Did School Make You Hate Maths?

his is not the day I want to remember, I was in grade 4 and It was maths class immediately after lunch. Everybody in the class would be tested on tables and the teacher would pick any random student I knew that one of them would be me and like they say if you ask for something you get it by the laws of secret. So mam asked me to recite multiples of 4 and I was standing there like a deer in the headlight I knew that if I don't answer this question correctly I would be beaten with a ruler in front of the whole class. The teacher was really mad at me and she asked me to go to the back of the class and face the wall for the entire period, I was actually relieved.

I was in grade 9 and it was Algebra class, I dreaded this day when we received our corrected test papers, I never understood Algebra and I knew I had failed miserably. The teacher started calling out the names of the students who had done well and mine was not one of them, I wanted to just disappear into thin air. When she finally called out my name and I went up to her desk to collect my paper, I saw a big red "F" on it and I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I was so embarrassed and ashamed, I wanted to just run away and hide but I had to face the music. When I looked around I saw my friends waving to me and telling me that they had failed as well and that made me feel a little better.

In the holidays my brother was assigned to teach me maths and he kept telling me how easy it was but I just couldn't understand it. One day while we were going through a problem he said "it's so easy, even a 4-year-old can do it" and that really hurt me because I felt like I was being compared to a 4-year-old. After that day I just gave up and decided that maths wasn't for me.

That's all I gave up, I wanted to get rid of maths as early as possible, I didn't choose to do maths in high school and I never thought I would need it in my life but

I was wrong.

Now when I am helping my son I realize that maths is actually not that hard, it's just the way it was taught to me. I wish I had someone to show me how easy it is, I would have loved maths a lot more. I tell my son these few things when he is learning maths:

1) Take your time, there is no rush- we need maths for a lifetime, why do we need to learn it all in a hurry?
2) Have fun with it- If you are enjoying what you are doing, learning is so much easier. Let's see maths in an everyday pattern like when we buy something from the shop, we are using maths. When we cook, again we use maths. There is so much more to it than just numbers and equations.
3) Mistakes are okay- We learn from our mistakes, so don't be afraid to make them. The more mistakes you make, the better you'll get at maths. I tell him many examples from my childhood when I had made mistakes and how I corrected them.
4) If you don't understand something, ask me again and again - I will explain it to you in a different way until you understand it. I tell him that even grownups need to ask for help sometimes, there is no shame in it.
5) Practice, practice, practice- We have a fixed schedule to practice maths so that we can face his fear positively.
6) And finally, have fun with it- As I mentioned earlier, if you are enjoying what you are doing, learning is so much easier. So let's see maths in an everyday pattern like when we buy something from the shop, we are using maths. When we cook, again we use maths. There is so much more to it than just numbers and equations.

I am sure that if I had known these things when I was learning maths, I would have done a lot better in it.

I was listening to this talk by Randy Palisoc, he says that we have always needed maths like people in the past used maths to conduct trade, build monuments and measure lands. He says that we have abstracted the maths such that kids begin to get lost in the numbers without
really understanding what they are doing. We need to connect maths to a language that kids can understand.

For example, if we want to teach the concept of division, we can use the example of sharing candy among friends. So if there are 9 sweets and 3 friends, each friend will get 3 sweets. So we can say that 10 divided by 3 is equal to 3. This is a language that kids can understand and it's also a lot more fun.

In a Ted Talk a high school mathematics teacher and YouTube star Eddie Woo share his passion for mathematics, declaring that "mathematics is a sense, just like sight and touch", he talks about some patterns and how they appear everywhere in our lives like a tree, blood vessels, storms, etc. He says many professions make patterns like musicians, artists, architects, and even chefs. He shows us how maths is a part of everything we do, whether we're aware of it or not.

We need to change the way we think about mathematics and stop calling some people "maths people" and others "non-maths people". We should start thinking about everyone as "maths people" because everyone uses mathematics in their everyday lives.

I think the way we are teaching maths needs to change, we need to make it more fun and interesting so that kids don't give up on it. We need to show them how maths is relevant to their lives and how it can be used in everyday situations. Only then will they start to see its value and appreciate it for what it is.

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