Higher Ed: Conquering Math 'Phobia'

[eridani]

2. Math is different from other subjects

If you blow the Revolutionary War, you can make it up on the Civil War test. If you goof up photosynthesis, you can recover with mammalian anatomy. If you don't fully get the first chapter in any math book, you can forget about understanding any of the rest of it. My husband, who in retirement studies n-dimensional geometry for fun, flunked calculus because on the first day he couldn't figure out with dy/dx why the "d's" didn't cancel out and never managed to catch up.

Math needs to be taught individually, with no moving to chapter 2 until you get chapter 1.