Trigonometry. My high school math teacher was a literal math genius and would always go deep into proofs and theory, sometimes not even getting to our homework stuff until the last 5 minutes of our 50 minute class. As a result I went from the “gifted” math group to nearly failing.
When I went to college I had to take a math placement test and ended up in Math 99 (below college level math).
It was there I was finally taught SohCahToa and everything clicked. I actually use simple trig a lot in my job now.
I was very bright when I was young, but unless I was given practical application of knowledge, it just leaked out of my ear.
I was exactly the same with trigonometry, I couldn’t understand it or why were even learning it.
As soon as I started to get into programming and I wanted to have a gun with a bullet that had a certain speed, and it was going at a certain angle, and I needed to break down the horizontal and vertical components of the motion, all of a sudden it felt like I had invented trigonometry myself.
I found that true of so many different things especially with math. No matter how much it was explain to me theoretically, it never made sense until I had a practical application and then it was just obvious to me.
I wish more of my education was that way instead of just learning theory.
Interesting, I had an almost opposite experience. I was good enough with memorization and applying formulas in high school to pass with As but I never really understood what I was doing.
Taking calc again in college and watching a video of Neil Degrass Tyson talk about Newton figuring out orbits are conical sections made everything click for me. Suddenly I remembered the 3D episode of the Simpsons and those coin spinny things at the mall and put it all together.
After that, I was much more interested in figuring out how the formulas worked and it made learning way easier.
I had something similar except I actually got help in high school from a study hall teacher. I can’t remember her name but she had awful halitosis. Somehow, she just explained it in a way that clicked for me.
Trigonometry. My high school math teacher was a literal math genius and would always go deep into proofs and theory, sometimes not even getting to our homework stuff until the last 5 minutes of our 50 minute class. As a result I went from the “gifted” math group to nearly failing.
When I went to college I had to take a math placement test and ended up in Math 99 (below college level math).
It was there I was finally taught SohCahToa and everything clicked. I actually use simple trig a lot in my job now.
I was very bright when I was young, but unless I was given practical application of knowledge, it just leaked out of my ear.
I was exactly the same with trigonometry, I couldn’t understand it or why were even learning it.
As soon as I started to get into programming and I wanted to have a gun with a bullet that had a certain speed, and it was going at a certain angle, and I needed to break down the horizontal and vertical components of the motion, all of a sudden it felt like I had invented trigonometry myself.
I found that true of so many different things especially with math. No matter how much it was explain to me theoretically, it never made sense until I had a practical application and then it was just obvious to me.
I wish more of my education was that way instead of just learning theory.
Interesting, I had an almost opposite experience. I was good enough with memorization and applying formulas in high school to pass with As but I never really understood what I was doing.
Taking calc again in college and watching a video of Neil Degrass Tyson talk about Newton figuring out orbits are conical sections made everything click for me. Suddenly I remembered the 3D episode of the Simpsons and those coin spinny things at the mall and put it all together.
After that, I was much more interested in figuring out how the formulas worked and it made learning way easier.
I had something similar except I actually got help in high school from a study hall teacher. I can’t remember her name but she had awful halitosis. Somehow, she just explained it in a way that clicked for me.
Well they say the olfactory senses do create better memories, so…she was on the right track!
Smell, Co-smell, and Tanscent
Interested to hear more about SohCahToa, my only terrible subject was Math, or more specifically, Algebra.
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/SOHCAHTOA.html
Thanks for the link
Some Old Hag Cracked All Her Teeth On Apples.
Hope that clarifies everything sufficiently!