I’m loving my prereq class for teacher certification right now. Lots of interesting debate, discussion, and sharing about how to teach well. On thing we touched on today was that in order to hook a student and open them up to learning about a subject, three things had to be present: personality of the teacher, content or subject matter, and context or relevance.
Of all the subjects I’ve encountered as a student, Math was the hardest one to hook me into, and I suspect that I am not alone. Most people I know have an aversion to math that’s almost as strong as their aversion to dentists and pelvic exams. Just teaching math relevant to life skills (enough addition and subtraction to balance a checkbook, fractions, percentages, and basic Algebra, and so on), it becomes an enormous challenge to interest the student. Go on to more advanced subjects - Geometry, PreCalc, Trigonometry - and the number of students interested and willing to do the work drops precipitously.
I also remember that from eight grade on, I could never get a satisfying answer from any of my math teachers as to why math was important. Why did I need it?
Now I’m at the age where I appreciate intellectual pursuits for their own ends. I find myself wanting to recover the subjects I so strongly fought against learning in high school, and I want to be able to convince future students that math has relevance to them.
So, here I am, arithmophiles. Witness to me! Convince me! Tell me why I need math beyond the basic skills sets!