The most common mistake

The most common mistake people make when working a math problem is not that they don't know how to do the math, it's that they don't know what math to use and they don't know how to find out what math to use.  The reason that they don't know what math to use is because the don't know what the words mean (and so they stare at it and ponder and nothing gets done).  The reason that they don't know what the words mean is because they didn't read the textbook, or at least they didn't read the right part of the textbook.  Now anyone could be forgiven that last, because the textbook is so thick and heavy you could use it to kill poisonous snakes just by dropping it on them, so actually reading it might be fatal.

Except. It's so easy to find the right part of the textbook. Because. Each problem set refers to just one little section in the textbook, which is by itself quite light and slender. That means that the words that you don't understand are in that one little section.  And those words will have some equations that come right after that describe what those words mean, and those equations will be the math that you need to use to solve the problem.