| I just finished a mathematics degree (BMath). Not a single one of my professors was a teacher in the sense of a primary/secondary school teacher. They lectured for an hour, three times per week, and assigned weekly or biweekly coursework. They set midterms and final exams and they assigned all the grading to TAs. Key takeaways: * Mathematics is hard. Much harder than most other subjects (except physics which is mostly hard because of all the math involved). * University is not like primary/secondary school. It is a place where you need to learn how to take responsibility for your own learning. Ideally, you learn how to become an adult. Every one of my classmates began their degrees from a different place. They excelled in some areas and struggled in others. Many dropped out. This led me to believe that most secondary schools do not fully prepare their students to study mathematics. Having said that, those of us who did make it weren't exactly geniuses. Just people who got used to it. "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." -- John von Neumann I've been tutoring high school students in math (and other subjects) for 8 years now. One thing I'd like to add is that I can tell who will succeed at mathematics and who will struggle just by watching them work from across the room. The students who succeed are the ones who can sit there and focus for hours at a time. The ones who struggle do so because they can't focus for more than five minutes and then start socializing. I think one of the biggest issues for people studying math is that they either can't focus (due to ADHD) or they have math anxiety which fills them with dread any time they try to study. This dread can be so overwhelming that they will do anything they can to avoid it, so they stop studying and do something else. When I was studying math I was spending upwards of 40 hours per week working on homework. Although this is normal for anyone with a full-time job, it's an unfathomable amount of time to be studying math for those who struggle. This is really what it takes though. An unrelenting drive to figure things out. |
It really was the savior of me. I can focus for hours when I get into something, but its the friction of starting up that I found other people really helped with. There are formal names for it, like "body doubling", but I didnt know of that, I just knew it was critical to work together with others to get stuff done, which as the above correctly writes, absolutely must be done.