The joy of learning math

For many students, math is a phobia on par with a fear of snakes, lizards, elevators, water, flying, public speaking, and heights. Although the “illness” is not genetic or infectious, they “inherit” it from their parents; and “catch” him from his friends. What are the reasons behind the terrible reputation of mathematics that divides society between “haves” and “have-nots” mathematicians?

“One of the reasons students do poorly in math is that they learn it by heart, often without understanding what they are learning and can’t apply it to real-life situations,” says Vijay Kulkarni, leader of the First State Annual Education Report (TO BE) recently published by the well-known Mumbai-based non-governmental organization, Pratham.

Explaining the grim picture the report paints, especially on math – 42 percent of children between the ages of seven and ten can’t subtract – Kulkarni says kids are turned off, because conventional straitjacket teaching in the classrooms he has expressed the joy of learning. , turning schools into robotic factories.

Outdated teaching methods and an outdated curriculum, far removed from the students’ everyday experiences, do nothing for the student’s appreciation of the subject. Intelligence is often measured by the grades you get in math and your self-confidence is eroded when you are called a fool for getting lower scores.

However, if taught in the right way, learning math can be easy, fun, and can fill one with a sense of wonder, with its inherently beautiful harmony and order. Both parents and teachers need to get the message across that learning math can be fun. Your expressions of interest, sense of wonder, and enjoyment are critical to the child’s interest in the topic.

“Parents are a child’s first mentors. Even before children can be formally admitted to preschool kindergartens, they can start playing with numbers,” suggests Dr. MJ Thomas, a child psychologist in the city. Children are playful by nature and have an irrepressible curiosity to explore the world through experimentation with the objects around them: seeing, touching, hearing, tasting, smelling and ordering objects, putting them together or taking them apart. Through such experience, children understand their world intuitively.

Dr. Thomas’s Tips: Collect beads of various colors and have the children alternately string two beads of, say, two colors. Tell them to bring red and green balls and make two piles of the same number of balls. Another game could be to place the cards in rows of three or four. These activities can reinforce quantitative thinking and help make numbers our friends.

“While the other sciences have a number of hands-on activities included in the curriculum and the idea of ​​a physics, chemistry, or biology lab is common, math is still taught by just the chalk-and-talk method,” says Dr. Dr. SN Gananath, recipient of the Ashoka Fellowship for Innovations in Activity-Based Mathematics Teaching. “This is particularly unfortunate since a subject like math can only be understood when a child experiences, firsthand, the idea of ​​weight and volume, shape and size, number and pattern,” he says.

Dr. Gananath has designed Maths Kits, with tables, diagrams and games, to explain various difficult concepts in Mathematics, such as place value, fractions or decimals. Take a sheet of paper, mark the lengths a and b in minutes, folding the paper appropriately, arrive at the formulas for (a+b) 2 and (ab)2. Such activity-based teaching stimulates thinking, encourages discussion, or looks for alternative ways to solve problems. On the other hand, traditional teaching in schools seems to give the impression that there is only one way to solve a given problem.

“Learning doesn’t mean just ‘knowing’ facts, but understanding the underlying concepts that are anchored in experience,” says HNParmesh, director of born free, a public school in the village of Banjarpalya, off the Banaglore-Mysore highway. His school has the rare distinction of all students earning first class on the VII Standard Public Examination for several years in a row. Parmesh and her team of dedicated teachers have used inexpensive materials like matchbooks and colored beads made from baked clay to make educational aids that they say have helped slow learners better understand math.

Various organizations like the Akshara Foundation and the Azim Premji Foundation, with the support of corporate bigwigs, have collaborated with the government and used computers to engage bored rural children and stimulate their curiosity and imagination. However, using the computer effectively to support teaching is not an easy task. It needs good planning and design; Otherwise, it can end up as an expensive replacement for rote learning, if all you do is replace boring text with colorful animations.

IT can be used in innovative ways to usher in interactive learning, as has been attempted by Oracle Education Foundationwho has designed a web-based educational environment – think.com for teachers and students in Bangalore and elsewhere. This has allowed students and teachers to create personal web pages and communicate or discuss with each other through message boards and emails. The website has made students more creative and teachers more responsive and accessible to students.

Games and puzzles are a sure way to help learning. As children, we have wondered the puzzle: a goat, a tiger and a bunch of grass must be transported across a river via a boat that can carry only one of the three at a time. Since the goat will eat the grass and the tiger will eat the goat if she leaves them alone, how would she take them one by one and save their lives? There is a similar exercise in logical thinking in the classic example of a town with two tribes, one always telling the truth and the other always lying. When you come to a point where the path forks into two paths, one leading to treasure and the other to death, you see one member of each tribe. If he is allowed to ask only one of them a single question, who will he ask and what will he ask to get the treasure?

Puzzles like this will start a lot of discussion. And the lessons learned will not be easily forgotten; will be applied when a similar situation arises.

Learning must be guided by generalized principles in order to discover problem-solving strategies. Knowledge learned through rote rarely transfers to new, albeit similar, situations.

Teacher-centered classrooms where the teacher dominates the scene should soon become a thing of the past. Teachers must be facilitators of learning; they should stimulate thought, which would lead to self-discovery, so that the child experiences the sheer joy of learning.