How many times have you heard someone say, "I was never good at math"?
Truth be told, you are probably better at it than you think. The reason most people don't like math (and other people do) is that it demands precision. Get one number wrong or mix up a positive and negative sign, and all your work is nullified. Believe it or not, math also demands good reading skills. We can't count how many times our students have been presented with an arithmetic reasoning question and their first instinct is to multiply or add whatever number they see in front of them. We start slow with this. Within about five minutes we can tell if our students can't do the basics - adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. You would be surprised how many people never mastered these skills. After we fix that, it's on to percentages and ratios, and only when those are solid do we move on to algebra and geometry. It is "scaffolding" in action. |
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