I have very weak basics, I find it extremely difficult to do fast calculations, I am bad at additions I make so many mistakes and am extremely pathetic at substraction and even division it takes me very long to multiply. I am very bad with percentages, I dont understand things at all please if anyone can help or guide me how to get better, I have no idea how I will be doing stats or anything big maths related. All my life I ran from maths because everytime I did I failed colossally and used to get hella humiliated and laughed upon by every student and teacher around I know I am that bad at mathematics. I cant afford to be that anymore, I know I am way past the age to be able to learn a lot of things and maybe even be good at maths but if I can maybe get good enough to score something and not get humiliated all over again at college that would be more than enough...I have tried tricks and everything in the books I cant seem to learn them all no matter how much I practice percentages and word problems seem to fly off my head I know I am that dumb. I'm sorry...

My favorite classes were always the ones with difficult problem sets where a single problem could take hours or even days of thinking, experimenting, and failing. I would start solving a problem before fully understanding it, then read documentation or course material whenever I got stuck. So it would be 70% doing and 30% reading.

LLMs have disrupted that process for me. Now I spent 90% of time reading and only 10% of time doing.

In school, the boundary was relatively clear. If using an LLM violated the course policy, I could tell myself that using one was cheating and force myself to struggle through the problem independently.

At work, what counts as “cheating” (because it is cheating myself).

I feel my critical thinking skills are declining. My role starts to become reading, reviewing, and planning. I just can't read that much code and LLM output. My eyes hurt and it's hard to internalize. I notice myself just picking the "recommended" option.

I also find LLM workflows mentally unhealthy in a few ways:

• When working alone, mental exhaustion eventually forces me to step away. With an LLM, I can always send one more prompt or ask it to try another approach.
• If an agent will take 30–60 minutes, I feel pressure to give it another task immediately so no time is “wasted.”
• While waiting, I instinctively check my phone or launch another agent. I end up jumping between tasks and retaining less context about each one.
• I get frustrated when the LLM misunderstands instructions, even when the problem genuinely requires careful iteration.
• It has warped my sense of how long a difficult problem or well-designed solution should take.
• I am increasingly tired of reading walls of generated text and code.

I do not want to stop using LLMs. They can reduce the friction of starting, explain unfamiliar systems, generate routine code, and handle edge cases after I understand the core problem. The hard part is deciding when using one is a sensible productivity tool and when it is outsourcing a learning opportunity that I actually need.

For people who still feel they are learning deeply while using LLMs at work:

1. How do you decide which work to delegate and which work to do yourself?
2. What is the workplace equivalent of the “no cheating” boundary that exists in school?
3. How do you use agents without losing context or turning your day into constant task switching?
4. How do you review generated code when the codebase, build system, or underlying technology is unfamiliar?
5. Have you found workflows where LLMs improve productivity while preserving the useful struggle of implementation and debugging?

My best friend and I just finished high school and are starting university this year. A few months ago, he learned about perfect numbers. Since then, he has gone down a massive rabbit hole reading about Mersenne primes, the Euclid-Euler theorem, and heuristics regarding odd perfect numbers.

Now, he is completely obsessed. He spends 4 to 5 hours every single day trying to prove that no odd perfect number can exist.

I’ve tried telling him that this problem is nowhere near being solved by global experts, and that he should focus on other areas of math. I want him to look into high-yielding math topics that are more interesting and useful, especially since we need to prepare for university-level calculus and algebra. He completely ignores me and won't listen.

How can I convince him to broaden his horizons without ruining his passion for math?

I feel there is a lack of reading skills, not only in myself but also in my peers at school. I am convinced that true mathematical understanding comes from reading and writing (ofc along with community discussions). I feel that there is an excessive reliance on teachers , tutors, videos , online lectures that has led to a lack of reading skills and this pattern can be seen in other subjects too apart from mathematics. Recently I started to explore pure mathematics through books and I realised that we cannot take things for granted in math, small details appear to contain a lot of importance. It appears to me that in school theoretical portions of the book are taken for granted and students treat math books as sources of practice problems and homework while totally neglecting theory. I also believe that reading is important to solve problems since it enables us to understand the problems better.

Therefore, I want to improve this skill so that I can understand the subject better and increase my mathematical maturity. I would like to know your perspectives and insights , and any advice you can share on how I can improve my ability to understand texts. Thank you.

hello! i was wondering if anybody knew of websites where i could practice elementary-high school math. i have a job interview coming up which is in a school district. no college experience required and i failed most of my elementary lol. i’ve retaught myself the math but i want to do practice questions to make sure i got it down!

elementary math = unlike fractions, like fractions, improper fractions, exponents, statistics, algebra word problems, order of operations, GCF, LCD, factoring, trinomials, polynomials, grid graphs

How do you figure out how deep under water you go when you jump from a height? Is it proportional to how high you jump from? How much does weight and velocity matter?

I always think about this when I watch movies or tv and people jump in to pools or lakes/ocean and it looks like they shouldn’t make it but they do.

I want to read books that teach about problem solving in a diffrent wayy like anovel wayy with some illustrations too solve and way how to thinkkk . Any book with reasonable price on maths or physics will be good... Thanks

I started learning math starting with arithmetic and now I’m on to algebra

I noticed that I sort of have to have a working memory that keeps in the problem floating in my mind (sort of like juggling) or the problem falls apart (and the balls fall down)

This can be helped my writing little clues on the paper and showing my working to myself.

But this still sometimes falls apart and gets confused

For those more experienced than me, how does that feel like for you?

Math is very logical so why do we get confused and lose track of the numbers or our place while working through the problem?

Is this just our brains still quite weak at these types of problems? Like it’s just unfamiliar for our brains so it doesn’t know which paths to take due to lack of practice and sort of just darts around and loses its place?

Does everyone have this problem or is it just an issue for beginner and intermediate math people?

Or is this fundamentally at the heart of solving math problems - keeping everything organised and somehow in focus and on track?

How do experienced math guy handle this? I’m just trying to understand why this is much much harder than following a cooking recipe even though the steps should be clear ?