[EllaMentry]

This is completely false:

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2011/09/jonathan-hardesty-9-yea... (the original forum thread seems to be down at the moment) - but it chronicles a guy who started to learn to draw and over the course of 9 years you can see the improvement.

I started playing guitar when I was 11...did I suck then...yes...I could barley hold a full sized guitar...and over the years I have learned new techniques and practiced endlessly...and now people would say I am pretty good.

Writing and math are no different - to peg them as just "talent you are born with" deprives the subject of all the work they have done throughout their lives.

[cliveowen]

That only proves my point, from the video you can clearly see he was gifted with an artistic aptitude that he just honed over the years. I wouldn't be able to draw anything like the first drawings of that guy, not even after 10 years of practice. Practice can get you a long way, but if the seed isn't there, you just won't get that far.

[EllaMentry]

Are you serious?!

The first couple of drawings are terrible, primary school level drawings - the perspective, shading etc. are all completely off.

If you honestly believe you couldn't pull something like that off given 30 minutes of dedicated drawing...well I don't believe you.

Some more examples of skills that are learned:

* Programming

* Public Speaking

* Estimation

* Throwing

* Juggling

Or are you going to start telling me that some babies are born with an innate ability to juggle? or programming?

I am not saying these skills are easy or trivial, they require thousands of hours of dedicated practice. It sounds to me you think most people are simply good at something and do that...when in fact people spend thousands of hours honing and perfecting skills.

You can't jump into the water and start swimming until you lean how to control your body through crawling, standing and lifting...with maths...you may be unable to grasp theorems because you lack basic training in propositional logic (something that is rarely taught before undergraduate unfortunately - it is so simple and provides a grounding that would make any additional mathematics teaching a whole lot easier) - what is your mathematical background? what books have you studied? what lectures/courses have you taken? Lets see if we can't fix this!

[cliveowen]

Obviously a modicum of training is always needed in most contexts, the here is that if you have an innate ability to, say, swim (which I don't by the way) you can pick it up after a few hours in the water (I've seen toddlers do it), and that's only because you have a web of neural pathways that makes you particularly apt to this specific task. Lacking that wiring you're left flailing in the water wondering why you had such a stupid idea as to get in the water in the first place.

[EllaMentry]

Swimming is not innate...some people do pick it up easily, others take a couple of times, but I have never heard of anybody who is "unable to learn how to swim" and once they learn they can practice and get very good at it....there is sometimes a genetic advantage (Micheal Phelps springs to mind) - but he wasn't always nearly 7 foot swimming giant, he had to learn different techniques and practice for hour and hours a day to get as good as he is.

[cliveowen]

I said it multiple times: practice will let you improve in anything but if your genetics is playing against you, you'll face a very steep road.

[EllaMentry]

Actually you started off by saying you can't teach "talent", now you are saying you can teach it but it may be hard...

Do you honestly think your genetics is playing against you in your study of mathematics? Which bits are you struggling with? What have you tried to fix it? What courses have you taken? Have you tried private tutoring? khan academy? Have you tried anything for longer than a couple of a days? weeks? How many hours of deliberate practice do you think you have put into studying mathematics?

[ehsanu1]

You might not be able to draw the first drawing right now, but if you as bad at drawing as the average person, I can't imagine it taking more than a few days or weeks (max) to get to that level, with a very modest time commitment. 10 years of practice dedicated to self-improvement? You'd be extremely technically proficient by then.