alt Hacker NewsI have not detected anything wrong with mathacademy, it does what it says on the tin. With that said, I stopped using it myself as I felt that my ability to "find the slope intercept form of blankety blank" did not actually translate to any deeper understanding of math than I had before.
I think mathacademy is excellent for developing the skills necessary for solving the problems on mathacademy (which largely are the problems on math exams).
But if your goal is understanding rather than application, then mathacademy is more similar to duolingo than it is to language immersion. You can go quite far in mathacademy (and much of performative mathematics) without really having thought about anything. It is procedure learning rather than understanding.
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Isn't this more or less true of the whole undergraduate college calc syllabus? Like, I had the same thought grinding on trig integrals: "these problems seem super artificial", and I gather they basically are, and I guess closed-form solutions to arbitrary random integrals all sort of are? But that's not Math Academy's doing, or any kind of "teach to the test"; I went through these same problems with both my kids as they did STEM degrees at Illinois, and that's the actual material.
I disagree with this take though I've seen the same criticism online a lot before I signed up. I found myself understanding stuff the more I did it. And MathAcademy makes you do a lot of problems on repeat. I also used gpt for stuff MathAcademy didn't explain well.
But the platform does have its issues. I should probably do a writeup someday.
Maybe the trick is taking the question and writing lecture notes / delivering the explanation as a teacher. Surely explaining it is much better than just solving the question and tap tap tap.
I'm sorry if this is a not a good question but as some one who never really had a good relationship with maths.
How do I get to a stage where I can just do math for the sake of understanding it.. to enjoy working on it.
I'm happy to "just do it" but is there some branch of match that might feel familiar and less removed from the real world?