Name: Artist 2006-12-18 16:18
Hey everyone,
I'm not sure how I got lost and ended up here, but now that I am I have a question for you all. I am a visual-spatial learner, on his way to some day become an artist. All my life I have been better at drawing and expressing/understanding the world and myself emotionally than I have at logic and argumentation. I am a strong case. To give you some examples, I am 21 years old and mess up every time I have to give someone change back when exchanging between notes and coins. I know the four basics, addition/subtraction/multiplication/division, and when I am explained concepts I generally tend to feel that I understand them...
But I always fail when I try calculating by myself, be it by head or anything else. And if I have to in an important context, it gets twice as bad, I lose my head and become nervous and fail tremendously. So, all this time I have lived by the perception that math are good and can help us, but are not that important and can only contribute to special "logically gifted" peoples' lives.
I am currently going through a course where I also take some basic high school level maths as a required subject. I felt nervous with the idea as first as this is actually the highest level I've ever taken, but our teacher is great. He's different and tells me that I could probably be good at it. This is something that actually somehow strikes me at the very core of who I am.
My question here is: What can I use math for? What use does it have? Why should I bother learning? Not speaking as an artist now, but as a person. How can it help me in my life. The way classes usually happen is that we learn...
"This is how you do something." (obscure)
But not why we even want to do it. This is how math has always been teached to me. Recently I have become more in tune with me being a visual-spatial learner, but schools don't teach appropriately for that here. Still, I have been able to use my own approach on learning from our classes, and surprisingly I am seeing progress. This surprises me.
As I mentioned, I need you to help me with probably the most basic of all math that can be taught - what merit it has for existing and being used. I feel that with this teacher I could go out of my way and practice in the afternoons, but I have no argument to why I should. Everywhere math is considered the root of "being smart", but I've never had it with me and still people hold me in high regards.
Please help me.
You could be changing someone's life and preconceptions permanently.
I'm not sure how I got lost and ended up here, but now that I am I have a question for you all. I am a visual-spatial learner, on his way to some day become an artist. All my life I have been better at drawing and expressing/understanding the world and myself emotionally than I have at logic and argumentation. I am a strong case. To give you some examples, I am 21 years old and mess up every time I have to give someone change back when exchanging between notes and coins. I know the four basics, addition/subtraction/multiplication/division, and when I am explained concepts I generally tend to feel that I understand them...
But I always fail when I try calculating by myself, be it by head or anything else. And if I have to in an important context, it gets twice as bad, I lose my head and become nervous and fail tremendously. So, all this time I have lived by the perception that math are good and can help us, but are not that important and can only contribute to special "logically gifted" peoples' lives.
I am currently going through a course where I also take some basic high school level maths as a required subject. I felt nervous with the idea as first as this is actually the highest level I've ever taken, but our teacher is great. He's different and tells me that I could probably be good at it. This is something that actually somehow strikes me at the very core of who I am.
My question here is: What can I use math for? What use does it have? Why should I bother learning? Not speaking as an artist now, but as a person. How can it help me in my life. The way classes usually happen is that we learn...
"This is how you do something." (obscure)
But not why we even want to do it. This is how math has always been teached to me. Recently I have become more in tune with me being a visual-spatial learner, but schools don't teach appropriately for that here. Still, I have been able to use my own approach on learning from our classes, and surprisingly I am seeing progress. This surprises me.
As I mentioned, I need you to help me with probably the most basic of all math that can be taught - what merit it has for existing and being used. I feel that with this teacher I could go out of my way and practice in the afternoons, but I have no argument to why I should. Everywhere math is considered the root of "being smart", but I've never had it with me and still people hold me in high regards.
Please help me.
You could be changing someone's life and preconceptions permanently.