So I was thinking the other day about how math was so useless after I graduated. Well it ain’t useless per se, it’s very important in our everyday life but it is only the basics that is required. The overly complicated math was all forgotten.
Looking back though, how I learnt math was very weird. I still learned it from teachers at school of course but how I managed to become good at it and get good grades was a bit questionable.
I started getting good at it starting from when I was 10. I don’t know what happened but I do know I didn’t understand it nor did I care about it. And that there lies the secret. I didn’t care about how math worked. Whether I understood it or not didn’t matter to me, they told me 2 plus 2 equals 4 and I was like OK, got it. Why did 2 plus 2 equals 4? Hell if I know? Well I do now but back then I didn’t. They told me it works and it gets a big red tick on all my homeworks and exams. That was good enough for me.
What was surprising was that this worked. I had somehow developed a system in my head that consolidates and organizes this information I can use. There was a fixed amount of answers for all of the combined equations so it wasn’t hard. All that with some constant practice and you have a solid model for doing good in math.
There were a few other factors that helped. One of which was a chant all chinese did in Primary school. We had this thing when it was math class, we started to chant the entire multiplication table. If we reached the end of the table, we would repeat it until the teacher arrived. We did it twice a week since there’s 2 classes every week. From the outside, it looked absolutely bonkers. It was almost military and religious.
Can’t argue with the result though. It helped us remember the answers to each multiplication. And if you know multiplication then you technically know division as it's just technically in reverse.
Who knew that not asking questions actually helped in education? Well some certain aspects of education. I would never encourage the type of education I went through. All memorisation and no critical thinking. It felt so robotic, no purpose and no development. Almost as if you aren’t learning anything. What’s the point if you can’t actually question the knowledge you learnt?
In time, I started to understand the concept and the workings of math. It came naturally, almost as if my brain decided that it couldn’t continue to do math without understanding it. To further develop and do math correctly further knowledge was required.
It’s weird as I have mixed feelings about how I learnt Math. Now that I am out in society these looked like a godsend in retrospect. I am convinced that so long as you know the crucial few concepts of math, you are good to go. Plus, minus, times, divide. The four symbols you require to know, then there are percentages and fractions. That’s it.
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