I was once smart

[yeawutever]

Ok maybe I haven't told ya this but sometime I entered 11 grade and so on, my gpa started dropping and I started going down academically though I did managed to graduated on the top 10 percent. I'm talking about from an 3.8 gpa to a marginal 3.1 at my graduation (luckily the weighted one was counted).

 

So as I went down my math skills also decresed and I don't know why. Till this day I don't know I went down. No it has nothig to do with not applying myself, I did and still I would't get the same high grades as before.

 

Does anyone knows why b/c I don't? Seriously I used to know why to solve long equations and was handy with numbers now I can't that much. Will I recover like before? My relatives still think I'm the same as before but I'm not.

[southerngirl]

If you do the best that you can do you are doing great! Thats all you can do. don't beat yourself up about it or think that you are not smart. Just the fact that you care about it and are making efforts says it all. You are one smart lady from your posts here.

[Cognitive_Canine]

I'm no neurologist, but in high school, you're mind is still growing. Perhaps it found a different way to work? I know that in middle school, I used to be able to draw things amazingly, now I am a horrible artist. Perhaps it is similar? Also, just because math is now different for you, it doesn't make you any less intelligent.

[yeawutever]

Thanx southerngirl.Yes I do want those grades back again, afterall my major is psych.

[yeawutever]

I'm no neurologist, but in high school, you're mind is still growing. Perhaps it found a different way to work? I know that in middle school, I used to be able to draw things amazingly, now I am a horrible artist. Perhaps it is similar? Also, just because math is now different for you, it doesn't make you any less intelligent.

 

Yes perhaps that must it. I tried once asking my psycho teacher about the possible reasons why I drop in math and her response was that it can happened in us girls in our brain that it got too saturated with it.

[tommy_bud]

Grades 1 - 6, math is pretty simplistic for those that are good with numbers. The rate of difficulty goes up very slowly during this period.

 

Grades 7-8, math gets a little more complicated, but still doesn't go up in difficulty much. You only start to touch upon more complicated concepts. The rate of difficulty increases a bit.

 

Grades 9 - 12, depending on the classes you take, math starts making large jumps in difficulty, requiring you to make intuitive mental leaps at much faster rate then was required in the earlier years. The transitions between algebra-->geometry-->advanced algebra --> trigonometry-->calculus require more and more mental jumps that are further and further apart.

 

Personally, since math was a breeze for me from grades 1 - 10, I never developed the proper study skills required to properly assimilate the higher level concepts. I also started doing worse the last couple years in math, but I didn't apply myself nearly enough.

 

The higher levels of math require a huge amount of memorization and the ability to apply all the stuff you learned in the earlier years. If you take a break for a semester or a year, it is nearly impossible to do well in the next level of math.

 

I dunno, if you are anything like me, perhaps things came to you so easily for the first 10 years that you never properly learned the study skills necessary to do really well in the higher level classes. I think those first 8 years should be a lot more challenging then they were.

[yeawutever]

Personally, since math was a breeze for me from grades 1 - 10, I never developed the proper study skills required to properly assimilate the higher level concepts. I also started doing worse the last couple years in math, but I didn't apply myself nearly enough.

 

Yup this is pretty much what happened to me. From kinder to 10th grade , it didn't take me long to think nor solve them problems. It would be me getting all the A's at it then as soon as I got to 11th grade, I only got an A on the first semester but dropped on the second and ended up with a B (almost C).

[karvala]

I learned first from personal experience, and then from subsequent investigation of the topic, that learning for gifted individuals often takes the form of a 'U' shape.

 

My case is typical: I started exceptionally well and set records up until the age of 11/12, then things started to fall off and while I remained well above average, I was no longer so exceptional. This was because I never needed to do any work as tommy_bud correctly observed, and also because the methods of working at those early ages are no longer successful as the work changes and because the methods were previously successful there is an initial reluctance to change them. However, the underlying academic gifts remain no matter what, and I found that after a while (in my case once I started at university), I finally shed the old way of thinking that had been outgrown by the work, and developed a new way which took me back to top level academic performance (without having to do more work ) and has happily kept me there (so far!).

 

It's possible that at the moment you are simply at the bottom of the 'U' curve. Give it more time, keep believing in yourself and investing in your thinking, and I'm sure you'll find it will come right in time.

[yeawutever]

Yea maybe time will do it. I at times see myself going upward toward the curve but then I'm down again (temporally recovery lapses but not completely).

[fragmint]

i find that when im having trouble learning or doing well i go back to the basics and define everything. for example a lot of people who have problems in the first semesters of calculus cant say what the definition of derivative is even though its pretty much chapter 1. just having this definition and undersatnding it can help you solve most 1st and 2nd semester problems in calculus. i guess you should try to zoom out a bit until you can clearly see the situation and that might help you change the way you work problems or learn new concepts

[GettingBetter]

Being good at math and being smart are two completely different things. That's the most important thing you need to realize.

 

But I'm about the opposite. I struggled in math in elementary school, and had to get help from a teacher after school just to keep up. I wanted so desperately to be good at math, and so I tried really hard, and then it started to get easier. I still struggled some through high school (mostly with the teachers), and then ultimately dropped out of high school, took a year off of math, and then went to a junior college. I always thought it was so unfair that everyone else was really good at math, and I had to work so hard to keep up.

 

Well, in college I did really well in the Calculus series, and better yet in Differential Equations, and then my best in Linear Algebra, before I finally started focusing on Physics instead. Now I tutor university level Physics.

 

The truth is that I'm not very sympathetic for people to whom math came very easily in their youth. And, to "lose" that innate ability as you get older is completely normal. Many, if not most of the people who continue on into the upper division math courses once struggled as I did. I don't know why--it very well could be that proper study techniques were or were not developed when they should have been--but this is what happens.

 

Now, if you were once good at math, then I firmly believe you can be again. It will, however, take effort--that same effort that I had to put in during my youth. (Except now, you will have a little bit of "catch-up." That is, you will probably have to re-learn some stuff.)

 

First of all, math is not about memorization. I have one of the shoddiest memories in the world, which is why I once struggled, but here I tutor Calculus-based Physics now. Math (and Physics) is about understanding.

 

There are a few things worth memorizing (like in Calculus I, the Product, Chain and Power rules, and the derivatives of e^x, sinx and cosx) but very few. I got through Calculus I remembering just those six things. And even still, you don't have to remember those. At the very least, you should still understand where they come from, even if you choose to remember the results.

 

I never bothered to remember the Quadratic formula (just complete the square) or the Distance formula (just use Pythagorean's Theorem), or the Rational Root Theorem (just try synthetic division on a simple quadratic to arrive at it). If you remember that logarithms are just inverse functions of exponents, then there's no need to remember the properties of logs--they're just the same as exponents, and properties of exponents are rather intuitive (just multiplication, really).

 

These are just examples, but I'm just trying to exemplify the best way to learn math: via understanding. Unless you have a darned good memory, there's really no other way, and even still understanding is much more malleable and versatile.