Fewer subjects bring up as many memories of worries and agony as math classes: the complicated methods, the confusing signs, and the feared charts and graphs.
Some are even proposing that becoming competent in math is a disturbing experience. It is something lived through rather than understood.
The narrative many have with math is a pity since math is practical. Most of the best courses are from STEM fields and depend on understanding math. Statistics is becoming a helpful lesson in understanding world events and news. If well understood, math lets one solve many of own problems.
I want to elaborate on how you can teach yourself any math in this article.
Step one: begin with a clarification
The critical step to learning math is to get a quick explanation of the subject.
There are many sites where one can get this information. Additionally, specialized resources are also available. The specialized resources many times don’t cover every possible topic. However, they are often more natural, delightful, and useful for the issues that they do.
Any time you get your explanation, your initial step is to watch it. It makes you feel you grasp the fundamentals of how it operates.
In case you don’t understand the explanation
There are two possible reasons for this:
- You lack some essentials for grasping the piece of math. It means you need to go back and look through it again.
- Trying to cover a lot without practice. Watching a piece of explanation and trying it out is a good pattern.
Step two: Practice questions
Math is something done, not memorized after watching.
If you spend all the time on videos, getting too many questions, applying your math understanding may be difficult. Furthermore, it can result in thinking that you’re not good at math though the problem is using an awful method to learn it.
Doing problems as soon as possible can help fix this. Good problems should be exciting and not impractical.
What if I lack questions to answer?
In case you don’t have questions provided, you can do a few things:
- Without checking the answers, do the problems in the explanations.
- Create and solve your problems.
- Try proving theories in the class.
Step three: Understand why it works
Understanding math is very crucial in a way that is different from other subjects. Don’t try to memorize math, as it could be perilous to learn it without understanding.
After, prove to yourself that you understand why the math is working. You can use the Feynman Technique for this.
Step four: Manipulate the math
After answering the provided questions and proving that you understand how they work, another thing is playing with the given problems. Question and see how things change when you try to change the math or the numbers and how it applies to other questions.
Step five: Use the math out of the class
Math aims to use it and not just to pass an exam. To apply this in real-world problems requires breaking from the textbook understanding.
Employing math in real life requires acknowledging the problem, formulating it into a math problem, and working it out.
A lot of work?
Working through the five steps on everything you learn will be time-consuming; however, you don’t need to do it on everything.
Alternatively, think of it as a bar of progress. Work through the steps whenever you can.