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Comment by sparklingmango | Hacker News Reader

When I was in undergrad, I declared a math minor quite late - just before my junior year. This led to me taking up to 9 hours of math credits in a semester. The reason I declared my math minor was because I was interested in going for a PhD in economics and my econ professors all recommended that I try to take as many math classes as possible to prepare. Reader, I was not a 'numbers person' at all.

However, in all of my math classes, I asked questions all. the. time. when I didn't understand. I would go to office hours and the teachers were seriously so helpful. This was the only way I survived. I learned that you don't have to be a 'numbers person' at all to be good at math. You just have to understand what's going on under the hood, and this may require lots of questions and outside help. But most importantly, you just have to practice. I ended up graduating with nearly a 4.0 for my math minor.

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> I would go to office hours and the teachers were seriously so helpful.

As a grad student that taught undergrads I always encouraged students to attend office hours. Most instructors do want you to succeed and one-on-one time is one of the best ways to learn. Definitely take advantage of your instructors' office hours; ask questions about anything that you aren't 100% sure about!

> I would go to office hours and the teachers were seriously so helpful. This was the only way I survived. I learned that you don't have to be a 'numbers person' at all to be good at math. You just have to understand what's going on under the hood, and this may require lots of questions and outside help. But most importantly, you just have to practice

I agree with all of this and it's how I got through extensive math. I'm not a "natural" at math and I'm not sure that really exists or possibly very people that are. I made sure to get to the office hours and I was surprised that there was almost no one there most of the time. I figured the cost of tuition is best justified by using as many hours of one-on-one time with an expert in the subject to better understand it yourself.

And to your last point about practice, I can't emphasize this enough. I would do the same problem sets over and over until I had them down. And it wasn't just memorizing the steps but rather getting to the point of being able to recognize the pattern. This made math "easy" at that point which is a weird phenomenon. Something that seemed so confusing and impossible suddenly becomes "easy". And then you can move on to the next step.

I understand rote learning is not popular because it is painful. But I do believe "drilling it in" over and over gets the job done. But it takes the will and the effort. It's been a long time but I think I could still solve most the math I took back then.

> I made sure to get to the office hours and I was surprised that there was almost no one there most of the time. I figured the cost of tuition is best justified by using as many hours of one-on-one time with an expert in the subject to better understand it yourself

Truth!

> I made sure to get to the office hours and I was surprised that there was almost no one there most of the time.

One of my biggest regrets about university is not taking advantage of office hours. For me it was a combination of 1) social anxiety and 2) thinking that if I really belonged in this program (physics) I should really be able to figure everything out on my own. I know now that this is a stupid way to think but it's the way I felt at the time.

I TA and tell my students that if they don't come to office hours or ask questions that they might as well be getting their degree on YouTube.

I don't mean this in the sense that they have to ask for every class, but the advantage of attending school (besides the piece of paper) is to get direct help. But I'm not attending a top 10 university and honestly most topics are covered by one of those universities and they post their lectures on YouTube or their own OCW.

Out of interest, roughly what proportion of students do come to the office hours?

Really depends on the class. One class I had basically no one. This one usually about 2-3 (out of 40) but more as we're nearing the end of term. Sometimes people come to say hi (again, class dependent). Largest I've had was like 8.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem

  the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better

A tutor can notice gaps. You can't.

I find this concept of being a numbers person weird to being good at math. Most math is about symbol manipulation and numbers are really only at the end.

> Most math is about symbol manipulation and numbers are really only at the end.

During the first semester at uni, the math prof was going through some non-trivial (at that stage) "real-world" example involving definite integrals.

After what felt like 10 minutes of manipulating integrals and such we got to the final "x = ..." equation, upon which he turned away from the blackboard and said "and then you can just plug in the numbers and calculate the result, but that's not really interesting". And so the lecture continued...

Middle School / High School: "What are these letters doing in my math?!"

Post University: "What are these numbers doing in my math?!"

Here numbers are always in the beginning (of each chapter as the chapter number....)

Getting students to seek consultation is a major problem. I advise them to come in small groups. This helps the shy ones. They don’t realize that it is very difficult to fail a student who asks for help. Any failure of such a student is implicitly also the teacher’s.

Only true for the teachers that care. A lot of my professors didn't give a damn about teaching and were annoyed that I was wasting their time showing up to these office hours.

Was this math? I found usually math guys including professors like to talk about math.

In my experience, when they're top tier math researchers they tend to be oblivious to the student's perspective, grasping the problem too well to give it detailed treatment. This is neither a failing of their enthusiasm nor a social tactic, but an imbalance in their abilities.

An old anecdote is the professor who was asked by a student how a certain problem is solved. The professor paused in thought for a moments, then gave the answer. The student asked again how to solve it, and the professor, again, thought for a while and gave the answer.

The student persisted: "but how is it done?" To which the professor gave a frustrated look and said, "I already solved it two different ways, what more do you want?"

University lecturers in particular are a deluded bunch. They mistake their role for one of power and forget that the students are their employers. Source: 100 years as a University lecturer.

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