Mistakes are a crucial part of your math education.
They can be embarrassing and negatively impact your grades, but the right kind of mistake can actually help you learn.
If you take academic risks and push your limits, mistakes are inevitable, but they’re valuable as well.
Every mistake is a learning opportunity, and the students who take advantage of those opportunities are the ones who excel in math.
So what does the process of learning from your mistakes look like?
It can come in many different forms. For example, if you missed several questions on a math test for which you thought you knew the material really well, it’s important to go back and look at each individual question and try to figure out what kind of mistakes you made.
You may find that you didn’t understand the material as well as you thought you did, and you need to change your study habits so that you’re going back and looking at the material in more detail and trying more challenging questions when you’re preparing for the test.
Or you may find that you understood the material really well, but you made a ton of simple math errors, like negative sign errors.
In that case, you need to build in a self-check on the math every time you see a negative sign so that you know you’re not going to make those mistakes again. There’s a little bell that goes off and says, “I’ve got to check that.”
In short, embrace your mistakes, learn from them, and use them as opportunities to grow and excel in math.
