Are math skills natural, or rather acquired?

Slorg
Fri, 30 Dec 2005 17:05:46 +0000

I don’t buy this “natural” stuff. There are kids who easily understand the concepts–they do well. On the other hand, there are kids who study very hard to understand only the formulas and numbers–they tend to poorly. If you ever get behind in math, you’ll have difficulty learning new material that builds on the previous material and you’ll end up getting confused and just studying the formulas and numbers and problems in the book. It’s paramount to never fall behind or do the bare minimum to get an A.

I also disagree with the poster who claimed children can be prodigies in chess, music, and math. There is no such thing as a chess prodigy. No one is ever good at chess right away. It takes thousands of games until your brain can build up the proper pattern recognition skills to even understand chess well. The 15 year old grandmasters are prodigious because they’ve managed to cram more games into their lives, and happen to be exceptional at pattern recall.