Trigonometry. My high school math teacher was a literal math genius and would always go deep into proofs and theory, sometimes not even getting to our homework stuff until the last 5 minutes of our 50 minute class. As a result I went from the “gifted” math group to nearly failing.
When I went to college I had to take a math placement test and ended up in Math 99 (below college level math).
It was there I was finally taught SohCahToa and everything clicked. I actually use simple trig a lot in my job now.
I was very bright when I was young, but unless I was given practical application of knowledge, it just leaked out of my ear.
I was exactly the same with trigonometry, I couldn’t understand it or why were even learning it.
As soon as I started to get into programming and I wanted to have a gun with a bullet that had a certain speed, and it was going at a certain angle, and I needed to break down the horizontal and vertical components of the motion, all of a sudden it felt like I had invented trigonometry myself.
I found that true of so many different things especially with math. No matter how much it was explain to me theoretically, it never made sense until I had a practical application and then it was just obvious to me.
I wish more of my education was that way instead of just learning theory.
Interesting, I had an almost opposite experience. I was good enough with memorization and applying formulas in high school to pass with As but I never really understood what I was doing.
Taking calc again in college and watching a video of Neil Degrass Tyson talk about Newton figuring out orbits are conical sections made everything click for me. Suddenly I remembered the 3D episode of the Simpsons and those coin spinny things at the mall and put it all together.
After that, I was much more interested in figuring out how the formulas worked and it made learning way easier.
I had something similar except I actually got help in high school from a study hall teacher. I can’t remember her name but she had awful halitosis. Somehow, she just explained it in a way that clicked for me.
Well they say the olfactory senses do create better memories, so…she was on the right track!
Interested to hear more about SohCahToa, my only terrible subject was Math, or more specifically, Algebra.
