Humans are meant to ask questions and I think children are more human.
While reading this amazing book on Mathematics, a subject which interest people like me and you. Hold on!….If you have Maths anxiety then hold give me a chance to write about it, I have something for you in my next post.
The book by Mark Wahl describes how Mathematics is seen by people with different intelligence. Some of you may be more inclined to see the image of the book (picture smart), some may Google the name and would love to read it (word smart).One may pause for a second and start reflecting on the title (intrapersonal). While many like me would also search for audio book (rhythm smart). I didn’t find the audio book so if you do then do share the link in comments. And yes people like one of my friend would straight away order a copy, that’s amazon smart! I call him ‘impulsive’ buyer.
Coming back to the big question; And yes questions starting with ‘Why’ are fascinating but most of the time they are difficult to answer. So I would like to attempt one here!
A simple answer to the big question is we learn Mathematics because we use it. It’s part and parcel of our daily life. It is a fundamental part of life. It is a language to understand science!
As a head of Science and Mathematics Department, I get special privilege to review variety of Maths books from different publishers and boards. And we see an interesting pattern there. The focus is more on the ‘quantity’ as in the rush to teach numbers 1 to 50 for the kindergarten. How many children in kindergarten deals with numbers beyond 10 or 20? and yes the less emphasis on concepts. In my belief children in kindergarten knows about fractions. I am sure you have seen two children sharing one chocolate almost equally. They very well understand equality which is sometimes taught formally in value education. Yes! mathematics is not too academic as one may perceive it to be. It deals with some core values of human life.
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