If you’re struggling with math, you probably already know that you’re not alone — plenty of children and adults have stories to tell of failed tests and teachers who seemed indifferent to their students. In fact, Gallup reports that for teenagers in the US, 37% ranked math as their most difficult subject, while only 23% said it was their favourite class.
There are a number of reasons why students ask themselves “Why is math so hard for me?” Challenges in mastering math can stem from psychological barriers like self-doubt, learning disabilities, or the complex nature of mathematical concepts. In this article, we’ll address a few of the most common reasons. Rest assured, none of them are that some people are just bad at math! With the right tutor and the right environment for learning, anyone can become better at math, and gain a clear understanding of the concepts.
Understanding the Difficulty
We often think of math as a concrete subject — there is only one right answer, and math has clear rules and patterns that must be followed exactly. In fact, math is much more creative than that! While it’s true that there are right and wrong answers, there are plenty of ways of arriving at that answer. For many students, the way their teacher demonstrates the steps for getting the answer doesn't suit their learning style. However, teachers are under pressure to ensure they cover all the concepts in a given curriculum each year. They aren’t able to spend time teaching each concept in different ways, even if they would be willing to try.
Teachers are seldom able to cater to individual learning styles in their large classes. This means some students are left behind and will struggle with the concepts. This is especially true of students who have learning disabilities. Whether you have a diagnosis or not, a learning disability can make you struggle to keep up in your math lessons, or make it hard to keep your attention focused when doing math homework. Studies have shown that about 7% of children have a learning disability related to math, and a further 10% consistently have low test scores. If you’re asking “Why is math so hard for me?” consider asking your parents or teachers for extra help, and whether you might need to be assessed for a learning issue.
Remember, having a learning disability doesn’t mean that you’re bad at math, or that you’ll never be able to learn it. It just means that you need different teaching techniques, and to spend little more time than others mastering the concepts. Spending time with a tutor who understands learning disabilities can help you improve your math grades.
Early Mathematical Skills
For many students, they do fairly well in math as a young child, but their grades begin to slip in high school. If this sounds like you, it might be because you are a great memorizer — but you didn’t get a real grasp on foundational math concepts in your early years. Math always builds upon previous concepts. If you didn’t understand a core piece of early algebra, for example, you’ll struggle with high school calculus. Adding to this, if you sailed through your homework and tests on your good memory, you might not have spent much time practicing math. This gets tricky when you enter high school, and each math problem is a multi-step process. It often looks easy when a teacher is explaining it in class. But when you’re on your own at home, it becomes a lot more challenging.
What can you do? It’s not always easy to know where your gaps are. That’s why it’s a great idea to find a good math tutor who can assess your math skills and help you create a better foundation of your math concepts.
The Impact of Stress
Students who are wondering “Why is math so hard for me?” can often overlook the role of stress in their learning. If you’ve struggled with math for a long time, even walking into the classroom for math class can make you feel bad. Add stress from other classes, the pressure of keeping up with your extracurricular activities, and possible issues at home, and you’ve got a perfect storm. When you’re stressed, your brain isn’t as able to form new memories related to learning. If you sleep badly, which stressed people often do, you can also have a harder time converting things you learned that day into long term memories. All this has a big impact on learning math, as well as other subjects in school.
Math Anxiety and its Effects
Sometimes stress about math becomes chronic. Math anxiety is a documented problem that impacts some learners who have had problems with math for years. A persistent lack of achievement in math exams paired with stress in math class, during tests, and while completing homework can fuel this anxiety. If you think you might have math anxiety, you can speak to your parents, your teacher, or your school guidance counsellor to find resources to help you manage your anxiety.
Knowing that math is so difficult for a large portion of students, there are still many teachers who might ignore the signs of math anxiety. With limited time and large classes, underachievement in math is often put down to students not trying harder. However, sometimes doing badly in math is as simple as not having the right teacher for your learning style. As our founder Omar Andani says in this video, finding the right tutor can make all the difference in your attitude about math or any other subject.
Traditional Teaching Approaches
If you have an older teacher, or you’re a parent trying to help your child study, you might be sticking to traditional methods of teaching math. These teaching styles relied heavily on memorization and “drilling” or repeated practice. They didn’t put much emphasis on the core concepts behind the math problems, or teaching logic or word problems to enhance learning. These approaches do work for many students (after all, most adults today learned math in this way) but the new styles of math pedagogy are often easier to grasp for young learners.
Modern Teaching Approaches
New approaches to teaching math use psychology and a better understanding of how children and teenagers learn in order to present math concepts in a way that should be more intuitive for most students. These new methods focus on connecting the building blocks of math to larger concepts, and on tools like modelling to help make concepts more concrete. There is also a focus on strategies for learning ‘mental math’ and ways to simplify more complex problems. These can include rearranging the order of steps in a multi-step problem, or turning equations into problem solving stories.
The Importance of Practice and Consistency
Regardless of whether you’re learning math by a new or older system, the best way to understand the concepts is to practice. Spending time on math at home is essential to improving your understanding and making sure you feel ready at test time. If you need help reviewing, or find it difficult to study on your own, a private tutor can help you focus on the problems you find hard to solve. With tutoring, you can make sure you’re ready for each test, and you’re completing your homework on time.
Math stress is common, but that doesn’t mean it’s a fact of life. A professional math tutor can help you improve your grades, but can also help you change your attitude about math over time. With the right tutor match, you might find yourself looking forward to math class and learning new material. Math could become your favourite subject.
