Is Math Worth the Sacrifice

Generation after generation, the complaint has been always"Why do I reason to learn mathematics? I'll never use it in the practical world. I want to be a fireman or a cowboy or a news reader and they don't need to know how to do math. Today, with the common use of electronic devices and even calculators on the cell phones which are carried by young children, it's a better question than ever before. Why should a person learn the formulas and memorize the times tables they learn in class Does it make any sense the effort involved in memorization of formulas and procedures when the only thing you need to do is to punch in a symbol to receive a digital answer to the math question?

There are some responses to the question and all of them require some maturity to understand. No one finds it entertaining to memorize facts; nevertheless, the foundations is what is usually better learned at first. It is a possibility that showing math in a different way, though, could radically enhance the comprehension of why we study math.

Among the reasons why the study of math is necessary is that it creates the need for students to read and comprehend, which also pushes them to learn how to organize their cognitive processes and to see depth in the problems. The formulas by themselves won’t help to understand how to apply a formula. In order to master that ability, the students need to get their brains active in order to recognize patterns and elements that will allow them to associate knowledge and to gain a more complete understanding. This new found understanding, obtained from the practice in figuring out the parameters in a math problem also contributes in other fields of study.

In addition to the need to organize your thinking due to math, you will also be forced to come to understand the meaning of the formulas, in terms of knowing how to apply them. In other words, unless you understand something about how math works, you won't have any idea how to enter numbers into a computer. In fact, the actual calculation performed with the aid of an electronic device can be simply useless if we are not able to give an interpretation to it, or how to use it. And this has to do not only to relatively meaningless calculations but to calculations that have an effect in our lives. For instance, we can use a calculator to compute a mortgage payment based on the current interest rate and term of the loan, but the result will be meaningless if we don’t understand the mechanics of the calculation.

This problem is faced by educators all around the globe. Even the tests which are designed with the purpose of monitoring the progress of students indicate a serious decline in the understanding of math. Teachers are criticized for not trying to go a little bit further, and maybe this criticism is a little bit unfair, because this fall is part of a deeper tendency.

Robert is a member of StatisticsBrain, a tutoring company that offers statistics homework help online.

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