I am starting IT studies. As someone always interested in computers I have paths in my head how to get needed information. There is also a luxury of testing anything learn in practice by for ex. contributing to open source or creating a server.
Math was always interesting for me too, but I haven’t spend time on learning it much, I have many lacks from middle school and there are topics I know about but can’t use them in practice or have no intuition or forgot how to formally write them.
So I started to try to learn, as a self-learner most time I spend on Wikipedia and forums, but those turned out to be death end when it comes to understanding whole topic and not just reminding one thing.
So question to you that are learning math: how do you do so? And I also never learned anything in a typical “school” way, I always need to feel interest or have a goal in something.
I dropped out of high school because it was interfering with my smoking pot and skateboarding schedule. A skatepark opened up by me (this was before concrete parks were the norm) and I managed to get a job building and maintaining ramps there. My friend and I had always built little kickers and quarter pipes but this was on a larger scale. So I went out and bought a book on geometry and taught myself circles and domes and stuff like that. Being interested in the outcome, not just the problem, was the thing that clicked for me. Once the interest was there, the work and study was fun. Since then, I’ve become a finish carpenter and specialize in odd trim details and complicated builds. So I guess my advice is to find a reason to learn it. Find that thing that makes it more than rote memorization and turns it into something more than that.
Were you able to keep up your smoking pot hobby?
Nah. I had several bad acid trips in a row and getting high was never fun after that. I’m at a point now where I enjoy being sober so much I don’t even take heavy duty cold meds. But I did fight in the war on drugs and now it’s legal where I live. So at least I fought the good fight for, and with, others.