Stuff that you struggled with in school

[SasQ 1,375]

Are there any subjects you always struggled with in school?
Things that you always had trouble understanding?

I'm curious to hear from you about it, because I'm planning to make some educational videos in a near future and it makes me wonder what are the things people always wanted to learn but encountered problems when trying to study them.

Therefore I'd like you to be more specific than just "I always hated math" or "my chemistry teacher was mad and ugly" because that wouldn't really tell me anything new – I already know that schools suck I'd rather like to know the details – what exactly was difficult for you to understand and why. E.g.
      "I struggled with history because I couldn't memorize all those dates", or
      "I had trouble with physics problems because I never knew which formula should I use"
– stuff like that. Stuff that could help me figure out what exactly causes problems when people try to learn different things, so that I could try finding some better ways of explaining it.

You can also just write about some stuff that you always wanted to learn / understand, but couldn't find any good sources of knowledge about that subject. That would be helpful as well

Another good idea would be to show some example problems that you couldn't solve or didn't get.

Edited August 18, 2020 by SasQ
Clarification

[SparklingSquirrels 21,332]

I struggled with my pre-calculus math course because at my school, we were just given a list of formulas to memorize, without ever actually learning their purpose or real-world applications. The topics were just too abstract and left everyone thinking "when does anyone ever even use this?"

Analytic trigonometry in particular was a nightmare . And no matter how much I tried, I could never memorize that dang Unit Circle!

Edited August 17, 2020 by SparklingSwirls

[ExplosionMare 18,062]

I struggled with algebra that went past two or three different steps. WAY too many things for me to process all at once!

History was a bit of a problem in the more recent classes only because my teacher had “open-ended” essays that somehow always found ways to prove you were wrong. I never understood what I was really supposed to say or what side of whatever we were learning I was supposed to support. It also took me forever to realize that Spain’s a part of Europe, so there’s that...🙄

[Courageous Thunder Dash 7,824]

Two words: Critical thinking.

I hated critical thinking questions. They were really hard for me to comprehend. This was especially in history class.  

[Thuja 3,659]

Mostly everything that wasn't art or gym?  How I passed high school with only one repeat year confuses me.  I tended to pass everything by the seat of my pants...

[AppleButt 8,675]

I struggled at math.  I don’t know if I can give a reason why.  Just numbers and stuff weren’t my thing.  Especially when letters started getting involved. 
 

I also had bad reading comprehension.   Was never really on par with reading like everyone else.  I recently got diagnosed with adhd though so I’d say that’s why. 

[Ashen Pathfinder 16,161]

Algebra was probably my weakest class, but I believe inadequate was largely at fault. When I got to college and proper teaching/tutoring; I aced it pretty well. Funny how that works!

[Tom Gallagher 33,581]

I struggle big time in school with a lot of things, maths especially. I only have two years left but believe me, if it was easier to get to college by dropping out of school, I’d do it. 

[Ittoni 538]

math, english, anything to do with memory like history, I couldn't remember when we were supposed to gave presentations so I used to be the one that didn't remember.  

[DubWolf 17,247]

English class. Having to write about how a book is written a certain way to mean something  .

I always preferred just using logic and facts to make a case than trying to sneak some hidden meaning in something  .

[Splashee 28,563]

I struggled a lot, sitting straight in the chair. I usually started wiggling on the two back legs of the chair, or just started laying weirdly in the chair. I fell backwards once.

Very difficult to sit during class, wanted to take nap until recess

[ExplosionMare 18,062]

5 hours ago, WWolf said:

English class. Having to write about how a book is written a certain way to mean something  .

I always preferred just using logic and facts to make a case than trying to sneak some hidden meaning in something  .

I always hated it when I found a meaning and it was “wrong”. It’s MY meaning, literature’s supposed to be deciphered in different ways! 

[Envy 6,143]

Pretty much everything. I was even really mediocre at history, even though I loved it. I was horrible at math and, TBH, also music theory. My music theory teacher straight-up told me that it wouldn't be a good idea for me to go on to be a music major. Miraculously, it was the first semester of college where I 'got' music theory and now I can't even understand how I didn't get it in high school.

But yeah, I really wasn't any good at anything in high school. Truth be told, I'm not wonderful at anything nowadays, either. I just learned how to study. But studying just helped me ace the tests, it didn't make me actually understand things in depth.

[BroomsNHops 260]

I was okay at history, but math was my worst subject. I dreaded the class mostly because I would get confused early on in the lesson as to where they got 'that' number from and what they had done to get the answer. Gods above help me when they wrote just the answer down and I was left wondering how the hell they got it.  It didn't help that the teacher back then used powerpoint to teach math. So instead of me being able to see him work out the problem, he just clicked the next button and there it was solved.  Geometry was actually good to me because the teacher there actually wrote out the problems on an overhead projector and took the time to show how they were solved.

 

[Miss 6,223]

Definitely math. Geometry (when I got to trigonometry), Physics, and Algebra II fucked me, all at the same time, roped up and sweaty when I was in high school. 

Chemistry had its turn with me as well. 

[ShadOBabe 18,997]

Spanish was the worst. The unfamiliar grammar rules would trip me up, but much worse was my professors. The best grade I got in Spanish was when I had my second semester professor whose first language was actually English. So she was really, really good at explaining Spanish to an English speaking student.

Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure my first semester Spanish teacher didn’t even understand everything WE were asking her.

[DubWolf 17,247]

1 hour ago, ExplosionMare said:

I always hated it when I found a meaning and it was “wrong”. It’s MY meaning, literature’s supposed to be deciphered in different ways! 

Aye. Although my own interpretations kinda did suck usually because I didn’t pick up the rhetorical and “literary devices” very well or understood them, or got a bigger meaning out of them  . Trust me, it was basically fluff or BS  .

Math I loved  .

[Cagey 4,248]

Understanding math is like a switch in my head. If I don’t understand how it’s done, it sounds like nonsense until the switch flips and I suddenly get it. 

English writing became progressively harder for me as I found it more and more difficult to explain my reasoning and as “quality” writing became more and more pretentious-sounding.

I found history difficult because of memorization. 

Physics was a hard science for me. Concepts + formulas + word problems = confusion. It helped when I was working in a small group. 

[Gaines 1,219]

Surprisingly, I struggled during PE. I was never really a fit or active as a kid, and I suppose I discouraged myself from even trying. After 7th grade, I stopped taking PE classes.

[Vefka 1,499]

I love algebra (in fact it's favourite subject), but I struggle with geometry. I just can't understand how this "proving" thing works and I can't memorize theorems

History sounds pretty interesting, but I'm terrible at memorizing names, dates and events order. I kinda abstractly remember large events in history, but when it comes to details and persons...

Social studies. There's nothing good about this subject, completely uninteresting and extremely complicated. So many terms which are sometimes blending together and barely distinguishable, so many tiny pitfalls in laws, these social institution things, etc. I just can't understand anything

Biology. The whole subject is straight up cramming and my brain refuses to do this kind of things

Literature. I'm not a person who can see deep meaning, I can just scratch the surface with facts and that's all. I always get C mark in essays

Russian. Not really relevant here, I know, but still. So many idiotic, illogical rules, even more exceptions in every single rule. My the most hated subject

[Dreambiscuit 9,623]

Things like algebra, calculus or anything I knew I’d never have any need for. These were hard to retain because I had no interest in learning them. To learn you have to be interested, at least to some degree, and I can’t get interested in wasting time and effort on something I have no use for. I love learning and have interest in almost every kind of subject, but they have to be presented by someone who can teach effectively rather than just droning on dryly by rote. 

I also was bad at gym. I'm not very good at sports; I'm fit but not good with coordination I guess. This made it difficult when gym classes focused on playing competitive sports where I was always the one responsible for losing the game for whatever team that was unlucky enough to get me on their roster. Focus should be on learning the rules of the sport and general sportsmanship rather than 'whoever wins passes the class and the loser gets beat up after school by their teammates.' 

[TheRockASaurus Rex 50,719]

Just now, Dreambiscuit said:

Things like algebra, calculus or anything I knew I’d never have any need for. These were hard to retain because I had no interest in learning them. To learn you have to be interested, at least to some degree, and I can’t get interested in wasting time and effort on something I have no use for. I love learning and have interest in almost every kind of subject, but they have to be presented by someone who can teach effectively rather than just droning on dryly by rote. 

I also was bad at gym. I'm not very good at sports; I'm fit but not good with coordination I guess. This made it difficult when gym classes focused on playing competitive sports where I was always the one responsible for losing the game for whatever team that was unlucky enough to get me on their roster. Focus should be on learning the rules of the sport and general sportsmanship rather than 'whoever wins passes the class and the loser gets beat up after school by their teammates.' 

Algebra was the biggest pain in the ass.

[Treeglow Flicker 13,619]

Physical Education. I was not made for team sports and had no interest in it whatsoever. So motivation and any kind of enjoyment got in the way of it. Couldn't we have just played Snooker or Darts?

[DixonTheAdversary 1,632]

Science was always my worst subject, but when I was in Elementary school, I struggled with anything that wasn't Reading.

[SasQ 1,375]

Whoa, one night and so many replies already!
Some of them very useful, some of them less useful, some of them begging for more clarification.
I'll try to address them all, but instead of doing it in sequence, I'll group them by subjects. I also emphasise in bold red the things that drew my attention.

Let's start with maths, because this seems to be the subject most people complained about (and this doesn't surprise me the slightest, of course ).

9 hours ago, Vefka said:

and I can't memorize theorems

Memorization is a very bad way of learning anyway, because keeping stuff in your memory requires constantly fuelling the neurons that keep that memory alive (that's why it feels so exhausting), and it is very short-term, because once you stop powering those neurons, the information is lost forever :q  People forget stuff, that's unavoidable. (Well, unless you drilled it long enough to basically have it burned into your wires for good :q But this is also bad, because it makes it even harder to unlearn it if it turns out that you've learnt it the wrong way ). A better way of learning is by actual understanding, because once you understand something, there's no way you can forget it. If you do, you can easily bring it back by quickly deriving it from scratch once again, because now you know how it works and where it came from.

19 hours ago, SparklingSwirls said:

no matter how much I tried, I could never memorize that dang Unit Circle!

Memorization strikes again As for the Unit Circle though: you mean the values of trigonometric functions for those "special" angles? There's a nice trick to remember them, as simple as 0,1,2,3,4
    sin(0°)    →   √[0/4]  = 0
    sin(30°)   →  √[1/4]  = 1/2
    sin(45°)   →  √[2/4]  = √[1/2] = 1 / √2
    sin(60°)   →  √[3/4]  = √3 / 2
    sin(90°)   →  √[4/4]  = √1 = 1
and the cosine works the same, just backwards (you can just take the fraction for sine, and complement it with whatever needs to be added to get 1, and take a square root of that instead to get the cosine; e.g. if you used 1/4 for sine, you use 3/4 for cosine, because 1/4 + 3/4 = 1).

BTW it's funny how they call them "special" instead of "simplest", because that's the simplest values of trig functions one could come up with, and usually the only ones dealt with in schools It's a lot more fun to come up with values for angles in a pentagram, or a 12-gon, or some other crazy polygons Schools never show you that, because that's where the real fun is :q

Also, in schools they always teach you that trigonometry is all about triangles (that's what the name means after all, right? :q ), but the truth is, originally it was all about rotations and going in circles, because ancient mathematicians used it for astronomy (calculating positions of stars & planets in the night sky). That's where the unit circle comes from as well. And it is much easier to understand it this way, as coordinates of a point moving around a circle, instead of with graphs of sine waves and solving triangles (which is just one of the applications of trigonometry).

19 hours ago, SparklingSwirls said:

we were just given a list of formulas to memorize

Yeah, that's one of the problems with how maths and physics are being taught these days. They just give you formulas but they don't explain where did these formulas come from and how they work – because they usually don't know that either And if you try asking them questions about it, they get irritated, because they don't want you to notice that they're no smarter than you in this regard. The only way they can keep looking smart is by making you feel dumb. And so they do. And when you start focusing on how dumb you are, you stop seeing that they're not that smart either :q

Fortunately, this is something that can be easily fixed by people like me who always dig deeper and try to understand how stuff works and why I've already found a lot of ways of explaining those formulas, in a visual way, with geometry. I also focus a lot on showing my students how they can derive those formulas themselves if they had to figure them out from scratch, which is basically what you have to do anyway when you forget them – because people forget things :q that's why memorizing stuff is such a waste of time and energy. But when you know how stuff works and where those formulas came from, you can always derive them again when needed, and that way you never have to memorize them ever again

19 hours ago, SparklingSwirls said:

without ever actually learning their purpose or real-world applications

That's another problem with how maths are being taught in schools: They totally ignore this important aspect of WHY. Why do we learn about this stuff in the first place? Why do we need this? Why did people come up with it? What they needed it for? What problems they were trying to solve? How did they come up with this particular solution?

Math is often being taught as something "set in stone" – discovered long time ago by some ancient sages / geniuses and all we need to do now is learn those laws and memorize them. This makes an impression that math is finished; that there's nothing more in it to ponder about or experiment with, nothing more to discover, especially for ordinary people like you and me who clearly aren't like those ancient geniuses. But this is wrong! Very wrong! The real fun of math lays in playing with it and discovering all those patterns on your own, because then it's much more exciting and it makes you feel that you can be a discoverer too! Those ancient geniuses weren't really geniuses – they were ordinary people like you and me, who just happened to be playing with those concepts long enough to figure out the patterns, and you can do that too if you enjoy it. There's still a lot of unanswered questions in mathematics, and one day you might be one of those who will answer them. Sometimes the answer might even be something obvious – well, obvious once you figure it out, but not so obvious when you don't know it yet – and that's the only reason why other people didn't find it.

Mathematics originated from real-life problems and people trying to solve them. Things like measuring areas of fields, finding distances between cities, figuring out how planets move in the night sky, calculating dates, finding ways to trade stuff without being duped, balancing accounts, making convincing arguments, aiming missiles at their targets or navigating space ships in the cosmic space, calculating forces on bridges and buildings so that they didn't fall apart, finding patterns in numbers to predict the stock market, etc. So there's plenty of applications, but they usually don't tell about them to you, which of course makes people feel that all this stuff is totally unnecessary and waste of their time, or even makes them hate maths :q

That's why I always do my best to explain stuff by showing how it originated from some real-world problems, ask people for trying to figure out their own solutions before showing them how other people did it (so that they understood better what was the problem really about and what was the difficulty in solving it, because then they have more appreciation when they learn the solution; and even more if they come up with the solution themselves ).

19 hours ago, SparklingSwirls said:

The topics were just too abstract and left everyone thinking "when does anyone ever even use this?"

More on real-world applications, but there's another thing worth pointing out: "too abstract". People often say this about maths: that it is "too abstract" for them, meaning that they don't see any connection of it to the real world. So what they really complain about is not abstraction, but being too "unearthly", so to speak. Abstraction is really about something else: about noticing a common pattern in different things and "abstracting it out" (taking out just that pattern without all the unnecessary details) and being able to apply it to all sorts of new situations. It is a tool for our brains to actually help us comprehend difficult subjects by grasping a complex idea all at once and naming it, so that we could keep it in mind as a single object instead of a bunch of complexity. It allows us to stop focusing on all those gory details for now, and focus only on the gist of it.

People who play with maths, quickly start noticing repeating patterns in numbers, shapes, formulas etc. And because they're lazy and they don't want to repeat the same arduous tasks over and over again, they abstract those patterns as formulas and laws that they can then apply in other problems more quickly.
Often they start recognizing the same patterns in different areas of maths. For example, they notice that dividing polynomials work pretty much the same way as dividing numbers. Or that all the ways you can rotate a rectangle works in a similar way to all the ways you can multiply positive and negative numbers. Sometimes those patterns are even more surprising: e.g. that there is a connection between arranging playing cards in a square without repetitions, and lines crossing each other in projective geometry. Or those connections can even span multiple domains of science! For example, that the way things fall when you drop them is somehow related to the difference of squares in geometry. Or that locust's mating cycles occur according to prime numbers (it has to do with primes having no common divisors and locusts trying to avoid predators).
Noticing such patterns is the first step for abstraction, and then it allows for applying the same observations somewhere else.

People often say that their minds are unable to comprehend abstract ideas when it comes to maths, but the same people unknowingly use abstract thinking in everyday life, totally unaware of it when, for example, they say stuff like "dogs are man's best friends" – they don't talk about any particular dog or any particular man, but dogs and men in general. They ignore all those unnecessary details and focus just on those features of dogs that are relevant to the case: their friendliness. Same goes when they talk about colours: when you talk about orange (as a colour), you're using abstraction :> You ignore all those unnecessary features oranges have, like their taste, shape etc., and focus only on one particular feature: their colour. Then you abstract that feature and apply it to other things that have the same colour. When someone says "This book is orange", you certainly don't have any problems understanding that they're talking about colour, not that the book is literally a fruit

So why they struggle when it comes to maths? What is it about maths that makes the difference? :q

Well, the problem is that people who work with maths professionally, they worked on it for such a long time that they used to it and they forget that the things that are now bread and butter to them, might be totally incomprehensible for others who didn't walk through all that route. It's those people who start their book with "Let 𝔊 be a simply-connected differential manifold in a normalized Hilbert space ℌ..." and you start wondering where's the Book I where they explain what the heck are those things?! :q  The problem here is not that math is too abstract, but that those authors suck at getting their ideas across :q  And it's quite unfortunate that this became a standard for math and science in general, where you are supposed to know stuff but you are not being told how are you supposed to learn them in the first place.
Same goes with those who just teach maths: they often are in no better position than their students, because they don't understand those subjects well enough themselves either. There's nothing worse than when the blind try to lead the blind. It's a recipe for disaster. There's no way someone can teach something to someone else if one doesn't understand it well ehough either. Unfortunately that's how public education works these days :/

Now for the replies that require more clarification:

18 hours ago, ExplosionMare said:

I struggled with algebra that went past two or three different steps. WAY too many things for me to process all at once!

What steps are you talking about?

4 hours ago, TheRockARooster🐔 said:

Algebra was the biggest pain in the ass.

Can you expand on why was that? What were the exact difficulties you encountered? Your statement expresses your feelings, but it doesn't tell much about what caused them. And I'm rather interested in the latter, because that's something I can work with (I can't work with your feelings though, because I'm not the one in control over them).

17 hours ago, Pathfinder said:

Algebra was probably my weakest class, but I believe inadequate was largely at fault. When I got to college and proper teaching/tutoring; I aced it pretty well. Funny how that works!

You meant an inadequate teacher?
Yeah, the fact that with proper teaching/tutoring you were able to ace it, clearly shows how it often depends more on the teacher than on the student. There was nothing wrong with you, it seems, that stopped you from understanding it – it was rather the teachers' fault that they failed at getting their ideas across.

Of course, if a student doesn't want to learn, then even the best teacher can't help :q  And if the student is determined enough, then even the worst teacher won't stop him from learning. But not every student is determined enough, and unfortunately most teachers suck at teaching It's just another paid job for them, often the only job they could get with their qualifications ;q  They know zilch about the stuff they teach, but they're good at pretending that they're smart enough for that job or have sufficient credentials (which doesn't always mean that they understand stuff – they once were students too, and they might just have managed to pass the tests without real understanding, as you do).

Knowing stuff is not enough to be a good teacher. One also has to know how to teach. How to exploit what people know already and use it as scaffolding to let them understand new stuff. Explain stuff clearly enough so that they could understand it.

18 hours ago, C. Thunder Dash said:

I hated critical thinking questions. They were really hard for me to comprehend.

What's critical thinking?  I've never had such subject when I was in school :q
So I don't really understand what was your difficulty with it. Can you show some examples?

11 hours ago, Miss said:

Definitely math. Geometry (when I got to trigonometry), Physics, and Algebra II fucked me, all at the same time, roped up and sweaty when I was in high school. 

Chemistry had its turn with me as well.

Can you elaborate on WHY a little bit?

---

And there's also a couple of other things I'd like to talk about

9 hours ago, Vefka said:

I love algebra (in fact it's favourite subject)

That's great to hear! Can you tell us more what is it about it that you like? That might help people struggling with algebra to see what's the real fun in it and maybe let them find some fun in it as well?

9 hours ago, Vefka said:

but I struggle with geometry

That's interesting, considering that algebra is really just a "programming language of geometry" – as I use to call it Why? Well, because when you write computer code, you're basically using symbols and names to manipulate stuff in the computer's memory or on disk – something you couldn't just do directly. Same goes with algebra: those symbols and formulas just represent some geometric objects that you would normally draw on paper or picture in your head, but after a while it would become cumbersome to use, so you replace them with symbols, because they are shorter and easier to manipulate, and you can put them into formulas and equations that can then be easily solved. But under those symbols and formulas, there's always some geometry hiding. Even behind such simple things as (a+b)·(c+d) = a·c + a·d + b·c + b·d. And it is very insightful to try finding such connections between formulas and geometry, because it makes math visible and allows you to picture it in your mind instead of just manipulating abstract symbols It also helps you understand where do these formulas come from.

9 hours ago, Vefka said:

I just can't understand how this "proving" thing works

Well, it's pretty much about showing other people how did you come up with some clever observation by showing them all the steps that lead you there from the first principles (i.e. the stuff that everyone can clearly see for themselves). Of course it's easier to do when you came to that observation yourself and you know all the steps that lead you there, but much harder if someone told you that something is true and your job now is to explain why

Problems with proofs in mathematics is that they're often taught as a "finished product" – something that some smart dude already figured out in the past by his ingenious mind that might seem like black magic to you. But rest assured, they were no geniuses. They just don't show you all their work :q  Mathematicians often have to try a lot of multiple approaches and fail until they find the correct way to prove something. But they never show their scratch pads – they only show you their final answer, which might make a false impression that they figured it out by mere luck or some ingenious insight they had. But the truth is, if they told you about all their failed attempts and ideas they tried first, it would become much more obvious to you how they came up with the right solution. And it's very unfortunate that schools don't spend much time on teaching their students exactly that: experimenting with ideas and coming up with their own proofs, and techniques of coming up with such solutions (and trust me, there are such techniques, and if you know them, proving stuff becomes much easier).

There are ways of making geometric proofs fun, as being shown by people who made Dragon Box Elements. It is a video game in which you basically prove geometric theorems, but they "gamified" it in order to make it a lot of fun   You should definitely try it, or just watch the playthrough I linked. I once wrote a commentary to this playthrough on another forum about geometry, so if you're interested, I can translate it to English and post it here somewhere, so that you could understand better what's really going on in that game.

There's also a nice illustrated adaptation of Euclid's "Elements" by Oliver Byrne that I also recommend. It basically teaches you how to prove stuff in geometry with pictures and colours instead of letters and algebraic symbols (but if you know algebra already, it should be pretty easy to connect one with another ).

Phew, that's a wall of text! :q  I'll address other stuff in another post...

Edited August 18, 2020 by SasQ
typos