Quote Originally Posted by Bethany1 View Post

The way math is taught in schools is pathetic and unless you have a teacher that knows how to explain concepts you lose out. I look at my kids' mathbooks and even I don't get it. There are no explanations of how a problem is solved. They are supposed to get that in class. My kids have to go to the internet to do their homework. It makes me wonder why I pay taxes if my kids are getting a better education via the internet.

You have something that most of didn't have growing up. The internet. I would have killed to have access to so much information while in school and the little bit of college I had. The math information out there is wonderful and I make my kids look up stuff they don't understand. Take advantage of it and work through the concepts you don't understand. The lightbulb will go on.
I dodn't have the internet in grad school, either... it came along three or four years later ;-) But what I did find that I didn't have back in my undergraduate courses was a set of books, "The ______ Problem Solver" series, which covered p-chem, calculus, etc. They used a large example of common poblems and showed a step-by-step way to solve each one, with a nice bit of narration. I still have most of mine.

I didn't really appreciate math except as a way to get to a finite number until I took abstract algebra in my senior year. Probably the most useful (and still the most (and most favorably) remembered math class I took. I had a hard time with the abstract concepts of random X, Y, and Z representing some ill-defined quantities. But when I got into p-chem and those abstract variables turned into pressure, temperature, volume, and concentration, something I could clearly relate to, it all made a lot better sense and my ability to deal with it sharply improved. But I still remember in the first semester of p-chem, memorizing all the steps of a thermodynamic derivation the same way some people would memorize a poem, just so's I could scribble it all down on the Friday exams ;-)