.
I wish math people weren’t so smug in their beliefs about this. We who’ve struggled with this for years know our own minds pretty well, and often have spent more hours than the math-talented people for no results at all.
Believe me, if it were a block, most of us would’ve overcome it pretty effortlessly when we were 10.