Jason Marshall

My dad always liked history, and studying it always made me feel important, so I was did good at it in school; math by contrast was always something I defined myself as not being good at, mostly because I couldn’t be bothered: it didn’t amuse me. I learned a few random things like how to figure out percents, and very little else. [Pre-algebra was fine, but very little after that.]

When I was a psych major in college, I had to take statistics. Since my life plan at the time was to get a good job so that I could get married and feel good about myself, I took statistics seriously and did very well. I was the best in the class. (The teacher gave us stats on the scores for the three tests and the grade I got on each test was always the same as the high end of the range of scores.) But, eventually getting a good job in the psychology field went away and so did worrying about math. In retrospect, a stupid waste of talent.

Fortunately, self-help helped me through a lot of trouble in life, which increased my respect for studying and made me realize that I like it. Now that I’m basically stable I can study things other than spirituality and psychology. I’m reading the great novels.... and doing math. I’m determined to read all about math and systematically relearn everything that I’ve forgotten from never having respected it before.

.... Anyway, the number of practice problems is laughably small. (Not practicing is fun! I mean, whoops....)

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It reminds me of taking piano lessons as an adult; sometimes the books tend to assume that you’re a child or a little slow.

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The questions are just way too ambitious— he’d teach you one thing and then test you on a cute extension of the idea— and there’s just not nearly enough practice and repetition.

Solution: when you’re done, read another algebra one!… (más)