Are you here for advice?
We get a significant amount of traffic for searches like
- do you have to be good at math to understand sciences
- bad at math but a good engineer
- smart people who are bad at math
- why do i always do bad at math
- can you be successful if youre bad at maths
because of a few of our old posts on innumeracy and attitudes about it. It seems like people are looking for advice and answers, and our posts don’t really provide them, so I thought I’d give it a shot today.
It appears that many of you Googlers (or Yahooers, or what-have-you) want to know whether it’s possible to be a good engineer or scientist while being bad at math. My short answer is: probably not. My longer answer begins with a question back to you: what do you mean by math? For most things I’d consider engineering or science, you need to have a good handle on geometry, high school algebra, trigonometry, statistics, and calculus. If you’ve taken classes with those names and failed them, a career in the sciences is probably not for you.
I assume most people who would ask this type of question are already in school to become a scientist or engineer, though, and are having second thoughts. Don’t worry, university classes are supposed to be harder than high school, and it’s normal to struggle a bit in the transition. Maybe you’re taking your first math class that includes serious proofs as part of the curriculum. If you’re good at calculations but struggle with proofs, there’s no problem with a career in engineering and plenty of available paths to take in the sciences. You probably won’t end up a string theorist, but we’ll still love you. (I suppose I should also ask, what do you mean by science? If you consider anything ending in -ology to be science, you have a wider range of options, including some that use almost no math.)
Then there are those of you asking why you are bad at math. I don’t know. I would obviously need some more information. Maybe you’re not taking notes or paying attention. I tutored some kids during high school that were failing math for that exact reason. Once I suggested that they bring their notebooks to class and, you know, write things down once in a while, their grades shot right up. Maybe you have a terrible teacher. That’s far from impossible, based on my experience. It’s also a possibility that you just don’t naturally think in the way that math requires you to think. It’s good to try to think that way — don’t write off math from the very start — but if you find that over and over again you just can’t seem to get the hang of it, perhaps math is not for you. That doesn’t mean you’re bad, and it also doesn’t mean that math is bad. Find something to do that you enjoy and excel at, and please, continue to respect people who are good at math — the same way that I respect people who are good oboists, or good swimmers.
It’s certainly possible to be successful and bad at math and/or science. (Just look at Congress!) I would also say that it’s possible to be smart without being good at math, though I’m a little more hesitant. What you mean by “smart” and what you mean by “good at math” plays a big role. I don’t think it’s possible to be smart without being capable of logical analysis. You can be smart without knowing that “integral” is a noun as well as an adjective. There are plenty of brilliant lawyers and insightful columnists and effective managers who never got the hang of l’Hôpital’s rule, and I’d still consider them smart. (I think Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences doesn’t have much merit as science, but it does offer some insight into what we mean when we talk about being smart. There’s more than one way to do it.)
Any more advice for our search engine visitors? Feel free to leave it in the comments.
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[...] are bigger issues here—as we’ve said before, they encourage the already-widespread belief that it’s fine to be bad at math—but I [...]
i can do basic math however when i checked with a counsellor thay said that i am more right brained then left brained, which by the way means that logic and math are difficult for me. I would like to know if there is a way through Counselling that i could balace the left brain activities with the right brain activities?