I'm highschool student and computer science maniac. To get into good computer science studies I need to be good at math and I really sucks at math. Even on this easy tests in school for 1 exercise from 5 I have to spend my whole time and because of that I have terrible grades.
I would like to like math and enjoy it, but it's not clear for me at all and boring af. Every minute of time which I spend on learning math sucks. At the same time I can spend whole my day by tinkering and reading about computer science. In computer science everything is clear for me. There's a lot of great documentation, manual pages and resources.
In the case of math the most things which I find on internet are just ads of paid courses preparing for exam or other shit behind a paywalls. Still there's a lot of content from which I can get knowledge but I don't consider them to be exactly what I'm looking for. Maybe I should try resources in English language. At least I have school book for math which is not that bad.
I hate equations because when I'm doing them I ALWAYS make mistakes, I'm getting lost when I have to rewrite numbers multiple times.
I hate these stupid math language and symbols which is saying nothing to me.
I hate my math teacher, because he just don't care and I can't get normal answer for my questions without nastiness.
When I learning something I have these hard moments but then finally I achieve my goal, I'm getting my reward and I'm happy. But when I'm learning math there's no any reward, only punishments and bad grades.
I'm not idiot and I have the best grades in my class expect math where even complete idiots can be better than me.
I was thinking to maybe connect programming with math but I don't know how. I know that for stuff like that Python or R are great but for right now I'm obsessed on C programming.
Sorry if this post is complete nonsense for you (like math for me). I can't speak with sense as I don't understand what is wrong with me or this math. I just wanted to let off steam. I really would like to enjoy math as it seems to be interesting topic. I was interested about it as kid but school completely destroyed my passion.
Try reading about the computer science topics that basically are pure mathematics. Read about automata (very simple models for computers) or about computability theory (which asks what problems are literally impossible for computers to solve, even with unlimited time and memory). There won't be too many numbers or equations involved in getting your feet wet with these topics.
Let's say you have a keyboard with only three letters: 'X', 'Y', and 'Z'. That's our "alphabet", it has just three letters in it. Let's plug this keyboard into a monitor that's really broken, actually all that works is one pixel that has four possible color options. We can have our machine start at white when you press the power button to turn it on, and when you hit black it shuts down. We could still teach a kid some basic programming ideas with this limited setup - If we're on white and press 'X', change the color to green. If we're on white and press 'Y', change the color to blue. Maybe pressing 'Z' from blue will get you back to white, but pressing 'X' will take you to black. Maybe some other rules too. This simple machine is called a finite automaton.
What "words" (strings) can we type in after powering on to shut the computer down? From what I've laid out so far, we power on to white, can press Y to go to blue and then X to go to black. "YX" is a string that works here. We could also do "YZYX" or "YZYZYX". The set of all strings that will power down our machine from boot are called its "language".
An automata theory question might ask if we can write a program on this machine that has both words "XYZ" and "XYX" in its language, but not "ZZZ".
If you've tried read this and have trouble following, that's because math is hard! (and totally not because I can't explain for shit.) If you've tried to read this and don't feel like it's hopeless to learn, that's probably because you're not even seeing this as math at all. (Theoretical questions like this are absolutely math problems.) If you've read this and have already figured out an answer to the question I posed in the last paragraph, then your problem with learning math definitely isn't that you're hopelessly bad, so we'll have to troubleshoot elsewhere.
If you learn these subjects you'll eventually need the groundwork from more basic mathematics, but you'll have some motivation for why they might be needed.
I started writing this intending to tag on a rant about how math being used as a gatekeeper in schooling poisons everyone's idea of what math actually is and makes a ton of people wrongly feel hopeless, but this comment is long enough as it is.