Will your Child ever Love Math?

Climbing up math staircase — Growing up with math

Christina Sng for Maths@Singapore

This is a difficult question, isn’t it? On one hand, you want your child to enjoy the process and do well in the subject, but on the other hand, you want to do it without forcing, which we all know will lead to resentment and hatred of a subject.

My personal journey with Math didn’t begin well. Before I entered school, my feelings toward Math were neutral. Workbooks were never forced upon me nor anecdotal lessons about Math by my parents. I did well in Math during Primary school and even aced my PSLE Math.

Yet I struggled in Secondary school and began to hate Math because of a sharp-tongued teacher and my own inability to grasp the concepts. My tutor Ahmad changed that and I went from 20% on tests to 80% very quickly.

The teacher remained sharp-tongued, this time because I was so ahead of class I was bored but I no longer hated Math and embraced it once more as a subject I was intrigued by.

For me, it was personal competency that helped me love Math and an unpleasant teacher who contributed to my negative view of it. We can’t change the latter but we can certainly help with the former. Help from a person who instills the love for the subject makes a world of difference to a child.

What else can you do to help your child love Math? Here’s another perspective: make it relevant to them.

Mrs K Gray, Deputy Head of Lower Primary, Dover Court International School says, “it is vital that it is as engaging and as hands-on as possible. We…encourage children to enjoy it by making it purposeful and relevant…as adults we don’t stop to think that we are using our mathematical skills. We calculate costs in our head, judge distances when we are making our way somewhere, tell the time so we aren’t late to meet a friend and the list goes on…the more children see Maths as a skill that is relative to their own lives and by encouraging them to use the skills such as measuring, ordering, using money and telling the time, the more they are likely to enjoy it.”

For more, read on https://honeykidsasia.com/how-to-make-your-child-love-maths/

Thanks to Gayatri Malhotra @gmalhotra for making this photo available freely on Unsplash

Author

Christina Sng is a three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author that finds peace in mathematics and the macabre. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and art appear in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Interstellar Flight Magazine, and The Washington Post. Aside from having over 20 years of experience in the field of writing, she also has an extensive background in UX design and IT. Her educational background combined with her interests and neverending curiosity about the world is the perfect recipe to have her tackle fascinating topics about math. She is able to approach the highly logical field of mathematics through an extremely creative lens that sheds new light and exposes new avenues on how it impacts our lives.