I took it and geometry in high school, and then I had to take it again in college. It was funny, I was taking Algebra and Pascal programming concurrently and one class right after the other. I’ve never been especially good at Algebra, but I recognized exactly the same logical structure in use between the two and programming was easy and fun. Algebra was a slog.
I guess a little context made all the difference.
“I guess a little context made all the difference.”
The *exact* same thing happened to me in 6th/7th grade. I had the knack for programming and wasn’t bad at math, but once variables and graphs were in the picture, I started to struggle with math (well, that, and being lazy :-) ).
Once I saw the relationship between the two, my interest in both math and programming took off despite hating school in general :-).
People learn things different ways. I kind of wish they’d teach math more from an applied perspective vs. the classical “mathematician” way for many people. Off the top of my head, think of how the slope of a line is taught ... some people will see Y = mX + B and freak out. Maybe introduce it as a graph of velocity vs time ... have students picture a car speeding up ... try and teach a relationship between math and the real world. I’d bet more people would succeed at math if that were the case.