I once asked a math major what integration meant. The question must have caught her by surprise since she stopped, looked at me and said “I don’t really know, but I did get all A’s in Calculus.”

Math teachers are notorious about introducing a concept with abstraction before explaining the relation it has with real life. Take the first day of a typical college Analytical Geometry class; the teacher introduces the class by drawing a graph on the board and asking, “Is that a relation or a function?” Relations and functions have different properties and the question is legitimate, but ‘you lost your audience professor’ – except for the top 3%. This is because most of the students have no concrete concept of functional or non-functional graphs. First, explain what function vs. relation means and then let the class try and create both.

A great rule of thumb in getting your point across to people is to draw a picture of what you are talking about. I thought I knew this completely until I ran across an Algebra problem given to us by a good Math teacher in Freshman College. I usually whipped through the Math homework with ease but I found myself stuck on this problem. It was a simultaneous solution of only three equations but composing the last equation was not happening! So, after an hour of getting nowhere, I said, “This is one for the teacher.”

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