By: Robert Duval
For ages and ages, the complaint has been "Is there any necessity to learn mathematics? I'll never use it in the practical world. My desire is to be a fireman or a cowboy or a news reader and they will never need to know what a number is. Technology makes it even more difficult. The varied arrays of electronic devices that are available for the public make the idea of playing around with mathematical calculations even less enticing.
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Does it make any sense the effort that implies the 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?
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There are some different answers to the question and all of them require some maturity to understand. It is obvious that no one likes to memorize just for the sake of memorizing; however starting with basics is the start of most fields of learning. It is possible that reversing the way facts are presented might do much toward helping students to understand why the study of math can be helpful.
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The first reason why math studies are helpful is that they force the student to read and understand the question or problem. The student learns to organize their thinking in order to understand the true dimensions of the problem. The best knowledge given by formulas will not tell you how to apply it.
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For that, you need to be able to train your thinking to recognize the important elements of a situation and secondly to understand how to apply known facts or procedures in order to find the answer to the question. This new found understanding, obtained from the practice in figuring out the parameters in a math problem also contributes in other fields of study.
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In addition to learning how 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 short, unless you really understand something about the mechanisms of math, you won't have any idea how to enter numbers into a computer.
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In fact, the actual calculation made with the aid of an electronic device can be simply of no use if we don’t know how to interpret it, or how to apply it. And this applies not only to relatively meaningless calculations but to calculations that have consequences 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 canl be meaningless if we don’t understand the mechanics of the calculation.
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This problem is faced by educators all around the globe. Standardized tests show a dramatic fall in the math understanding of our students and the tendency doesn’t seem to get any signs of getting reverted in the short-run. Teachers are criticized for not trying to go a little bit further, and maybe this criticism is not justified, because this decline is part of a deeper tendency.
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