Colleges across the country are grappling with the same problem as academic setbacks from the pandemic follow students to campus. At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents. More students are being placed into pre-college math, starting a semester or more behind for their majors, even if they get credit for the lower-level classes.
Colleges largely blame the disruptions of the pandemic, which had an outsize impact on math. Reading scores on the national test known as NAEP plummeted, but math scores fell further, by margins not seen in decades of testing. Other studies find that recovery has been slow.
Also an entire education system that does its best to be bad at making math interesting.
Yep. I’ve always been bad at math, I still am, but at least college math was interesting even though I didn’t get it very well.
Go back and really understand fraction and decimal conversion. I’ll bet if you do that, the higher levels will make a lot more sense. That’s where most people get lost.
It also helps to understand that math isn’t just moving numbers around. There’s a lot of that going on, but it is essentially a language that at the higher levels can be used to describe anything, even stuff we haven’t bothered inventing yet. Boole died “knowing” he invented a branch of mathematics that would never have any practical applications in the real world. We based all of computer science on it.