Skip to main content

Mathematics and Life 5, Mathematics as a science of patterns

 Mathematics as a science of patterns 


As against treating mathematics just as a computational tool, once we start treating mathematics as a 

science of recognising, understanding, appreciating and creating patterns a quiet revolution starts happening.


Some of the implications are 


Teaching becomes wide based The teacher does not just confine to teaching abstract concepts, but she relates concepts to student's daily life experiences. Right angle, for example, does not remain a geometrical concept taught by a teacher, but she makes all her students understand that all buildings in this world are at right angle to the ground. 


The students just do not know feet, centimetre conversions mechanically, but can guess / estimate lengths by watching. 


Learning becomes fun As the child is taught mathematics through the environment, from his reality, the concepts start developing on their own as the child constructs her reality in an incremental, organic way. 


Instead of just knowing what is acute angle, when a child sees that all doors open as acute angle to the door frame, wall, scissors make acute angle, railway tracks are parallel, the child understands that mathematics is not something from alien species to trouble him, but is in fact a friend in need.


Better evaluation tools Once we start treating mathematics more than just a computational tool, our methods of assessing child's mathematical power too change. We start giving more chances to correct, we create MOCPA (More than One Correct Possible Answer / Approaches) type questions which give the child a fair chance to progress at her own pace, compete with herself, and better her own performance.


Higher order thinking skills develop As the child starts enjoying the learning, the mind is relaxed and can think out of box solutions. The child does not see contents in isolation, but is able to see the interconnections between the seemingly unrelated topics. This is the beginning of the child acquiring higher order skills like problem solving, critical thinking, computational thinking.


Relates learning to work efficiently Through understanding the core concepts, subject matter, on her own, the child develops confidence to use the learnings in day to day shopping, kitchen works, playing games, making intelligent guesses and so on…..

Once this kind of working becomes a habit, the child applies in her real work situations. 


Please write in the comment box any other benefits you see in this approach

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 20, 2021 at 9:45 AM

    Good morning sir, may God always accompany you in fulling your vision. Regards Preeti

    ReplyDelete

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