Comment on Teach primary pupils real-world maths - Labour
thehatfox@lemmy.world 8 months agoOne of the reasons kids can find math so dull is because it’s not taught with enough relation to the real world. Maths teaching is often reduced to only doing sums for the sake of doing sums, which is not going to be interesting with most kids.
What makes maths interesting is how it can be used to understand there working of the real world, and if that connection isn’t made it’s very hard to create a lasting interest in maths among students.
Chariotwheel@kbin.social 8 months ago
I agree. I had very mixed success with maths in school. The topics I was the best was things I could understand. E.g. calculation of probabilities or how long it would take for debt to be repaid with certain parameters. But as math got abstract I got lost, because for me it was a just a bunch of formulars that seemed arbitary to me. Maybe it was me or maybe it was the teachers failing to explain why we're doing what we're doing.
fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 8 months ago
I struggled massively with the abstract nature of maths at school for several years - oddly, it was our art lessons that fixed it all in my case.
We started looking at (and practicing doing) geometric abstract painting, and suddenly all the maths abstraction made sense when I could think of it visually. Changed me from a “D” student to an “A” student.
Use maths all the time at work and in life these days. Love a bit of maths - thanks to our art teachers :)