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Why Do You Struggle With Quantitative Disciplines?
An explanantion of why you might struggle with maths and numerical disciplines in general
Date : 02/01/2021
Author Information
Uploaded by : Ondrej
Uploaded on : 02/01/2021
Subject : Basic Skills
Why do you struggle
with quantitative disciplines? Let me illustrate the problem
before presenting my case. A new student contacts me with a request for help
with their high school maths. They hate maths, always struggle with it, but now
they reached a point when they have no idea what is going on in their
classroom, and their teacher wants them to quit. Their parents don t know what
to do and are not keen on maths themselves. When I ask the student to describe
in detail how they revised in the past, I already know what they are about to
say. They went to school, did the required bare minimum, avoided maths at all
cost and enjoyed every maths-free break they got. Their heavy dependence on a
calculator is the only reason why they survived in the classroom for so long. A
few details in the above story, main actors and their honesty might differ
however, this underlying pattern holds for about 90 % of students of any
quantitative subject who have ever contacted me. Most people struggle with
quantitative disciplines which is often blamed on the absence of a unique gift
having a mind for numbers. While it is true that these subjects tend to be
more abstract, counterintuitive, intimidating, and each student has a different
processing speed and a unique pattern of learning, we often ignore the most
critical variable: consistent minimal required exposure. If this is accounted
for, the answer to the above questions becomes self-evident. Most people are
too inconsistent and have chronically low active contact with numbers. Is the education system
consistent enough, and does it provide children with this minimum? A school
year has roughly 40 weeks or 200 days in most countries and children tend to
have 4 to 5 periods of numeracy per week plus some homework. An upper bound
estimate is about 300 hours per year, but more realistically about a half of
this time might be spent with actual practice. This estimate implies that
children spend about 2 % of their year doing maths which seems reasonable.
However, on a closer look, we can see that only about 55 % of the days contain
any active practice, while the remaining 45 % have probably no numeracy at all.
In other words, children exercise their skills for half a year, and then they
have the other half to forget most of what they have learnt. If we looked even
closer, the numbers become even worse, and neither consistency nor the minimum
required hours are achieved. If we put this in a context,
how many hours per day are children exposed to a language? The exposure starts
even before they are born, and then they spend an increasingly large portion of
their day actively and passively using language while they listen, watch,
speak, write and read. It is not an overstatement to say that humans spend most
of their life using language to interact with the world around them and master
the required skills in the process. Considering this fact, is it so surprising
that everyone finds the non-quantitative disciplines much more accessible than
the alien numerical ones which they directly see only at school? Nobody is surprised by trivial
facts such as babies cannot immediately walk upright, they need weeks of trial
and error to learn it toddlers cannot instantly speak, they require months to
master a sentence everyone is born illiterate, and we need years of consistent
practice to change this but when it comes to numeracy, many seems to think
this pattern breaks down and a few minutes here and there in the school will
cut it. If this low exposure is not enough, you are not a maths type, and you
need to rationalize that you did all you could, and the failure was inevitable.
Give up now as the quants are only for the chosen few. This myth just does not want
to die, and people keep believing in it even if it gets debunked thousand times
every single day. Dyscalculia is a real problem, and we still have to figure
out how to adapt the teaching of numeracy so that nobody is left out. However,
this genuinely disadvantaged group is tiny. Most people only need to follow a
consistent schedule, work on their own with the free resources available and
ask for a bit of help as soon as they get stuck and cannot help themselves.
Numeracy is just a skill, and we acquire it the same way as all other skills.
Almost everyone who wants to learn it can do so. Everyone can do much better
and pass lower level exams in high school and university.
This resource was uploaded by: Ondrej