Skip to main content

Mathematics and Life 55 10 ways to see you are good at maths

 10 ways to see you are good at maths


Background


Do you know you are good at Maths ?


As it happens with all activities, there is great confusion, debate, as to how to know if you are good at Maths ?


There are parents, children, teachers, marketities,  agencies who believe and promote that being fast at calculations, orally, is the sole criteria of your being good at maths. There are big, commercially successful, models going and growing around the globe who buy, sale this core thought. Countless children feel guilty of not being able to find, say 674 x  4387 in a fraction of a minute if not seconds thinking. 


At Beyond Abacus we summarily reject this line of thinking and strongly believe in a much more scientific, inclusive, definition of mathematics as a science of understandings , recognising, appreciating and creating patterns in daily life, business, sciences


Based on this definition, I have identified many activities where knowingly or unknowingly, we use mathematical concepts. If we involve kids in these activities, their mathematical thinking will develop 


  1. Budget making is one of the most useful activities we do on at least a monthly basis. To prepare the budget we use the core mathematical skills of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. calculation of percentage. So,if you make a budget and it works, you have mathematical skills, even if you may not be good at exams. 

  2. Construction Be it just extending a room, making additional toilet or making an entire new house, construction activity assumes knowing good core mathematical skills like budgeting, comparing rates, bargaining, geometry, symmetry.

  3. Exercise training this another area where we use lot mathematical concepts like weight calculation, diet planning, time counting, estimating and see on.

  4. Interior designing requires good knowledge of core mathematical concepts like judgement of space, ratio, proportion,symmetry

  5. Fashion designing too is like interior designing, using same concepts of ratio, proportion, symmetry, estimation, visualisation, mixing colors

  6. Shopping at mall if done without just trying to impress someone, shopping at malls or  grocery stores requires real, mathematical sejudge offers and to avoid impulsive buying.

  7. Cooking and baking Although most ladies and girls do not know it, when they increase the tea for suddenly arrived guests or add salt to reduce the chilli impact, they are using the concept of ration proportion. In earlier times, even entire wedding food was planned, cooked by the family ladies using their judgement measures. 

  8. Sports also requires a lot of planning, judgemental based on data. Martina Navratilova, the legendary women's tennis player was one of the women athletes working on programmed diet schedule. The sport coaches have to watch, compare, scores, and develop judgement through cognitive, logical reasoning. 

  9. Management of time Working across different time zones is so common these days. We have countries like the US having 5 time zones within a country. Australia has a 3 hour difference between Perth and Sydney. Arranging a common meeting time requires good knowledge of time sense. Likewise, while estimating Project timeline deadlines, lot of mathematics is involved. 

  10. Driving skills are the ultimate and tests of judgement of speed, turning space, speed of the opposite vehicle, space to turn, strength of breaks, finding the average of the vehicle. 


Thus we see involuntarily we are doing a lot of maths. And guess what, on the whole do it quite well too. 


See these traits in your kids and motivate them to develop mathematical thinking than just scores in class tests and quizzes. 


Dr Prakash Moghe

Beyond Abacus

8085906062, 7489447223

drpnmoghe@gmai.com

Comments

  1. Snehal PrabhuneMarch 11, 2021 at 8:36 AM

    Wow, that's so prominent, certainly maths is in our lives but till now we failed to acknowledge that

    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