Thread by @ashtonpittman

I was so bad at math in middle school, I triggered screaming fits from two math teachers.

One threw an open textbook on her head, pulling down on both sides, screaming.

On another day, she threw the textbook to the ground & jumped up & down on it, fists clenched, screaming. 😐

I don't know why I just thought about that now, but it suddenly occurs to me that this probably wasn't normal?

Like, it wasn't my behavior that caused those two teachers to get so frustrated at me they literally screamed (one on two occasions). I just didn't get math.

What I realized in college, when I was able to take online math classes where I could teach myself step-by-step from a textbook, was that I actually wasn't as terrible at math as I thought.

I just didn't understand it the way my math teachers taught it. & I had undiagnosed ADHD.

Example: I went from failing college algebra when I took it as an in-person class where I learned from an instructor writing on a chalkboard to passing it with an A when I took it as an online class where I taught myself using a textbook with steps and relevant examples.

In high school, I'd usually get As in most subjects (sometimes Bs), but with math, I always struggled to pass with a low D—with tutoring!—and didn't get the concepts. At all.

I could've probably been good at math if K-12 had been more accommodating to different learning styles.

It probably also would've been helpful if my math teachers had been able to recognize when students simply needed alternative learning options instead of... screaming in frustration? (I often felt frustrated with myself too, but couldn't scream in class about to let it out).

This is how my math teachers approached teaching math:

1. Write an formula on the board
2. Write the name of it ("Quadratic formula")
3. Write an example problem
4. Talk us through the steps of solving it
5. Assigns us problems to work, often more complex

6. Thinking I understood the steps, I do the HW problems only to find there are complexities & exceptions that I wasn't taught to expect or how to handle in class. I go from feeling confident to frustrated & confused.
7. Also, I have no idea what the point is.

8. The next day, we work through the homework in class. The teacher explains where I went wrong & what the exceptions were to the steps we were given the day before like I should've figured it out on my own. But there's always more unaddressed complexities/exceptions!

9. Eventually, we get application problems that purport to teach real world examples of use.

But the way it's presented feels more like the application problems were created as an avenue for more math—as opposed to math being created to solve these real world problems.

Also, in my middle/high school math classes, I couldn't just teach myself by going through a textbook because teachers usually only used it for homework assignments—and didn't go in the order of the textbook, they'd jump around.

Chapter 11 one week, chapter 5 the next.

The reason I was able to teach myself with online classes and a textbook is because the online courses were designed by the creators of the textbook.

So I could teach myself systematically, chapter by chapter, and build off prior knowledge.

I wasn't at an instructor's mercy.

And the textbooks I was learning from would begin by presenting the kinds of real world circumstances that we needed a way to solve.

And THEN it would introduce me to the mathematical means of solving it—the reverse of how my math teachers would approach it.

I actually really ENJOYED learning math with my online college classes. I even had fun learning calculus (after pre-calculus nearly killed me in high school) and made a high B in it (but only after attempting it in-person and struggling to pass).

Honestly, I thought all the curveballs where HW and test problems had complexities we weren't taught to expect was just math teachers trying to trick me.

A lot of it was prob caused by them jumping around the textbook instead of teaching section by section, tho.

https://twitter.com/ashtonpittman/status/1416512244892962817