How did you find maths at school?
 

Was it too easy or too hard? Was your teacher rubbish or good? Did you take an interest in maths or did it bore you?

Just wanting to gather experiences about your maths lessons at school.

I was mediocre. I was kicked out of the higher-level class for being much slower than the other students. I did improve a little though - I couldn't do algebra at all in 3rd year, but I took a few extra maths classes in 5th year and from then on I found it much easier (by the time I finished school, I could do simple quadratic equations in my head - it didn't help, because you don't get marks unless you write out the whole process step-by-step, but it was kind of fun). It was the same thing with every other area of maths - I was the last to understand it, but once I got it I could do it easily enough. Nonetheless, my grades were average at best.

Unlike most people who are good at maths though, I actually enjoyed it. My teacher was very friendly and doing equations was kind of therapeutic. I could just tune everything else out and focus on it completely (which I couldn't do in other classes for some reason, even the ones I was good at).

I was really good at math til I got to calculus, then I started to get a little lost.
AP Statistics was the worst math class of my life. The teacher was garbage, and statistics is boring as hell.

I liked maths. I'm pretty good with numbers. In secondary school, I had one mediocre teacher (in 1st year, it was a bit annoying how she spent more energy making sure everyone's notes were multicoloured than on the actual work), a pretty good teacher in 2nd year, a really awful teacher (made calculation errors in every single class, seriously), and a pretty amazing teacher for the leaving cert (mostly in terms of personality, but she explained very well too).

I am god-awful at math.

Well, I can do simple stuff. "Business Math", if you will.

But I failed out of anything algebra and beyond. I was just never able to get my head around numbers. Any studying went in one ear and out the other, and I got bored and frustrated with it easily.

I think i'm pretty good at maths, well I would hope so as I am going to take a maths degree :P But i had absolutely amazing teachers that i can't thank enough. Im currently taking maths and further maths for A2 and enjoy every moment. I must admit I find the normal maths fairly easy and further maths quite a bit harder, but I love to get my teeth into it! Especially calculus and pure. I hate applied though... grrr!!

But woo maths!!

I am terrible at maths. I can do basic maths but that's about it

I loved maths. But then again science was my favoiurite subject so I may not have been the "norm" lol. Science was my favoutite subject and maths my second favourite. Though I did HATE statistics... but that was mainly as it felt sort of "tacked on"... at GCSE only the top maths set did stats and we didn't get seperate lessons for it, they just tried to incorporate it into the maths lessons, we didn't even get given time to do seperate coursework instead we were given a topic that would allow us to use the same coursework for both subjects :/

I wanted to do maths and further maths at A-level too, but the further maths was dropped after only a few weeks as there were only 3 of us in the class :o so I took ICT instead which was AWFUL



At my school too the maths and science departmenrs had a bit of a rivalry, it was mostly sort of silly/playful but it really was amusing to watch. And as I volunteered during sixth form as an inclass support assistent in nboth departments I got to experiance the rivalry close up

I had a lovely maths teacher who was wonderful and a rather imaginative, if somewhat batty, priest (this was a strange thing because my school had absolutely no focus on religion at all) for higher maths. I loved it. I was/am good at maths.

My maths teacher was pushing fifty and had a huge schoolgirl crush on the deputy head and used to blush when he passed the classroom door. Luckily, she had a good sense of humor also :)

I went to acouple of questionable schools in primary, and didnt start any form of math until i was maybe eight, but once I did I surpassed my year. I love numbers, particularly algebraic and applied maths. However in J. Certificate year 3 our teacher was **** and the whole honours math class dropped in grades. Hey ho. I willforever love our first year amd second year math teacher though.

Also though i sound really arrogant I am no longer much good i don't think I it's mOre of a wistful stroll down memory lane to a time when i had potential.

I love maths. But it was far too easy at the whole of secondary school so I skipped most of my maths lessons. But I really enjoyed the Junior/Intermediate/Senior Mathematical Olympiads that I did over the years. I did well in my GCSE/A-level maths, but I just found it so boring at school as I had covered the material years ago when I took them.

I was listening to a radio station a while ago that was saying that many people either struggle with maths or find it relatively easy. Why is there such a strong discrepancy?

I like mental arithmetic too and I have developed a few algebraic formulae that make mental arithmetic faster; if anyone wants me to teach them my mental arithmetic tricks, I am very happy to do so.

I tutor people in maths and science, and from my experiance often people have a fear of maths that causes a sort of mental block... once you get them past the fear generally their ability increases greatly

At Standard Grade (sort of GCSE equivalent) my teacher hated me, to the extent where she deliberately knocked my textbook of the desk and didn't pick it up and just ignored me if I needed help. So I had to ask a friend in the year above to crash-teach me a week or two before the exam, simply by working through past papers.

So because I had a rather rudimentary knowledge at Higher (a bit like A Level) I struggled, and there were too many people needing help for her to get around to each class. I went to my teacher three days before the exam knowing how to do a whole three questions out of an entire two papers. To her credit she sat with me the whole day and basically taught me everything again, gave me some homework and told me to come back the next day to do it again. She was part of the senior management team and gave up her duties to intensively teach me everything again.

Because in maths the answer is either right or wrong. Unlike a more subjective course, in maths you either get it right or you don't. It's probably also because maths is a subject that gets built upon over the years, so if you struggle with a fundamental part you'll not be able to do the more complex aspects of it either.

I loved maths. Had a **** teachers for gCSEs and A-levles (same teacher) so I taugth myself. I found it very easy, when teaching myself. Made even easier by having a dyslexic parent who has a maths degree to help me if I did get stuck. (the dyslexia is relevant becuase it means we have similar learning styles). I was in fast track maths, which meant by the time we got to year 13 we had one module left to do, instead of three, and that the majority of my class already had an A before going into that exam.

I would have liked to have done exams earlier; my year 8 (age 12-13) teacher gave me GCSE papaers when i'd finished the work days/weeks ahead of the class so I wouldn't get bored, and I did alright on them. If I had been allowed to do my A-level maths int he same years as GCSE maths I could have taken a whole nother A-Level instead of having two 'empty' spaces on the time table.


sorry, bit of a rant there.

I loved maths in school :-) I did separate maths and statistics GCSE's and got A*'s in both, didn't take it at A level though. Opted for Chemistry, Biology, and Geography instead.

I prefer logical subjects like maths and sciences where the answer is right or wrong as opposed to subjects like English where answers can be vague and interpretative.

I think it was quite obvious from a very young age I preferred science and maths though, for Christmas and Birthdays I used to ask for books on astronomy, human biology, geology, etc. It was such a problem in primary school that they actually banned me from the reference section and forced me to read more fictional literature as they thought I'd fall behind otherwise, and I guess it helped a bit as I picked up a few authors I like Franz Kafka, George Orwell, H C Wells, and Arthur C. Clarke. To this day I still prefer science books though for Christmas I got The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow.

I enjoyed Maths at school, I found it enough of a challenge - not especially too difficult or easy. My Maths teacher was a bit of an.. eccentric. I didn't particularly like him, but his teaching was fine. I was set to take my Maths GCSE 2 years early but never got round to that due to changing secondary schools then leaving school completely because of illness.

I had a bad maths teacher 2 years in a row when I was 12 and 13, and it soured me on maths in latter years. As soon as I met minimum requirements I bailed out on maths classes.

I always have a need to know "why" to do something and not just "what" to to do. Maths teachers more than others will tell students what to do but are bad at explaining the why of it. In algebra I was confused by the letters used. I thought equations should be c = a + b but it was never that simple since other letters were used. It was confusing that M should be used for a slope and not S lol. Only latter in uni when I took statistics (which I liked) did I learn the letters used were from Greek or other languages. So as teachers began to make a young Iso learn formulas I was stuck wondering why all the crazy letters were being used and not the letters I thoughts should be used lol.

Hated it. Wasnt actually as bad as I thought I was and got a B in the end in GCSE. But my teacher wasn;t very nice and my class were disruptive, so I pretty much taught myself what I had to know for the exam from a text book.

Though to be fair I'm now awful at maths and have drained all the knowledge I had... I can do the basics which is what I need to be able to do.

I find maths so incredibly boring, i have no interest in it what so ever. I can do it but since leaving school because I don't have to I have lost any ability to do simple maths through lack of practice and added indifference.

My boyf likes countdown and can do the maths ones really quickly (well depends on the numbers obviously) but I don't even bother trying.

Strangely I do live science but more biological science than any to do with numbers and physics and stuff.

I hated maths and was convinced I couldn't do it. I don't think I was actually as bad at it as I thought I was, as I never actually got bad grades. I never exactly liked it but I was okay with it until Standard Grade. It didn't help that I had a terrible maths teacher for Standard Grade (judging from this thread, there seem to be a lot of them out there!) She criticized certain people, including me, frequently - on a personal level, not just about maths ability. And she told me I was going to fail all my exams, which was pretty unfair considering I was never even likely to fail maths. But she had me convinced I was completely useless and would never pass and I absolutely hated maths after that!