Why You Should and How to Develop Your Mathematical Skills
Article Overview In this article, you will learn about the importance of having mathematical and numeracy skills. You will also learn how to get better at mathematics and improve your ability to understand and work with numbers. Pause and Think: “Why does Maths sometimes seem so strange?” Imagine you’re in front of your Maths textbook trying …
Article Overview
In this article, you will learn about the importance of having mathematical and numeracy skills. You will also learn how to get better at mathematics and improve your ability to understand and work with numbers.
Pause and Think: “Why does Maths sometimes seem so strange?”
What is mathematics really all about?
To most people, mathematics means working with numbers. But maths goes far beyond that. At its core, mathematics is the science of patterns. Mathematicians seek out patterns in the world, study them, develop notations to describe them and use those notations to further study the identified patterns.
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However, they don’t stop there. They go ahead to formulate assumptions about these patterns and establish truths by means of rigorous proofs. Finally, they develop procedures that can be used to apply the results from the study to the world.
For most students, maths is more feared than understood. Perhaps, the school system and the way we teach might have played some part in causing that. However, maths is very important in today’s world.
For instance, we use maths in every aspect of our lives at work and in practical everyday activities at home and beyond. We use maths when we go to buy things at the market, withdraw money from the bank, cook food or arrange our room. According to Prof. Keith Devlin, “what most of us learn in school doesn’t begin to convey what mathematics is.”
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Why You Should Care about Your Mathematical Skills
It is an undisputable fact that basic numerical skills such as dealing with decimals, ratios, percentages and making estimations are very important in the world we live in today. As Peter Braunfeld of the University of Illinois tells his students, “Our civilization would collapse without mathematics.”
The world is fast becoming a statistical battlefield filled with so much information. And this raises the bar for more people to be more mathematically informed and inclined. Good basic arithmetic skills helps us as citizens make sense of statistical and economic news. Moreover, many decisions in life are so often based on numerical information, such that to make the best choices, we need to make some calculations.
Statistics show that in the near future, around 90% of new graduate jobs in careers such as engineering, accountancy, nursing, medicine, art, architecture, and many more will require some degree of digital skills. And off course, digital skills are built on basic mathematics. The more digitally inclined the career, the more advanced mathematical skills are required for the job.
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The digital age presents us with more numerical data than ever before. Thus, this puts a new premium on the ability to reason and to apply mathematical concepts. Computers can do the mind-numbing mathematical processing for us. But we need good mathematical reasoning skills in order to use them effectively to solve our daily problems and make appropriate decisions.
Two Important Tips to Help You Get Better at Mathematics
Many people dislike mathematics simply because they’re doing it wrong. Nobody is born good at Mathematics and it’s not genetic or hereditary. In fact, there’s no such thing as a “maths” person.
Mathematics is like a language which allows you to communicate. You start out finding it very difficult to understand. But with practice and use, over time you become very proficient at using it. Here are two important tips to help you get better at mathematics:
1. Understand rather than memorize
Mathematical symbols be they numbers, letters or whatever else are like every other symbol. This means that they were invented to represent something. And when symbolic methods gets separated from the real world domains they were invented to handle, it ends up seeming like a meaningless and pointless activity. This is the problem with how we study mathematics particularly very abstract branches like algebra and calculus.
Very often, we try to memorize a mathematical equation or formula without understanding what each symbol represents. Or we might try to cram a procedure or sequence of steps instead of looking to understand why certain steps are required in a procedure.
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We’ve already explained some helpful tips for understanding in the previous articles on chunking. Understanding that 74 × 5 means the total of seventy-four “items or things” five “times” or in five “places” is more important than knowing how to do the calculation.
2. Get active and practice different problems
Maths like most subjects is difficult to learn when you’re a passive learner. As a matter of fact, unlike some subjects, it will often put you out of the comfort zone requiring you to sometimes think really hard. Having come this far in this series, you should be well aware that this kind of focused thinking is normal and part of the learning process.
It is very helpful to solve as many problems as is required to ensure you understand the concept and become fluent at finding solutions to various problems within the concept readily. Remember, like a language, maths skills require repeated use for you to get better at using it.
When you have correctly solved about ten varied problems with varied difficulty within a mathematical concept, you’re most likely going to end up with a solid chunk of that maths skill.
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Article Summary
You can improve your maths skills with practice, determination and willingness. Learning mathematics usually requires a lot of intense focus. This means you need to turn off or remove all distractions when studying.
Also, it’s okay to ask for help from those that might have gotten a better grasp of the concept you’re studying when you need it. Some people prefer to work alone. However, when it comes to solving problems with some level of abstraction, it is often very helpful to have one or two people to reason with. Sometimes, a study partner can help clarify a concept for you by looking at it in a different way.
Finally, since procedures matter a lot in maths, it really helps to explain how you solve mathematical problems. You might write down the steps you took as well as other possible approaches you could have taken. Also, you could explain it to somebody else or teach it to a friend. Maths is fun because it helps you better explain and understand the world around you. You just need to study it while keeping its importance in mind.
Happy Learning!
Article Discussion
What do you think about the ideas shared in this article about mathematics and getting better at it? What difficulties have you had in the past when studying maths? And how can you get better at studying maths? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.
