I'm bad at math. How do you do it?

In an attempt to be a BIT more helpful:

I managed to get my wife better at math by repetition. Tons and tons of repetition and correction. I had her calculating 15% tips on made up amounts of money in her head. I told her how to do it, guided her, then had her say her steps out loud. This way I was able to see where her mistakes were.

But if repetition doesn't work for you, I generally come up with easier examples of the problem and have people solve that. Then I show them how to transition to the harder problem while keeping the steps from the easier problem in mind.

To keep numbers in your head:

Get flash cards with numbers on them. Have a friend hold them up one at a time and you say the number out loud (or just hold one up and put it face down on the table after). Do this for three cards. Now with all three cards hidden, try and recall the three numbers. Once you can do this with 3 cards, do it with 4 or 5 cards. You can do this with poker cards too if you just use 2-9.


Ex:
1) flip a card. if you flip over a 2, say "Two" Put the card face down.
2) flip over a 5 "Five" -> face down
3) flip over a 3 "Three" -> face down

4) at this point, hopefully you remember that you flipped a 2 then a 5 then a 3. You'd check to see if you DID remember them.

If you didn't just try again. Eventually you'll be able to pull it off. If you did it easily, move on to more cards in a row.

I've tried that, I've also tried copying series of numbers from one piece of paper to another. But I inevitably switch the positions of numbers (if I remember the chain) or lose it from my short term memory entirely. It is extremely frustrating because I feel like I have some type of problem with numbers, but don't know what.

Corn: I do every problem in every section my class covers, on top of our online homework. It's extremely time consuming, but doesn't seem to help. Doing this has landed me a nice C+ in my calc class (integrals this quarter) so far.

Kalovale: Yes, you can trace math back to being the source "founding" subject of everything, and it is useful for modeling biological processes, but in reality I won't actually be doing any of that...most biology jobs are math free.