The art of motorcycle maintenance may have its followers, but if there’s one thing I’d choose to teach my kids its good old Maths. As God said, go forth and multiply.
So while the kids may or may not count on me, count they must. In steps, series, squares and cubes. Our baby conversations began with “one, two buckle my shoe “, and books like Dr. Seuss’ when he says “"Think! Think and wonder. Wonder and think. How much water can 55 elephants drink?" Primary school music revolved around School House Rock, that incredible set of songs where multiplication tables are cleverly set to jivvy little numbers.
An Indian obsession maybe, this middle class mesmerization with mathematics, but it certainly has its benefits. It’s the secret ingredient, as any astute analyst will tell you, for the Indian success, the reason why Indians are in such demand , and the reason why even Japanese schools are aiming to go the Indian maths way.
And now India is Shining and all that, with its gleaming crop of IB schools. Why then you may ask, do I as parent persist with this atavistic fixation with figures. Why bother with the binomial or struggle with statistics when you could earn credits with the intricacies of illustration or with ikebana?
Multiple are the reasons for the merits of Maths. The most important comes from something French philosopher Descartes said – “It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well." Nothing, needless to say can beat doing maths on a mind and memory sharpening exercise.
Go deep down enough and everything eventually comes down to numbers. The business of life and living is so numerical, beginning with statistics like date of birth and height and weight and culminating in the decimal points on your bank balance. So why not train kids to be the sort of people who can be interested in numbers, and their interconnectedness. This way they get more confident and have more choices than if they stayed the ‘Oh I’m so bad at Maths ‘kind of kids who glaze over as soon as they sight a sum.
Because everyone can do Maths. The ‘I just can’t do Maths’ may have something to do with bad teachers, but it’s also one of the biggest myths on the education circuit. As a high school teacher said "There are two ways to do great mathematics. The first is to be smarter than everybody else. The second way is to be stupider than everybody else -- but persistent."
The 3P’s above all else – practice, practice, and practice. OMR (Optical mark readers) make multiple choice papers easier to administer these days , but as the Maths minded spouse insists , its problem solving that must be mastered. 20 or 30 or even 50 sums a day everyday till numbers become people you know. Like 1729, the smallest number you can express as a sum of 2 cubes in 2 different ways ( 9 cube plus 10 cube as well as 12 cube plus 1 cube). We end up quizzing the kids on their favorite numbers and getting them to look for patterns in the license plate numbers they see. Any maths exam- and we’re there - The IPM (Institute for Promotion of Maths) scholarships, the Asset and the Maharashtra State government scholarship exams. It’s an effort ; all those Sundays ( not counting the days of prep) but it’s also the only way to travel out of a fixed school syllabus , to engage with off beat problems.
Besides all this they must count; whatever can be counted – right from steps and yellow cabs on the road to the number of kilometers to destination, on highway travel. Read maps and train time tables. And play guessing games galore – the 2 year old toddler must estimate how many spoonfuls of dal are left in her katori (you’ll be surprised how much faster this makes the eating ordeal !) while her 7 year old sister estimates weights of packages and lengths and breadths of rooms.
Like it or not Maths is the one key fits all, for disciplines ranging from engineering to economics. Even drawing draws from mathematics ( yes it’s the geometry that’s plane fun ; life without geometry as they say, is pointless !). It’s also as Richard J. Trudeau says in his book ‘Dots and Lines’, “ the world's best game. It is more absorbing than chess, more of a gamble than poker, and lasts longer than Monopoly. It's free. It can be played anywhere - Archimedes did it in a bathtub. “
This appeared in Mint Lounge February 2008
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