A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)

What a turn around in learning. Great book.

A Mind for Numbers is written for students of math and science, but Barbara Oakley’s perspective, interviews, and recommendations are very useful for everybody who wants to be a SMART 21st Century lifelong learner. It is a practical book that reflects the best knowledge about how our brains process things – both logically and creatively, from the details up AND from the ideas down. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn better – or who wants to help a scholar who wants to excel and LEARN in school.Oakley uses good teaching/learning approaches in this book. It is peppered with stories and even pictures that bring lessons to life. The stories are from very successful scientists – many of whom struggled to learn or were even written off by their teachers. They are stories that say – “persist, be smart about how you learn, and you will succeed.” This, of course, is the learning mindset that is so crucial for discovery and living an unstoppable life.Oakley also distributes insights about her core topics – building up and reinforcing the key ideas throughout the book. Ultimately, she concludes that 10 practices are critical (she calls them “Ten Rules of Good Studying.” They apply to lifelong learning as well as to learning for school – especially to information and processes you want to remember:Use recall. Don’t just review what you want to remember. Actively pull your insights out of your own brain. This, of course, is a key practice in my Unstoppable You. Oakley offers many reinforcements of this important way to support learningTest Yourself. This is something anyone can do about any topic you want to remember. For kids it’s flash cards, for adults it might be asking yourself what you know about a topic before a meeting or reading, and then doing it again afterwards.Chunk information. Organizing ideas and facts into categories, pictures and diagrams, songs, and other mental files can help you remember and understand at a deeper level. Connecting ideas to what you know and to each other creates more neural connections and thus more ways to find what you need when you need it.Space repetition. Oakley practices this by revisiting and enhancing these 10 rules throughout this book. The lesson is to work on something for a shorter period of time (30 minutes?) and then do something less demanding. When you return to the learning project later, you will be fresher and your automatic system (she calls it your “diffused processing mode”) will have done some undercover work to process your initial learning.Alternate different problem-solving techniques. She talks about how this works in math – work on equations for a while, then on verbal problems, then do a test, etc. The point is, don’t get stuck on one way of learning something. Get a variety of perspectives – some big picture, some detailed. This “interleaving” is a pretty valuable approach for any topic.Take breaks. When you are stuck or tired from focusing on solving a problem/learning, stop and do something that isn’t so taxing. Your automatic (diffused) processing will continue to work on the problem unconsciously and you will be able to have a new perspective when you come back to it.Use explanatory questioning and simple analogies. Try explaining what you are learning in a simple way – preferably to someone else. Tell them what it is “like” (an example she gives if that the flow of electricity is like the flow of water). This more deeply engrains the knowledge in your brain and may get you some clarifying questions.Focus. This is a very important and often broken rule. It is clear that your brain can’t work on more than one complex problem at a time. So, as many others suggest, turn off the phones, text messaging, loud music, and create a space where you can concentrate.Eat your frogs first. That is, do the hardest things first when you have the energy.Make a mental contrast. This is equivalent to the imagination quality presented in Unstoppable You: see where you want to be and compare it the where you are. Let this be motivating.There are many specific tips and encouraging comments in this book. And for students, there is a lot of good help related to working with teachers, studying with others, dealing with procrastination, taking tests, dealing with anxiety, letting go of the need to be perfect in order to be open to insights and to correct errors in thinking, remembering facts and methods, and more.Oakley is a very respected educator who came to the sciences by accident when she was in military service. We should be glad that she discovered math and science and became curious about how to be a master learner and teacher in these areas. We all benefit from her perspective, examples, and tips.

This is a great book, but I would not recommend the kindle version.The kindle version is not horrible, but it was quite uncomfortable for me to use. For the most part, because I felt that for this book I needed to be able to every so often flip back to a previous page, which is not as easy with the kindle as it is with a real book.About the content, the book tries to give scientifically backed learning strategies and techniques, and does so quite well. The strategies and techniques taught in this book are very well researched, with plenty of references, and not only for STEM subjects, by the way. There are also a lot of anecdotes from other students and teachers throughout the entire book. Each chapter ends with a summary of key concepts, a small question set (without solutions - but none is really necessary or even possible, for questions that require a private answer), and a large reminder to "Pause and Recall" the material that was studied in the chapter - this was in my opinion the best thing in the book. If you do indeed get into the habit of pausing and recalling learned material, then you will most likely study much much better. It is also important, however, to check with the book that you have indeed recalled the material correctly, by looking either at the content of the chapters themselves or the summary.The book was very readable and quite enjoyable. It is mainly organized into three parts: 1. dealing with procrastination, 2. learning strategies, 3. attitude (such as avoiding overconfidence and minimizing anxiety). The learning strategies can themselves be made into two distinct groups: one that deals with memorization tricks, and one that deals with understanding. Although the two groups are not mutually exclusive.There is also a lot of emphasis on pointing out what strategies DO NOT work - such as rereading and highlighting.At the end of the book you can find a quick recap the entire book. This recap is freely available as a PDF on the author's website, titled "10 rules of studying". Just google it, if you are interested.Be wary that the book is quite verbose. For every idea presented in the text, there are a lot of background stories that are probably there to help anchor the idea with some real world situation, although for some they might be useless and even cumbersome.Another thing about this book that might be viewed as a drawback, is the author's reliance on metaphors. The concepts of "diffuse" and "focused" thinking modes, for examples, are explained using the metaphor of a pinball machine. Another metaphor is that of vampires for the mechanisms of forgetting in the brain. The metaphors might be helpful, but they also feel awkward.Overall, I felt the book was great, quite readable, and I am very happy to have read it. The main concept I have taken from this book is the recall technique, where after you learn something, I try to recall it by explaining it to yourself out loud. Throughout the entire book, you are actively reminded to use it.

I'm also reading one of her other books. There's some overlap but that's a good thing. I will say that the reading is a little difficult for me. Most sentences are very long and structured in a complicated way. I have never been a strong reader, and I write code for a living. My training in C# leaves me biased towards less words per sentence. It helps my comprehension. I might be dyslexic.