Ask anyone about math, and 3 or 4 out of 5 will say they hate it!
Yet watch any group of kids before they go to school. They love counting -
which is, of course, the basis of math. So why do they hate math later on?
What's going on?
It starts in school. In any class of students, about 10% will love
mathematics; another 10% will find it manageable, without any strong
feelings for it. At the bottom of the class, about 10% will find
mathematics impossible. The 70% in between these extremes with grades
from just above fail to just above mediocre will pass - and for the most part,
they will hate mathematics.
Teachers are going to hate me for saying this, but the reason so many
people hate math is that so many math teachers hate math. Not only that,
very few math teachers know how to teach math, and it can be safely said
that no math teacher knows how to teach it to the 90% of the average class
that should be comfortable with math, but mostly isn't.
The reason for this lies in a failure to understand how we do mathematics,
and how the whole edifice of mathematics was laboriously constructed by the
human race over the course of our history, in different civilizations
around the world.
At EMRI, we researched math teaching, and were not surprised to find that
math lessons don't address the part of the brain that does mathematics. The
kids in class who love math somehow move the lessons over to the math
brain, and love the workout it gets. All the rest find that math lessons
somehow interfere with the math brain, and they resent that.
When a part of the brain does something without conscious thought, we say
it;s working intuitively. We tend to disparage intuition, mostly because it
can't be explained in textbooks, it can't be put into a test, and it can't
be graded objectively - although we can all admire the intuitive dancer,
artist, or chess player.
So we decided to work out how to address the part of the brain that does
mathematics, to awaken mathematical intuition. We were delighted to see how
delighted our students were to discover mathematics for themselves, to
construct more and more elaborate mathematical constructs, to understand
and master and develop the toolkit they use to work on numbers, shapes and
other mathematical objects. We showed them how other people throughout
history had made similar discoveries, and how they had led in time to the
wonderful world of mathematics we know today.
We call the course we constructed Mathemajix, because - well, because it's almost magical.
We really believe that those who win the Nobel prizes in mathematics or
physics in future will be those who get their introduction to arithmetic,
geometry, algebra, trigonometry, calculus and statistics from Mathemajix or
courses like it.
If you're a math teacher, you could use these methods to teach someone who
may in time win a Nobel prize.
But even if you don't have any Nobel laureates among your alumni - and of
course chances are you won't - you will have changed the attitudes to math
of almost all your students. Few will hate it, most will enjoy it! And as a
math teacher, isn't that what you really want?
When you buy Teaching Mathematical Intuition, you get access to our online
discussion group, where you will meet teachers like yourself who are
striving to be better teachers, to do better by their students.
If you're in South Africa, click here to order Teaching Mathematical Intuition for R195.
If you're in the USA, click here to buy it for $29.95.
