Becoming good at math is easy, actually

0:00 so you want to become good at math based on all the movies and shows we were told that math is for people that have high IQ and natural talent but actually become good at math is pretty easy even if you don't think you have the math Gene so take me as an example my name's Han I graduated from Columbia University I studied math and operations research because I majored in math and I got pretty good grades some people assume that I was naturally smart little did they know I was filling my math classes in high school but the materials just didn't make sense to me I couldn't understand what the teacher was talking about in the class I remembered that every time when I ask for help I can see the frustrations in their eyes because I'm just so confused being defeated by a

0:46 math problem and just constantly looking dumb really didn't help my self-confidence I always procrastinated in terms of studying math or doing math homework back then because I know that every time I try the problems I just couldn't figure it out no matter how long I tried and that's just such a Negative experience so I end up like always tried to avoid doing math homeworks and just this thought of going to math classes make me nervous because being in a classroom and couldn't do anything else but just listening to the teacher explaining things that I have no idea what's going on was such an emotional draining thing and turns out I was not alone approximately 93% and adult Americans indicate that they had

1:33 experienced some level of math anxiety you know what even though I was so terrible at math when I was in high school one day something just clicked and I finally felt like I cracked the secret Cod of becoming good at math so for context let me explain what I was doing back in high school I would try to pay attention in math classes and take all the notes that I can take and I spent lots of time looking through textbooks and I would really try to understand those math problems well I sounded like a hard worker right but something must be wrong when you spend all that time trying really hard but just have no result so little young H just thought oh I must be stupid but that's so far away from the truth the say is stop always trying to understand

2:18 math but actually all you need to do is to practice so back in high school all I was doing was passive learning and basically no Active Learning so passive learning B basically means you receive information from outside sources and you try to internalize it such as listening to lectures or reading or watching demonstrations so Active Learning on the other hand means you have to actively involved in the learning process like engaging in discussions practicing questions and teaching others and there's so many research shows that passive learning are not as effective as active learning in math and Science Education so in real life we use math to help us solve problems like calculating

3:04 how much tip you should live and in school they test your MTH skill by asking you to solve math problems so either way you need to know how to use math by practicing it you wouldn't say you can drive a car just by watching someone else drive and remembering all the traffic rules you have to get into the car and practice so you really don't have to spend a lot of time trying to understand math by reading it's like understand all the mechanism of how a car move what really matters is you know how to drive so if you want to be good at math all you have to do is practice a lot of questions but there is a reason why lots of people don't like math because when you go practice questions you either don't know where to start and you're just completely confused or maybe

3:51 you can start by doing the question and you go check out the textbook and you go back and forth and you spend a lot of time in just one thingle question question and eventually you still get the question wrong that's just such a Negative experience I have personally experienced this so many times let me tell you nobody likes that this experience will only make you feel frustrated and defeated so let me share with you my favorite ways of practicing a question that doesn't make you feel like you want to stab yourself with a fork so when I encounter a question I don't start writing immediately instead I will take a couple moments to mentally walk through how I'm going to solve it if I have no idea how to solve the

4:36 problem I will just give up yes you heard me right I will just give up instead I will just go look at the answer of the question I take time to thoroughly understand the answer and its Approach at each step once I've grasped the solution I set the answer aside and try to solve the question on my own and I will write each step down this time I won't give up too easily I will make a genuine effort to applied what I just learned from the answer and once I complete the solution I compare it to the answer key once again if I realize I've dant incorrectly or I'm stuck at a point that I can't quite recall I would just repeat the process understand the answer then attempt the question again independently until I get it right so a couple reasons of why I think this way of practicing a question is really

5:23 really effective okay I just want to take a quick break and share that I basically only use my iPad to study math take notes and do all the homeworks and all the practice questions on my iPad the great part of using my iPad to study is that I don't have to carry all the papers and the books and pencil with me all the time and I can like copy and paste all the notes that I want and also I have just so many materials in there but the only downside is that I kind of miss writing on paper you know there's just something satisfying about writing on real paper with a real pencil that's why I was so excited to discover the sponsor of this video paper like paper like is this really cool screen protector it makes my iPad screen feels like a piece of paper so when I write on it I get the feeling back it's basically

6:09 the best of both World digital paper that feels like real paper during exam season sometimes I would write on my iPad for like 12 hours a day and my hands like get sore at the end but with paper like it just makes using iPad much more comfortable they have this notaker collection that also has this little pencil grip in them which I really like because they just like make holding the iple pencil much more ergonomic and comfortable this collection also include a little cleaning kit that makes keeping your screen clean Super convenient you can just spray this to your iPad and you can just wipe it and clean your iPad which is just so so cool I genuinely think that paper leges just make my workflow much more enjoyable and just helps me be more productive so check out

6:55 paper like use the link in my description and thank you so much paper like for spons answering this video so a couple reasons of why I think this way of practicing a question is really really effective at really safe time and I think it's a really efficient way of using your time so instead of spending a lot of time trying to figure out a question on your own and you might not even on the right track you might be completely in the wrong chapter you could have used that time to practice like multiple questions and I'm not saying that there's absolutely no value of trying really hard to figure out the question on your own all I'm saying is that if you look at a question and you don't know how to do it and you probably

7:42 will spend a lot of time going back to the textbook and trying to figure it out on your own you could have used that time to actually look at the correct answer and try to understand the correct way because the purpose of practicing a question is to learn from this practicing session so it really doesn't matter if you get the question wrong or right the first time when you try this answer it really matters is are you moving on before you actually know how to answer the question compared to those scenarios first is that I did a question I got it wrong and I got so upset so I move on or the second one is that I know I probably can't do it independently then I look at the answer and I learn every single step and then now I do the question again and this time I try

8:28 really hard so I know how to actually do the question so instead of spending the majority of the time in trying to figure out the question on your own spend the time on you know you can actually do this question the key is that don't move on to the next question until you can do the question independently on your own you are 100% checked that you know how to do the question don't try to just understand math by reading it you should make sure you understand the questions by practicing it and distribute your time more efficiently another common concern is that oh if you just look at the answer and you do the question

9:14 you're just memorizing it you don't actually understand the question so the way I think about it is that if I actually understand the math then I understand the logic behind it example for a question it's given a and the answer is d i know the logic behind each step I know given a it should lead to B and I know given B it lead to C and given C it lead to D well if I'm just memorizing it I probably will just memorize oh given a then D so the fireman technique which is famous technique that help people to understand things better it's invented by Nobel Prize winner Richard fan it basically means that if you want to test yourself whether you fully understand something you explain it to someone else ideally that someone doesn't have lots of

10:00 background on what you're talking about imagine you're explaining it to a child and if you can really explaining everything using the simplest language then you fully understand this thing I use this technique sometimes I just pretend I'm teaching someone else or it's actually even better when someone asking me a question I would just try to explain it to them that's a really good way to test whether you fully understand the question or not and a thing that I always say is that you might think that you're bad at math but you actually you're not I truly truly believe that everybody can become good at math and everybody experiened some level of math anxiety and that's completely normal even though I study some pretty high level math in college and I still had

10:47 the same feeling as before sometimes if I skipped the one class I couldn't understand the next class completely the first step of becoming good at math is to believe that you can become good at math and whatever you're experiencing that's completely completely normal just the nature of math it has layers that you cannot skip so when you feel like sometimes you don't understand math why it doesn't make any sense because each New Concept each new topic is built on its previous knowledge for example if you want to learn calculus you have to learn pre-calculus first which means you probably need to learn algebra geometry and gometry and all those subjects has its own fundamental knowledge as well

11:34 and all those knowledge basically can form a giant Network and this is also why school have prerequisites for stem subjects so if you feel very lost in your Calculus class and you're very confused why the teacher jump from one step to another step and everyone else seems like oh they just understand it and you have no idea what's going on it's probably because that's like a concept note that you're missing and they assume you have the background so they don't always explain it and when you're like facing a new problem or like you're learning A New Concept and you felt like you're slower than everyone else it's not because you're stupid or anything it's probably because you're not familiar with all the fundamental

12:20 knowledge enough it's because you're probably passing at each step and trying to understand at each step trying to make sense to yourself while someone else that's really familiar with all those concept they can just like jump through those and then without even need to think too hard about it your brain is always working and it's slower in terms of like reasoning processing and conscious thinking like when you heard most of things the first time you your brain is trying to understand them have you experienced something like you read a book and every single word is going into your head but after like a couple sentence and then you realize oh shoot I actually didn't read anything and you have to read the sentence again because you were not processing them you're not

13:07 using your conscious brain to think them and this part of your brain this slow brain you're using is when problem solving and reasoning happened and on the other hand we also have this fast brain that we relies on recognizing patterns and intuition thoughts or like gut feelings you really don't need to even think about about it and your brain just automatically processed it for you really really fast before you even realized it for example like this is a cat do you really need to think about oh what is this I have seen this before what is this oh oh I remember I saw it last time somewhere and then you're like oh that's a cat no you really don't need to do that because you have seen a cat so many times before so now you see a

13:55 cat before you even realize it your brain already knows it similarly in terms of math if I ask you what is 1+ one you will know it's two you don't need to think hard about it so when someone is really good at math especially the people that are really fast with math they had more experience in terms of all those Concepts they just practiced it so many times and lots of the basic concepts like geometry or algebra they don't even need to think hard about it so when they're learning a new topic they brain is automatically relies on all those fundamental topics that they know so well so they takes way less time to process to excel math all we need to do is combine those aspects

14:42 so basically by practicing and using our conscious brain so many times that it becomes second nature to our brain that it already internalized that we don't have to do the reasoning and processing anymore that's when we transform form our slow brain and all the efforts to fast brain and intuition so next time when you see a problem your brain will immediately recognize the familiar elements and put together a solution for you so if you think this video is helpful please hit the like And subscribe button thank you so much for watching I will see you next time bye-bye love you