I'm Good at Math but I Make Silly Mistakes

I'm Good at Math but I Make Silly Mistakes. This happens to most people. Does it happen to you? How to you deal with it? Do you have any strategies for this? Please leave any comments or questions in the comment section below.

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Daily Devotionals for Motivation with The Math Sorcerer
Thank you:)

[Abhimerc]

silly mistakes really weigh heavy on you, sometimes you get so frustrated that you're in tears and start doubting your abilities

[Djentstructer]

Seriously, math sorcerer's doin some serious sorcery here. Where does he pull these super relatable topics out of? Just amazes me everytime!

[austinhardison]

“Sometimes it just takes time” so true, sometimes we’re just not mentally equipped to handle the problem in the moment, but through hours of experience and gaining wisdom, we eventually hit that next level. Patience is key for development

[carljones]

Something I noticed in myself is that I would most often make these mistakes when I was too confident in the math. I would be able to see where the solution was going to come from, and I would be so focused on getting to the solution that I would stop paying attention to what I was writing. Numbers from steps further down that I was visualizing would creep out onto the paper, or I'd stop paying attention to the signs, or I would apply a theorem only partially and leave too much out so the proof wasn't obvious anymore.
I also noticed that the more I felt pressured to finish in a certain amount of time, the more likely I would be to have this sort of math ADHD where my mind would be chasing solutions and not paying attention to the process of getting to them.
If you want my reaching explanation, I think a lot of mathematics "maturity" comes from having spent enough time slowly perusing a textbook and painstakingly working out solutions by hand while being forced to ignore everything else that you, indirectly, teach your mind to focus on single task. It's a sort of therapy for attention disorders or deficits. You refine that focus over the years of reading and mistakes and agony to the point that it becomes scalpel-sharp and then, without realizing it, you're suddenly "good" at mathematics.

[dominicklukas]

Another problem is simply being messy and rushing. Writing more slowly and being neat goes a long way. Also half the time I don't check for errors because I can't be bothered. If your writing is neat enough then you will be excited to read over and admire it, to catch those silly mistakes 😄

[defunct]

I think your definition of mathematical maturity is pretty much on point.

[leeming]

What I've learned from Dotson, is that professors actually like to hear when the book tortures you and you can't figure it out.
Either sadistically to laugh at you for your incompetence, or to helpfully guide you during office hours to an easy approach.
Hopefully the later and not the former, but the former happens way too often.

[skeptic]

It's amazing that you as a Math teacher struggled with matrices..I love linear algebra but when it comes to the computations I feel like a 8 year old (although they might be able to correctly calculate 3-4, which I have learnt I'm not reliably able to do)..So now I use a calculator to manually do the calculations...

[rationalpi]

I can relate to this so much, I’m in my first year and sometimes I can spend hours on just one single problem. Like you said there is really no shortcut beside practicing more and be patient with the process. One thing I found really useful is to really think about deeply of the mistake you made, and try to repeat the exercise again line by line in your head by always reminding yourself of that error and ask yourself why you didn’t get it right. I personally find that it helps me to be more cautious the next time I run into a similar problem and as a result ending up with less mistakes.

[mylesanthony]

Thank you! This will keep me going some more this rainy Friday morning. For me it's Functions that I keep adding or subtracting wrong with. Amazing to know I'm not the only one! And reassuring to remember that picking up new maths isn't nearly as much of a problem.

[benthayermath]

I love these motivational videos! Keep 'em coming!

I remember making a mistake on a homework set in quantum mechanics, and I looked over it for something like 8 hours and couldn't find it. It was a simple series of problems but somehow I was obtaining impossibly difficult algebraic equations. Frustrated almost to the point of crying, I went to the professor and asked him to find my mistake. He spotted it in 30 seconds. I had somehow forgotten to take the alternating sum when expanding a determinant in cofactors, a stupid, silly mistake! And he told me something I'll never forget: "In life, you have to learn to find your own mistakes and fix them. This is what it's like to do research; there may only be a handful of specialists in your subfield capable of spotting your mistakes in the world, and they won't always catch them." It left a big impression on me. That advice has transcended math for me, as I keep telling myself to backpedal if necessary and work on my flaws, so that down the road I can be successful.

[yrjokalevi]

I took a big step in my life at 25 y.o and went to the university of applied sciences, software engineering in January this year and lately I've been struggling a lot with math as the subjects just gets harder and harder. My highest level of education was vocational school which I graduated from in 2016, back then my motivation was so low that I did not give a damn about learning anything but today it's totally the opposite. One year and two months ago I started to learn math so that I could bear with it in the school and oh boy how low my skill level was, I had no idea how fraction numbers work, no idea how to calculate the most basic equations, in geometry, square area was the only calculation I knew, no idea what pi, square root, sin/cos/tan is for etc... 1 year and 2 moths after to this day I'm learning linear algebra!

I understand the math concepts pretty fast and I think math is fun but I just do all sorts of stupid mistakes and by then my motivation goes down and I throw my laptop out of the window (not really), at that point I just feel like this is not for me, I'm too stupid, I cant, I give up. However this video gave me huge motivation boost and reminded that it just takes time to learn these things :D

Thank you so much!

[marr]

Losing points because of these silly mistakes is the worst. Professors are ruthless here, losing 1/10 of my grade due to a silly mistake is the worst. If I do more, I lose even more...
Once I was solving a complex integral and a squared z was turned into a 2 in the next step 😭.

[doublebassrox]

Thank you for these videos, and these points of view, coming from a person who’s failed trig and college algebra 3 times, I feel like I’m inadequate and there’s something seriously wrong with me, but when I see people like you struggled as well in your own ways I feel like I can pick myself up and keep going if I just put more time to it

[dojawiththecat]

Thank you for posting this!
You gave me relief...

[lka]

To my mind, i think the most practical way to avoid silly mistakes is looking back to spot the silly mistakes you proprably slipped up. I used to do that every tests in middle school and because of that every solution i wrote in the exam is perfect the examiner can’t deduct points from me, but now in high school i hardly have enough time to do the problems let alone looking back and checking it. By some unknown reasons, i now always make some mistakes somewhere. For example, yesterday i sat the school’s excellent students exam and i missed 6, 5/20 points due to not processing deeply the task. I regret not reviewing the solid geometry solution i wrote. I made mistake of drawing it right at the beginning and spend 1 hour doing it for nothing.

[srinjenadas]

OH MY GOSH how do you make such relatable videos 😭 to be honest when i read the title of making silly mistakes, the first thing what came up to my mind was finding the inverse of a matrix, because that's what i used to struggle the most in my high school years for getting all the computations right.
Right now I am a math major, and I can confidently sit with a book of proofs and absorb what's written in there. But somewhere I used to feel so dumb as I couldn't always get all the multiplications right back then and spend long hours in it. Now, when I saw your video it motivated me so much.
Thanks a lotttt. Love from India. ❤️

[ashurbanipalcousin]

Thanks for another insightful and relatable video! I have gotten so many exams back that I expected 100s on and was ashamed to see my not perfect score because lo-and-behold I put the square root of four as FOUR. I’ve learned to take as much time as possible on exams going over each small computation again after I have gone through it the first time. I have found and fixed many small mistakes because of this tactic.

[tanaveditz]

Hey man, awesome video. Im a sophomore in algebra 2 and I am really good at math, but I tend to get a lot of questions wrong and when I look back all the steps in the problem I set up were correct, its just a simple silly flaw at the end of the problem that I didn't add or multiply in the end which gets the whole question wrong. I always type my questions in the calculator after I finished them to check the answers and I always get a different answer and when I go back to double check it would be a simple mistake like adding 5 when I am supposed to be multiplying. It gets me so mad how I'm really good at the tricky word problems and setting up hard equations but I end up getting it wrong just cuz of a silly mistake when im about to get my answer. This video really helps though. I guess I just have to wait and get better.

[fatmabatmaz]

I am a Year 12 Maths student from the UK and throughout the year my grades flactuated up and down and maths was the subject I was the most stressed for ; this is why I always watched your videos because I loved maths and I always practised but due to stress, anxiety and careless mistakes I didn't get the grades I wanted. For my end of year exam however I got 89% (which is an A* at our school and is the most important grade to determine predictions for universities ) and yes I could have got 92% if I gave my answer to 3 dp instead of 5dp, if i didn't change my sign from + to - midway through my working out, if I had payed attention to small details like exactly which part of the journey we had to draw the velocity/time graph for . At the end of the day I have accepted that i will make those silly mistakes and I can only reduce them by constantly practising and doing timed papers . Even if it's a relatively simple calculation I would write it out so that even a Year 10 student can understand what's going on in my paper. I also felt bad for not doing enough revision like the 2 weeks before the exam but my advice for maths students is that if you have been working hard throughout the year and understood the concepts, don't worry (still do some practise papers!) as I have learned none of your hard work will go to waste, even if you don't see the results instantly :) <3