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Comment by beebeepka | Hacker News Reader

Not everything is hard work. Some are smarter (or better equipped) than others. You can spend an eternity teaching me math and still won't be able to accomplish anything. It's almost like different people exist and they have different skill sets and interests.

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Unless you have a specific learning disability, I refuse to believe that you are unteachable. Maybe you have zero interest (in which case, of course you won't learn). That's fine. Maybe abstract reasoning doesn't come as natural to you as it does to others, that's possible. But we know how plastic the brain is. Given enough time and dedication, you should be able to learn things - certainly not PhD level stuff, but the basics.

> Maybe you have zero interest (in which case, of course you won't learn).

Quoted sentence does a lot of heavy lifting in your reasoning. Being intrinsically interested in something is integral part of learning. And, yes, obviously for people who have zero interest in subject it will act as "specific learning disability". I know this because I tend to be interested in programming-related subjects and, consecutively, capable of learning them, but I could never muster any interest trigonometry or calculus homework. I've also known multiple people who felt the same way about debugging their software development homework - they weren't interested and hated every second of it.

I don't think you can count "zero interest" as being a learning disability. I hated drawing and still do (and other things too), but I could probably still learn the basics of it if, say, my life depended on it.

Exactly! And another person in your class that is interested in painting could become world class in it while you will be struggling to learn basics.

I guess you mean well but this sort of reasoning is borderline offensive. I said math is hard to me and you immediately jumped to "abstract reasoning" as if that means math and nothing else.

Saw plenty of this in school. Not appreciated.

I apologise if I have caused any offense, because that wasn't my intent.

I feel you missed the main point of my comment, though. Even if abstract reasoning, or certain forms of abstract reasoning, were not natural to you (something that I can impossibly judge), it wouldn't mean, as you initially claimed, that it would be impossible to teach you mathematics.

Oh, understood the main point just fine. You are not wrong.

Just got a little upset about the rest. I wouldn't have reacted as I did had you phrased it a bit differently, like in the post I am currently replying to.

I don't think your offense was warranted. You've got a chip on your shoulder. Other people may be able to tell but either haven't confronted you about it, because it wasn't worth it to them, or you haven't responded well to feedback.

Either way I recommend reflecting on it.

Yeah I experienced this firsthand. My roommate in college was a physics genius. He would grok concepts without really studying very intensely— often after a single reading or lecture.

He would intuit solutions to problems based on extrapolating from the textbook. The undergraduate stuff all clicked right away for him.

Even when we scored the same on an exam, the difference in effort expended was dramatic

You are confusing the difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient one. The argument was that practicing was necessary to gain a deep understanding of math, not that it was sufficient.

Ironically, this is one of the first things they teach you in college level math (or at least they did in my case).

I’ve tutored many students in math and it’s really common for people to feel the way you do. They’ve had bad experiences at some point or another, whether it’s with teachers or classmates.

There are a lot of different reasons why students feel the way you do and (unfortunately) give up on math. It’s a shame because I believe most of those reasons are specific to the high school setting and from what I’ve seen, students have a much better time if they come back to math later in life and study without that environment.

Interest also plays a role, of course. And not everyone will have the interest to go back and study again, later in life.

I did come back to it as an adult. Spent a while doing 2d and 3d graphics. It was much easier as an adult but rendering involves too much of this math stuff and I gave up. Definitely not for equipped to shine as graphics programmer.

Which brings us to my original point - not everyone can do it (well).

I bet they said this back in the day when illiteracy was a widespread thing. Some people just weren't "cut out to read".

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