What do u hate about ur school?

I absolutely HATE math. Im in all advanced classes and am more intelligent than most people around me. Still math always manages to kick my booty.

I work best with concepts and things that arent fact, like language and art. But math is nothing but pure fact. A painting can be a beautiful work of art that can instill a huge multitude of emotions, from sorrow to bliss. A number can be....a number, and nothing else. 2 is always 2. 5 is always 5. They never change, and that annoys me. I NEED CHAOS, DARN IT!

And then there's the sheer complexity. That's what really kicks my butt. I can handle simple arithmetic. But some formulas just get SO LONG! Theres just so many variables and exponents and factors and.....sigh It just makes me want to scream.

There was probably once a time when you couldn't do an addition problem like 93498 + 47943. Then, at a certain point, you probably realized that it wasn't all that difficult. Just a simple extension of what you'd do when solving a problem like 98 + 13.

Math formulas are the same. Stop thinking about how long and hard and complicated and impossible to understand it is and just start decoding it. It's kind of like a long word on a spelling test. You've probably noticed that long words are not always harder to spell than short words. For example, it's much easier to spell "antidisestablishmentarianism" than "fishhook", only because "antidisestablishmentarianism" follows all the conventions, but you might be a little unsure when you come to "fishhook". Now picture some wide-eyed little kid who is asked to spell "antidisestablishmentarianism" during a spelling bee. He gets so intimidated by the word's length that he doesn't realized how easy it is.

The same thing goes on when you see a big scary formula. You spend so much time anticipating it that you never get down to understanding it. Change your attidude from "easily frightened" to "earnest and determined" and you'll do better.

May I reccomend the following websites:

xkcd.com - This will make you think math and science type people are cool and interesting. That will make you want to become one.

betterexplained.com - Cool website. Read some of the explanations, even if they're not for anything that you're learning in your class, and you can feel like an undercover genius. This article might be good for you:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-develop-a-mindset-for-math/

Thank you for your encouragement, but your comparison fails. The laws that govern spelling rely on concepts and relativity. Following conventions does not apply to the simplicity of "decoding" the spelling of the word, because the conventions themselves are just relative constructs and are not a necessity. Numbers are fundamental to existence, and outside of the actual labels applied to numbers and formulas, are objective. Conventions MUST be followed, or else it is completely wrong. That is why math sucks. The conventions it follows are static.

Also, breaking it down doesn't reduce the difficulty. Simplification involves formulas. The only simplification that occurs is in finding the simplified form of whatever I'm simplifying. The 'how' of that, and the actual finding of the answer, is made much more complicated.