Posts Tagged teaching math
Keys to Teaching Kids Math Successfully
One of the most important functions of us, as parents and mentors, to kids nowadays is teaching them and being able to do it successfully. There are a lot of tools and methods that can be used to teach our kids especially Mathematics but we really cannot tell how successful these tools may be unless maybe when we see them hurdle those Math lessons and exams in school. There are three basic keys or skills we need to develop and enhance to be able to successfully teach our kids Math: Memory, Mental Picture and Reasoning (Logic and Analysis).
Memory
Related posts
How to Teach Mathematics
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.”
Related posts