Hiw bad am I at Maths?

[Creamcustards]

I feel I am terrible at Maths. If I express this, somebody will say “you have a B in GCSE / were a primary teacher, you can’t be that bad”.

I don’t feel like a “B” student though, and I only taught the basics to 6 year olds. In the adult world I feel lost and embarrassed when called upon to do sums.

If Maths were reading, I think I’d be a hesitant reader decoding the words, but not comprehending the whole paragraph and having nowhere near the “skim reading” fluency to take short cuts or see the overall picture.

With anithing other than very simple mental addition I have to mentally visualise it in columns like I was taught to in school. I do the same for subtraction, although I often make little mistakes as this is hard to do.

Was driving yesterday at 60mph, and my destination was 6 miles away. Took me ages (several minutes) to fingure out how long it would take me to arrive if I maintained my speed- 10 mins or 6 mins? I figured it out in the end (6 mins - right?) but it took me ages, you can imagine that simpler time / speed / distance sums are usually beyond me, mentally.

I get in a twist over my timesheet at work too. I work 7h 24 mins a day, which is written as 7.4 hours. When I see I have 120 hours of annual leave to take or 15.25 hours of flexi, trying to figure out how many actual days / hours / minutes I have is a bloody nightmare involving a lot of trial and error with a calculator.

I’m not a teacher any more and suddenly feel more aware of and embarrassed by my poor arithmetic. But how bad is is that I can’t do these things easily? I know poor mental maths is quite common, and calculators have a lot to answer for - am I “normal bad” for a professional person, or extra bad and should I be looking at getting myself into some sort of maths for adults course...

Arithmetic is just a very small subset of maths, and doesn’t necessarily reflect one’s ability to study maths well. I did A level maths in the 80s, but was never really quick at ‘arithmetic’ or mental maths, just good at logic and problem solving. You are certainly not alone.

Maths at degree level doesn't really have many numbers. Just loads of letters and greek symbols.

Maths & mental arithmetic are completely different. DH has a physics degree from a top uni & got 5 A grade A levels in the 70s, worked with numbers all his career. I got a C in maths O level. I’m faster & more accurate at mental arithmetic than him but he can do stuff I can’t even start to understand.

I can't do sums in my head very well, I always use a calculator. I work with figures every day, it doesn't bother me.

I'm loving the comments from all the mathematicians here! Very interesting (and amusing !)

@forinborin

OP, there's maths and then there's maths. I have published mathematical papers (nothing too groundbreaking, just in my narrow area of interest, which is more applied maths). And have an undergraduate and a postgraduate degree in pure mathematics. And earn good money now from very mathematically heavy tasks.

With the daily arithmetics though, I am even worse than you. Honestly. Last time when I arrogantly calculated "in my head" how many tiles I needed for my bathroom, I had to pretend in the end I actually wanted to tile the back wall in the garage too - the tiler looked at me in complete disbelief when getting the delivery.

You have no idea how much better this makes me feel

I also have a maths degree and make many errors in arithmetic.

However I think there is a difference in that I would definitely know how to tackle the OPs examples, I might just make a mistake implementing it (over vs under confidence).

It sounds to me like having a handful of examples she is confident with might help op a lot to know how to tackle problems..?

I try to do a ballpark calculation separately to avoid the worst errors!

I guess I'm saying one difference is that those who are officially good at maths but make mistakes are not feeling bad about it

I just remember that at 60 mph you are covering 1 mile in 1 minute.

So I drive everywhere at 60 mph and that way I can easily work out what time I'll get there.

However, be warned, in my experience magistrates do not recognise this as valid grounds for exceeding a speed limit or failing to stop at red traffic lights.

I am ok with some maths but algebra makes no sense to me whatever.

We're you born in the 80s to early 90s? Maths teaching in the 80s and 90s is generally regarded as having been poor (but we did have a lovely time at school!). I've learned many strategies as an adult and am much better now. Things like times table recall is just practice. I'm curious as to how you managed to only teach 6 year olds though? Did you not live in fear of being moved to Y5 or 6?

I was quite bad at maths at school, and whilst I don't have dyscalcula, I do struggle to compute quickly.
It is only since DC started school and I had to learn how maths is done now, that I have improved.

I work with numbers all day every day, it's literally my bread and butter.

Ironically it was the one GCSE I failed in at school! Got 'A's in EVERYTHING else. Math is an odd one in that some aspects of it come very easily to others, other aspects click into place for example when your older.

A lot of this is repetition as a pp said.
I was confused when my new boyfriend who was way better at mental arithmetic than me would ask "how much longer" on a journey when we had passed a sign giving the Km left until I thought about it.
He didn't drive and I didn't work it out I just knew from experience, on a motorway half the distance is usually the time.
I'm an accountant and get teased by my friends for getting the phone out for the calculator if we need to divide a cost
My defense is that no-one wants an accountant to work things out in their head, I'm paid to "show my workings" ☺️
You could work on everyday uses if you like so you appear to work it out quickly but I wouldn't stress about it.
The wedding guest may have been looking at you like that because he thought you were drunk, not because he thought your maths was terrible!
We can't know what other people are thinking so no point trying.

You’re normal bad at maths.

I’m rubbish at maths. My parents got me a tutor and I can remember feeling total agony in those weekly lessons - nothing ever made sense. It took me ages to work out why your car-journey example wasn’t 10 minutes. 😆

I thought about being a teacher when my kids were little and the website said you’d need basic maths. I did the online test snd failed!

Please don’t let one bloke at a wedding reception make you feel bad about yourself. He’s clearly good at maths himself, but lacks empathy. We can’t all do the same stuff!

I wonder if as many people are as 'bad' at English as at maths but don't consider themselves such as it's easier for it to go unnoticed. Obviously most people get plenty of practice at reading and can do it fluently but an awful lot of people struggle with basic punctuation, grammar and syntax, all of which are taught at the same primary level (or below) that the maths concepts people find hard are. An awful lot of people claim to be awful at maths but in general I think primary children actually find the English curriculum harder.

If you're doing mental arithmetic by trying to visualise written methods in your head, then you will find it hard! Written methods are meant to be different to mental methods. Think about telling the time - you can't use column methods for time so if you were e.g. catching a train and it left at 8:47 and the journey took 55 minutes, you might add an hour and subtract 5 minutes to see when it arrived. Or if it took 1 hour 30, you might add the hour to 9:47, then add 13 minutes to 10:00, then add the last 17 minutes to get 10:17. Or add the hour to 9:47 then count in in ten minutes 3 times - 9:57, 10:07, 10:17.

Those are the sorts of things you should be doing when trying to do mental arithmetic - doing a simpler calculation and amending it, breaking it down into chunks, counting on. If you haven't practised these methods and instead are trying to visualise a written method, then you will come to the conclusion that you are rubbish at mental arithmetic compared to others.

It's like if you're trying to find 25% of something, you need to divide by 4. If you're working mentally, then halving and halving again is a great method - trying to visualise a bus stop method and dividing by 4 would be awful!

An awful lot of people claim to be awful at maths but in general I think primary children actually find the English curriculum harder.

The primary English curriculum is unnecessarily complicated wrt grammar. They teach a load of stuff that then isn't needed or built on at secondary.

I think there is far less stigma attached to being 'bad at maths' compared with being 'bad at English'. Parents happily pass on to their children that maths is hard whereas they wouldn't tend to say the same about English.

@Skysblue Thank you- simole answer, what I needed to hear!

@Subordinateclause Oh yes, I’m an ‘85 baby, and my primary maths teaching was awful. Never learnt a single times table, and can’t remember ever actually being taught any methods at all, just slogging my way through textbooks best I could (at one point I was 2 textbooks behind my friends).

And yes, as a teacher I did dread being moved to year 5/6! I guess if I had been, my Maths would have had to improve pretty quickly!
I did do Year 3/4 class once, the good thing in class though is that you always go through the workings out on the board slowly step by step with the kids, and it’s actually better teaching to go at their pace! And I’d make a marking sheet for quick marking. ‘Generate your own sums’ questions could be a bit of a nightmare because they all jad to be worked out individually to mark them! Horribly time consuming! Often ended up being the keen kids who finished all their work and did super complicated sums too 😅 Nightmare!

@TeenMinusTests

ps. 60mph means 60 miles per hour. So 60 miles in 60 minutes So 1 mile in 1 minute So 6 miles in 6 minutes.

By simplifying the numbers I mean this:
120 hours annual leave at 7.4 hours per day.
Too hard.
120 hours at 10 hours a day = 12 days right?
So you did 120/10 to get the answer.

Now you know you need to do 120/7.4 to see how many days leave you have.

For the majority of everyday maths such a level of accuracy is unnecessary, I've never, ever worked out the time for the rest of a journey, too many other factors involved, a rough idea is enough and I taught A level maths!

For mental basic arithmetic, try Killer sudoku. I would really struggle with basic addition and subtraction until I started to do this a few years ago

To be fair JudgeJ those were the two questions the OP was trying to answer in the first place!