Can learning math later make you smarter?

Brighten Youth Education Centre

classroom experiences create a lasting personal legacy. Many of us have stories of teachers or projects that helped us connect with our passion - perhaps pointing us in the direction of enriching careers.

However, negative encounters can be equally impactful. We learn we "can't do" a certain subject, or "don't have the right brain."

In the case of New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson, it was maths that had him stumped. Comfortable only with adding, subtracting, division and multiplication, anything more was so much of a challenge that he admitted to passing his high school math exam only because he cheated.

Having read Carl Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he felt an affinity with a man who described himself as "amathematikos" or "nonmathematical."

A lifelong autodidact, Wilkinson has studied everything from Gibbon to French to drawing to yoga.

A few years ago, having decided that he was capable of grasping adolescent math, he decided to enter the 18th-century world of pure mathematics - geometry, algebra and calculus.

The decision prompted him to contemplate the nature of his mind.

"I didn't understand why it had been so hard. Had I just fallen behind and never caught up? Was I not smart enough? Was I somehow unfitted to learn a logical, complex and systematized discipline?" he wondered. "Or was the capacity to learn math like any other attribute, talent for music, say? Instead of tone deaf, was I math deaf? And if I wasn't and could correct this deficiency, what might I be capable of at 65 that I hadn't been capable of before?"

Having been astonished by the speed at which 12-year-olds worked after arranging to spend an afternoon in a math class at his old school, Wilkinson decided to meet with his niece, a math professor at the University of Chicago.

Considerable difficulties ensued: some academics have spent so long in their field that they find it difficult to conceive of it in simple terms.

Wilkinson also battled elements that had not troubled his niece during her studies. Despite many struggles, and a course of study that took six months rather than his formally predicted five weeks, Wilkinson did note modest improvement.

"The enlargement of one's intellectual reach isn't the kind of circumstance a person can identify empirically. One can only sense it about oneself. I felt I was beginning to change, to a degree, perhaps only in a cursory way"

Much has been published about the importance of continued learning as we age.

If Malcolm Gladwell is to be believed, expertise take 10,000 hours of focused study and practice, meaning we have the ability to master multiple skills as our lives progress.

Lifelong learning helps prevent neurological decline, has been linked to longer lifespans, opens new worlds and, perhaps most importantly of all, is a source of satisfaction and joy.

If you have any questions about our column, or the issues raised within it, please e-mail them to us: enquiry@brightentestprep.edu.hk