Which Maths topics do you not get?

Thank you, they've all come through! Guess what i'm doing this evening!

Ahh forgot to name change back. I'm Martha!

I'll PM you my email address. Thanks tatiana, really appreciate this.

Yes tatiana A level maths. Thanks that would be great if you could. I still have my course notes and A level text book from my access course so can use it too but its all quite familiar to me. Will check out the OU modules and youtube as well thanks.

Congratulations OP!

Could i be really cheeky and ask if you know of any sites where i could practise my maths? I am thinking about a degree but not sure if i should go for maths or what and am not ready to commit to anything but would like to be able to test myself and maybe improve my maths. I took the OU's test last night to see if i could do their maths degree and only got about a third of the questions.

Apologies for the rogue comma

Congratulations, on being offered a place

Congratulations!

I did an access course before a masters and very much enjoyed it compared to A level pure and stats. I would agree with others that teaching those things that people are likely to use is very useful - how to understand charts and graphs, percentages, conversions (miles to km, Fahrenheit to centigrade and weight conversions), dimensions of shapes - particularly circle geometry, maybe even as simple as long multiplication and division and mental math skills. Things that are relevant are much more likely to be retained, and with a solid ground in those it may them be good to move on to the more esoteric things like trig and calculus.

Also agree that trying to ground things in the real world makes it much easier to retain - I see this working with my kids they are much more likely to have confidence in a problem if they can relate to it rather than just seeing piles of letters and numbers.

D'oh national speed limit of 60! And I was so pleased with that little example too, dammit... Why is there no edit function on here?

As someone whose day job involves trying to convey probabilistic information to the general public, I'd second the suggestion for probability, and suggest you google "infographics probability" - there's loads of good stuff on how to help people to get a handle on probabilities by thinking about questions like "how many people in a group of 1000 will have disease X? How many people will get a correct diagnosis from this test? How many people will have a false alarm (i.e. they get told they have the disease when they don't)? How many misses will you get (i.e. they have the disease but the test fails to pick it up)?"

I guess if you're teaching adults, this will mean predominantly people who struggled with maths at school and so are wanting to have another go as an adult - so focus very much on stuff they need in their day-to-day life: percentages, doing "order of magnitude" estimates (one I quite like is "do I get a good estimate of the cost of my weekly shop if I just count all the items in the trolley and call it an average of a pound each?").

Also, give loads of examples. An equation like
T=d1/v1 + d2/v2 + w
presented as an abstract set of mathematical symbols is horrendous for someone who's struggled with maths. But if instead you say "It's 150 miles from here to Land's end, and google is telling me it'll take 2.5 hours driving, because it just divides 150 by the national speed limit of 30, but I know that the last 30 miles is on windy roads, so it makes much more sense to say 120 miles at 60 gives me 2 hours, plus another 30 miles at 30 gives me an extra hour, and then there's that permanent traffic jam on the western side of Bodmin moor which adds another 45 minutes, so that's 3 hours and 45 minutes... so clearly google is talking out of its arse" Suddenly the scary marks on the paper mean something!

Things I use the most in adult life: percentages, ratios & proportions.

I liked Maths and enjoyed number and algebra problems.

Things I struggled with:

Logarithms: WTF is the point?

The integration of trigonometric functions: the rules seemed to change for every example we were given and I never managed to spot a pattern. It felt like they were just pulling the answers out of thin air.

Reverse percentages

Trigonometry - I just cannot see the point in it?!

I did an OU course in Maths ten years ago - not a degree, it was the equivalent of first year at Uni. At the time I would have carried on studying but family life got in the way. I don't think I'd study Maths again at the moment. My job a decade ago was very mathematical, my current job isn't.

Probability. It's the most evilly counter-intuitive mess I've ever tried to make sense of.