Quote:
Originally Posted by Rusemandingo
+1. Same with learning a foreign language. It just comes easy to some people and others could spend hours a day practicing and never get that good. Kinda scary that a tutor thinks that anyone who doesnt easily get concepts is just being lazy.
I think 95+% of people can learn high school level math. When I tutored people most of the job was just having them actually work hard. So I'm not surprised that another tutor apparently thought the same.
In particular, in my experience people who are struggling with a math class typically have problems with the prerequisite material. They can't learn calculus well if they are struggling with basic algebra. This makes it seem like they "just don't have a math brain" but really it's just that they need to review the prerequisites (which obviously requires a lot of hard work). The fact that math classes rely heavily on prerequisite knowledge is a big contributor to the gap between those who "get it" and those who "don't have a math brain" since the people who struggle with the prerequisite class will always struggle with the following class.
I get pretty frustrated when people attribute everything to "being smart" rather than hard work because this attitude encourages laziness, both among the high achievers who think "I'm smart so I don't need to work hard," and the low achievers, who think "I'm dumb so I'll never do well even if I work hard." I'm not saying that genetics play absolutely no role but I certainly think it's a bad idea to emphasize being smart over working hard.
The fact that you're supposed to put punctuation inside the quotation marks even if the punctuation isn't part of the statement that you're quoting annoys me.