reenmachine - I tried to self-teach but I find it very difficult to learn math randomly , you always get stuck on...
Well what things have you been trying to learn, or maybe what textbook or math puzzle book are you attempting?
There are a lot of people who hit the getting stuck roadblock, and it's quite natural, but with almost anything in math and physics, with a bit more patience and simply spending more time on something, and going back regularly, even if 10-30 min a week, you can snap out of it.
Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes years but if your interest is there, you'll self-study one day. Just knowing a little piece well, and being interested enough to come back to the book for 30 minutes at a time, and then browsing again, every week for another 30 minutes, you can kickstart the habit
a. where you'll get a better grasp of ideas and concepts from just random browsing and getting the 'gist of things' far more than you might realize
b. actually saying, maybe i'll start on this book properly, at the beginning and go for being slow and complete, but trying extra hard to being consistent with your reading or pondering of examples, and realizing that you don't need to get far. Be patient, spend more time with things.A lot of hurdles with self-studying math can just be something so simple as not realizing that you needed to spend three times as long reading that article/chapter fragment. that 14 minutes didnt work, but 71 minutes unlocked some secrets...
im still kicking myself for not reading sherman stein's calculus book in the house, when i was still struggling with algebra. I got frustrated with the book that some chapters were crystal clear and a few just seemed 'unclear' to me. I gave up.
Also i didnt realize how important it was to just try out what the author *really* intended.
If he wrote 36 pages for chapter one, why not read *all* 36 pages?
Why not read it slowly enough to give the author a 'decent' chance?
Maybe his examples are extremely extremely useful, figure those out *deeply*
Hey, why did the author plop 64 questions at the end? Gee that's a lot! Wait a minute, what happens if i did all 64 of them?
That's the sort of thing that broke things for me with self-study.
Don't fall into the trap that the school system teaches you, the bad habit that it always needs to be a race. Make one chapter of that textbook, your life. Forget about the whole book. Drop the idea that you need to rush through the book and skim through 70% of it, sure a lot of teachers do that to cram things into 12 weeks or 15 weeks ,but why should you?
Make sure you got math books that are slightly easy to read, and some that actually do challenge you too. One day some subjects will be eye-opening if you can read one math book, and then slowly, use 2 more textbooks to read together...
So you're seeing some ideas open up in three different ways, and see how each explanation is unique...
What's murky in one book, can be clearer in another book.
but real accomplishment is when you can read all three chapters in all three books, and they all start to help each other, rather than feel like three different universes, all frustratingly different and confusing.If you are fascinated with something, don't let friends or teachers get you down. You might be interested in something, but who says that you got to be an expert from day one with it?And who says that self-study isn't so hot when you do it randomly...
If you got a book, you start at the beginning. There's nothing random at all about taking an extremely small sliver of it and trying to learn it well. Take small bites, take a lot time to chew, eat regularly...
