My wife is taking calculus/trig in college and she’s struggling immensely. She spends hours on one question and sometimes doesn’t answer it fully. She claims that her math fundamentals are her biggest detriment and wants to drop out of her class and spend the next few months just doing practice worksheets on fundamentals. She has asked me to be her aid which I’ve accepted daily (of course she’s my wife.) The issue is I’m having to learn all this stuff with her and at times I’m just as confused as she is. She wants me to teach her things that I pick up easily but when I try she doesn’t understand. For example, last night I had to explain to her similar triangles and we spent 2 hours for her to finally understand. I’m not a teacher and I encouraged her to have a tutor that I’d pay for but she feels a lot of shame with that and refuses. I’ve also wanted her to work with a professional because I have poor patience and get often frustrated. She yells at me when I’m not explaining the answer well enough; I try a million ways to teach it but nothing seems to work. What doesn’t help is that her professor is poor at explaining her work and assumes her students are reading her mind.
My question is: How do I help my wife with math? It feels wrong to just throw our hands up and have her drop out but she’s really pushing for it.