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Comment by TrainedMonkey | Hacker News Reader

I got burned by this too. Problem, unfortunately, goes deeper than just not learning how to do math. You skip learning ability to structurally learn new things at a young age, because you simply "get" how things work. So by the time you hit the wall you not only not know how to do math correctly, but also have no idea how to structurally learn correct way and must do both at the same time. Here most people give up and say they are bad at math.

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My daughter has gotten burnt in a similar way. She's grown up in the teach to the test era. She has been a straight A student and sadly I did not see it but what she is gifted in is memorization. You tell her 300 answers to the upcoming test and she will be able to recall them. It is now becoming apparent that she is stunted when it comes to actually reasoning and learning, PSAT kicked her butt and as a HS Junior she is struggling to maintain a B. Not sure how to fix this...

Try and find something she's interested in. I was this way all throughout high school because nothing ever interested. When I got to college and started studying CS though, I was extremely interested and always wanted to know how things worked, I still knew most of the answers without trying, but I would dig in to see why the answer worked. This saved me my Junior year when we started getting into complex concept that I couldn't just "figure out". Having something of interest (to the person) to study will almost always lead to better study habits.

I can tell you what worked for a friends daughter: Music. They steered her (somewhere around her sophmore year) into playing piano and eventually she found the guitar.

As she described it "I needed to rewire my brain and music was the way to do that". From her perspective learning to play music helped her begin to understand how things "fit" together in her head. Her ability to memorize things was incredibly helpful (so she was initially a step-up in confidence), but as she played more she began to see how chords build on each other to form songs. She went from rote memorization to actually building a mental model of music.

In the end she became not only a fantastic musician but a MUCH better student.

This. I managed to keep this up through even the reasonably prestigious STEM school I attended for undergrad. It was only when taking reasonably challenging graduate physics courses in grad school and having to do research that I finally was forced to break myself down and learn how to learn.

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