Skip to main content

Mathematics and Life 15 Some more limitations of the Abacus system

 Some more limitations of the Abacus system


In personal capacity I have nothing for or against the Abacus as a business model - in fact it is none of my business. 


But as a longtime maths teacher, researcher in mathematics education, educationist, when I see the way the system works and its brutal impact on children tender minds it pains a lot to see how the gullible parents, kids, are misled to spend huge amounts of money, time on this system. Children have tremendous stress and strain to develop, hone, perfect, a skill I have never needed in past 61 years.


I ask the readers - have you come across any situation where you had to calculate, say 6759 x 3276 accurately in a fraction of a minute (if not seconds) ? Never. We either estimate roughly or use a calculator. Then why bother tender age kids to learn all these skills ? Make them feel guilty for something which you are forcing them to learn which has no utility in life ? Parents spend a lot of money, time, create hatred for maths in children's tender minds by constantly comparing them with other friends or siblings performing better on the Abacus ?


Moreover, besides in the marketing material, I did not find any credible research reference to support the claim of left and right brain faculty development through use of the Abacus system. I will be happy to read if someone may share some link in this context.


Other than being an excellent example of skilled marketing, good packaging, excellent positioning, exploiting parents’ fear of competition, I do not see any merit in the system as contributing anything significant in developing children's mathematical ability. More often than not, it is doing just the opposite.


Feel free to ask for articles on any topic in education, mathematics.


Currently we are available at drpnmoghe@gmail.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics and Life 23 Improving school mathematics 8

  Improving school mathematics 8 The role of parents 2 Mathematics is the science of recognising, understanding, appreciating, creating and using patterns in day to day life, business, sciences, work life, technology. In the last post we saw how parental influence becomes counterproductive and even limits a child's ability to perform. Now we will see what parents can do to boost a child's morale. Besides not doing unequal comparisons, expecting too much from the child, making public insults, the positive things parents can do are Give quality time to the child Encourage developing a study routine,, schedule in general Informally explain where education can take the child Accompany the child of school meetings  Besides these broad tips, using lot of love and common sense, parents can help the kid enjoy her studying maths. I also saw these videos which I guess will be very useful  9 tips to improve concentration https://youtu.be/LFIiW5BQP00 5 step formula  https://yout...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mathematics and Life 95 Multiple Intelligences and mathematics education

  Multiple Intelligences and mathematics education Background Intelligence has been the factor on which the human race takes the highest pride and feels that it has Intelligence of the highest level. It is so because only human beings have all the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch fully developed. Moreover, only human being have the unique ability to express ideas, feelings in their own written or spoken words. In the beginning of the 20th century a lot of research was done on human intelligence. Their types, levels, measurements, enhancement. In the early 1980s, Dr. Howard Gardener gave his theory of multiple Intelligences.  Quoting successful cases of great musicians, players, business tycoons, religious leaders who never went school, he proposed that just relying on academic Intelligence is not the way to define Intelligence and gave eight traits of distinctly different types of intelligences. They are Linguistic Intelligence - what we measure in formal e...
6 comments
Read more

Mathematics and Life 45 Experiential Learning

The role of experience In the behaviour school of psychology, who treat, observe, measure only the behavioural aspects, modification in behaviour is considered learning. For example, if you are training your dog to get the ball back, it does it, it has learnt what it means to get the ball back. Closer to us, if the teacher has just taught the concept of odd and even and now asks her 10 students to arrange themselves in odd number of rows and they make five rows with two students in each,they can be seen to have learnt the concept of odd and even. With more practice, it can be further consolidated. The mega companies like Jio, Amazon, Google, Facebook and others too have what is called experiential marketing as their backbone. Using, AI and applying big data, machine learning, techniques they study you and provide experiences you have been preferring to choose.  In this video, the high energy, very motivated friend of mine Dr. Sapna Agrawal takes us to the journey of providing exper...
4 comments
Read more