| I've had similar experiences helping my SO, my sister and a good friend with post-high school math in various forms. My SO had a teacher at school who'd determined she couldn't do math, and had the worst passing grade as a result. She wanted to go to engineering college and lacking the prerequisites she had to take their pre-course, ie all the math and physics required compressed in a year. She struggled hard from the get-go, and I had to go back to elementary algebra and build up. Yet after a few hard weeks the efforts started paying off, and in the end she nearly aced the pre-course. My sister had never been into math, and had taken a vocational route working in a kitchen. After some time she wanted to go to college doing something else, and that involved taking college level math. While not as strong as my SO, again similar story where persistence and working the foundations helped a lot, and she aced her somewhat easier college math course on time. My friend was a bit different, in that he'd never been interested in math but had to take it to get the required points to get into some uni program he wanted. He's fairly smart but struggled with motivation. So for him it required finding the right way of forming the questions so he got some motivation to solve it. These are my most direct experiences, though I've also helped others here and there. It led me to believe most people could do reasonably well at entry-level college math (ie basic calculus, statistics etc). For some it might require quite a lot of effort to get there, but still doable for someone with motivation. |