Struggling with maths - when you should and when you shouldn't
No-one ever said maths was an easy subject. Its challenge is part of its fascination. At any level it demands we go one step further, and no real progress is made without a genuine attempt to think it through for oneself. Yet the rewards of making that effort are considerable. Whether it's an appreciation of the beauty of it all or simply that satisfaction that says "I didn't think I'd be able to do that, but I can!", the feeling is more than enough to motivate us to go on.
There is, however, another side to the coin, and it is probably very familiar to those of us whose early studies were in the age without the internet, social media or even mobile phones, but still affects school children, students and even professionals from time to time. It's when a concept, or more often, a particular problem just seems impenetrable. However we try, the key just seems to elude us. This can be so frustrating as to make us lose either our temper or the will to carry on, and is surely why so many give up the subject as being just too difficult. This is why the most popular answer to "what was the subject you hated most" must be maths.
When this happens, books or internet documents seldom help, and videos seem either to rush on and fail to answer our problem or to go so slowly that we lose patience. It's at this point that an understanding tutor can be of most help, by seeing why the problem is occurring and prompting with the right questions, or a clear explanation. I hope I've been able to do that as a tutor, but as a learner I've certainly been helped by others in this way. Christopher Bradley, my head of department at Clifton, was brilliant at this. Several times I was struggling with some aspect and a conversation with him solved my problem in just a couple of minutes, but friends and colleagues, whether they knew it or not, have, perhaps by little more than a casual remark, set me on the road to a solution to something that had been the cause of much angst. Here's the richness of maths in that it enables us, even in a small way, to see farther by "standing on the shoulders of giants".