Short answer: Yes

Long answer: No. Well, at least I hope not. Maybe, I am not studying correctly, or that I am not polishing my understanding as frequently as I thought. Did I understand what I have just read or did I mindlessly copy and pasted the highlighted phrases into my notes, hoping I could do the same on my exam paper? Or am I too scared of facing my fears of being wrong? . . .

. . . the list of possibilities could go on. One may think that this is a cherishing experience as this lightens the pathway into exiting the peak of “Mount Stupid” on the Dunning-Kruger Effect Curve. But for some others, like myself, would rather slither my throat in hopes to reincarnate into a pebble rock on the fiery banks of Mustafar.

Earlier today, I was tutoring my 6 year old brother on the basics of geometry like finding the area of a square/rectangle. He was struggling and so I asked if he knew his multiplication tables, he said yes. Indeed, he did and proved that to me by solving all the questions I drafted out in less than a minute. When I asked him how did he come to that solution or what does it mean by multiplying the two integers, he couldn’t answer me. I tried making him map his thoughts on paper when he was solving 8*10. He started to mumble, “8, 16, 24, 32, ..,” A nostalgic learning technique that purely relies on your memories that could only get you so far, not beyond the scopes of basic geometry, but just enough. For some people, this could be sufficient. But, may no be for my brother, who perhaps might like the same things I do.

I too, have started learning maths the same way. It got me through high school, and maybe, for some first year maths units in my undergraduate. My learning experience after that was like driving a car in the dark without headlights on, or baking cookies in the middle of the night without glasses (assuming your vision is terrible). You don’t know what you are cooking, and you don’t know what you are looking at, but you know damn sure that you are baking some good old cookies. If you don’t know what you are looking at then how would you know the cookies were baked perfectly? or how would you know if you actually liked maths? A question that prompted me to do many things ranging from attempting to change degrees to revisiting high school level math textbooks.

Relearning my fundamentals made me realise that mastering all higher math concepts rely on how strong your fundamentals are. In other words, how fast you are able to complete a large sized puzzle depends on how fast you can solve the smaller puzzles. Curiosity, consistency and frequent practices definitely comes into play in building your problem-solving skills. Although, what I found most important was mastering the skill of patience and resilience.

Much like my younger self, my brother is clearly more comfortable in memorising the solutions rather than taking the time to reason. In an economic sense, I guess he is better off doing that since it takes less time. The point is, if he could understand how addition and multiplication worked, then solving for the area of a rectangle or square would be his second nature.