MATH IS HARD?

MATH IS HARD?

Why do some students find math is hard?  Because knowing math means knowing a lot of stuff.

First of all, there are many numbers in math that you need to know by heart. There's 0, there's 1, there's 2, there's 3, and on and on and on till you learn that there's also the number 1,000,000,000.  So now you have a trillion things to know.  That is you have a trillion and one numbers to know: all the numbers from 0 to 1,000,000,000.  

Luckily, mathematicians have made it easier for students to know all these numbers without having to learn each one of them or even to say or write each one of them.  What is this thing that makes it easy to know all these 1,000,000,001 numbers?  The key to knowing all of them is that each number following another is only 1 more than the previous number.  For example:

1 = 0 + 1.

2 = 1 + 1.

3 = 2 + 1.

4 = 3 + 1.

5 = 4 + 1.

Do you see the pattern?  Each succeeding number is 1 more than the previous number.  So that means that 1,000,000,000 is this:

1,000,000,000 = 999,999,999 + 1.

So knowing only one thing makes you learn a trillion things.  And you can learn these trillion things in only 10 minutes, 1 hour, or 10 hours depending on how much fun you are having in learning a trillion things.

What about the rest of math?  Math is all about patterns.  Knowing one pattern can make you learn 10, 100, 1000, 10000 or a trillion things all at once, I mean, 10 minutes, 1 hour, or 10 hours.

Have fun discovering and exploring mathematics!

John