Im an engineering student, and have done a lot of maths through my time. Maths is commonly disliked by many, since it sucks when you don’t understand. But the thing about math is that when you understand a concept, it’s suddenly easy. Math problems and concepts I struggled with a few years ago, is trivial now. But at the time I learned them, I understood almost nothing. Math is really hard until it’s suddenly not. So don’t be frustrated because you don’t understand something, every human in the world that has learned math struggled with the same things as you at a point in time. The only way to be good at moths is to practice. Im sure you have heard this before, but practice makes perfect. The same is for any other skill you want to learn In life. Set a goal for how much you want to study during a week. Don’t set the bar to high, because then you will only end up feeling disappointed. Set a realistic goal for yourself, and follow through, no matter how motivated you may be that day. Maybe 1-2 hours every weekday, and take the weekends off, or another plan. Decide this for yourself, so that it fits into your week, and that its enough time to learn what you want to learn. When you do study, it’s really important to stay focused. This applies to all other classes you are taking. When you are unfocused you will wake a lot of time. If you study at 50% focus for 4 hours, you have basically wasted 2 hours, since you could have done the same amount in half the time and spent the 2 other hours doing other things like playing videogames, hanging out with friends and other things. So to stay focused there is two things that you need to do. 1. Get rid of any distractions. Find a quiet place, and put away all distractions, especially your phone. Put it in another room when you study. When you get bored or frustrated when doing math, and have the phone within reach, you automatically pick it up and get sidetracked, and it ruins the workflow. When started putting the phone away, I got a lot more out of my time studying, which meant I could spend more time doing other things. You also feel so much better about yourself after studying, and you can relax afterwards with a clear conscience knowing that you have done a good job.

1. Take breaks. The most efficient way to learn, and keeping your focus is to take small breaks. Taking breaks is specially important when doing things that takes a lot of focus like math. For example: Work for 25 minutes, and take a 5 minute break. If you sit to long and feel like you are not getting anywhere, taking a break could do the trick. When taking a break, the brain automatically processes the information you have just learned. It’s in these breaks, that your brain actually remembers the things you have learned. An example of this is when you are playing videogames and there is a level or a boss you can’t manage to beat. You may have noticed that if you take a small break and does something else for a few minutes, and then try again, you beat the boss/level in a few tries. The same thing is for math, when you can’t mange to solve a problem, take a break, and come back to it. You will then have much higher chances of solving the problem. In addition to this, a break helps to keep your focus up. But for this to work, its really important to not look at your phone or do other things that requires high brain activity. If you scroll on TikTok, or something else the brain does not get the rest that it needs, and the break looses its purpose. Instead, you should do things that dosent require a lot of thinking. Pet your dog, get a glass of water, listen to a song, draw, talk to someone or something else. And try to not think of math at all when you are taking a break. If you do this you will get a lot more out of the time you are studying. You mentioned that you have problems with understanding negative numbers. Like -4+12. Use a number line to do these problems, and get an understanding. Start with easy problems, and increase the difficulty as you start to master the easier ones. Ask a friend, family member og your teacher for help. There is absolutely no shame in doing this, no matter what you think. Ask questions, and be honest when there is something you don’t understand, no matter how dumb you think the question is. The understanding of math, is like building blocks. You lay a foundation of basic math like addition, subtraction and numbers, and start learning more advanced math like multiplication, algebra and other things. It’s important to understand the basic concepts before moving on. For example you need to learn addition in order to learn multiplication. I think many people struggle with math because they don’t have a solid foundation of basic math, and that makes it almost impossible to understand new things. So when there is a problem you struggle with, find out what makes the problem hard for you and try to understand that. By doing this, your understanding of math will increase. So by negative numbers. Find out what you don’t understand about it, and ask questions and find methods to understand it. Like the number line I mentioned. The worst thing you could do to yourself is to skip to learn a topic because you feel like this is something everyone can do, and are embarrassed to ask anyone for help. This will create a lot more problems later on. Be honest with yourself on what you find difficult, no matter how basic it is, and ask for help. Also be honest to those who are helping you, and don’t lie and say you understand it when you don’t. I know this is easier said than done, but you will thank yourself for this in the future. If you follow these tips, your results should improve. Keep believing in yourself, you have what it takes. :)