Comment by dahart
Of course you disagree with me ;) You’re talking about the minority of people who’ve had incredible amounts of math success (yes despite sometimes legitimately feeling very stupid). I’m not talking about my own experience, FWIW, I’m talking about the majority of people who never get anywhere close to a PhD in math, because they were left behind by our math education system. Obviously I don’t know exactly what you disagree with since you didn’t elaborate, but we have bumped into each other in mathy threads fairly often, right? If we get the chance some time, it would be super fun to discuss math & education over coffee!
Your starting "of course" presumes that you are right. I'm disagreeing because I truly and honestly think that you're wrong.
People who are struggling with math, even in elementary school, will often say things like, "That's so simple, why couldn't I get it? I must be stupid!" I've heard this over and over again in a wide variety of contexts. Including from my own children. We honestly believe that if it is simple, it should be easy to understand. And so the experience of having struggled with something simple, leaves us feeling stupid.
Even people with an incredible amount of math success, wind up feeling this. And pretty much universally have also developed coping mechanisms for it. But the experience itself is pretty much universal. My son felt it in middle school when he was struggling with long-division.
Now does a poor education system make this experience more likely? Does it serve us poorly? Absolutely! I consider it a crime that Singapore has developed a better way of teaching elementary math, and we have not adopted it. Singapore is now moving to #1 across different subjects according to PISA, and Western education systems aren't even curious about how.
However that is orthogonal to the key point here. Which is that math tends to be simple in a way that our brains aren't built for. And when we're confronted with how hard it is for us to learn something simple, it is easy for us to feel stupid. This can be very demoralizing. And it is very helpful for us to learn to accept and deal with that feeling.