Quote:
Originally Posted by kerry edwards
I may be completely off base on this, but I think that math skills are partly hard wired. Some people have a much easier time understanding math than others. It doesn't mean that everyone can't understand it, it just means the effort to understand it is very different. It's like the hull speed of a boat. It doesn't take much effort to get a boat to hull speed, but to get the boat to climb the bow wave, exceed hull speed and plane requires a huge increase in horsepower. For some people to do math, it's like trying to plane a boat.
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I don't think you are off base on the hard wired thing at all, and have seen many studies to back it up. I had to take fairly advanced calculus in college and struggled with it to the point of having to have a tutor (gd functions). Meanwhile having scored 1350 on the SAT and acing all sorts of high level biology, chemistry and even physics classes (algebra didn't bother me too much). I struggled with math as a child and still do--but can ultimately figure it out (as a previous poster indicated---harder for some but not impossible to plow through).
I do think you need a little refresher on your nautical analagies though: Hull speed is a rule of thumb term used in regard to displacement hulls to describe the hull's speed potential. Displacement hulls are called such because they displace water and specifically do not plane
