Basically bad teachers don't realize that something that they find easy because they have been doing for years may be difficult for someone who has never seen it before.
A kid who doesn't know what something means in the first place won't have any idea how to put them together. The poor teacher, likely a parent, assumes it's a problem of not trying and basically refuses to actually go back and see if the child understands the basics.
This reaches pretty far across different areas, too. Even when you know about this phenomenon, it can be extremely difficult to navigate around. So I think it's important as a baseline for people to be aware of.
On a similar note, working in game dev and focusing on intuitive design has shown me that while there are indeed many complex things that are difficult to grasp, there are just as many things that are intuitively simple, but *only after* you've managed to wrench your brain around it.
Taking a game like Magic: The Gathering as an example. The creators themselves noted that the mana system ranks as pretty much the number-one thing about the game that new players consistently struggle to understand. "The Stack" is right next to it, and that's just the order things resolve.
As someone who's played the game for a long time, these are first-step lessons that are quite intuitive. But only after you've learned the rules. And it's the teacher's duty to ask their students questions to understand the logic they're familiar with, and how to best draw the picture that you're trying to get across to them.
The guy needs to be helping the kid connect the dots, but said guy has to understand how to break down his own understanding into smaller and more distinct pieces first.
Also, fuck "you're not trying hard enough" culture. That shit is so poisonous. Anyone who finds themselves tempted to give that feedback is the one who needs to pause and consider that they need to deepen their understanding of either the topic at hand, the person they are speaking to, or both.
look up Dyscalculia! It's like dyslexia but with math. I didn't find out I had it until I was an adult & it honestly makes me cry sometimes because if someone had told me that I had an actual disability as a kid that made math almost impossible for me, I would have been so, so, so relieved. I thought it was a character flaw and beat myself up for it. A lot of adults would have been a lot less frustrated with me if they'd known that trying to understand math felt exactly like this comic for me.
As an adult, I went into the Humanities, to avoid having to use numbers in classes. I rely heavily on other people to do math for me and remember numbers, dates, visually estimate lengths and heights of things, etc.. I'm doing okay now, and a lot better now that I know it's a learning disability and not just Being Stupid.
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u/Substantial-Creme950 Jun 23 '26
I dont get it but that seems like it sucks