Making Math Learning Effective

Posted by steveth268 on October 13th, 2014

It is not unusual to hear from the most successful people in the world that they cannot do math. Math is such a nightmare for them. We think that understanding math is an innate quality, but this is so untrue. It is the weak foundation on which the mathematical concepts are built on which is the culprit. Math can be learned effectively if it is taught in an interesting way and if higher concepts are taught relying on the strong foundations. This piece of article identifies the problems related to math teaching in Tuitions centers and schools.

Math is an essential requirement for everyone in the today’s world. A good understanding of the fundamentals of mathematics is needed in all walks of life. It is a misunderstanding that learning math is important only for people who want to build a career in science and technology. Math is required for solving all real life problems.

Unfortunately, Most of the schools and tuition centers in Singapore fail in developing students’ interest in math. The prime focus of these institutions is to complete their syllabus, even at the cost of students’ understanding. There are different types of students in a class; some are slow, others are average and a few of them are whiz. It is the role of teacher to bring all the kids at a same level to develop their proficiency in the subject.Math can be best taught with real life problems. Teachers should include some interesting games, projects and group activities in their lessons to teach the concepts. Concepts like integers, percentages, tables, multiplication, division, etc. should not be taught like procedures that can be rote. The practical applications of these concepts should be explained to them. 

Memory of kids is short lived. In the initial years of their schools, they are not aware about the importance of subjects and their utility in the higher classes. While teaching higher math, it is needed that teachers refresh the earlier concepts of the students. Small revisions in the class to give students an opportunity to understand certain topics that they couldn’t understand earlier and let them understand the new topic in a better way.

School curriculum focuses on the question and solution method of teaching and evaluating. The marking system horrifies students. Sometimes, students face problems related to the understanding of the question than the understanding of the concepts. The actual problem is of language than math. Teachers are not able to identify the right problem to rectify it. To identify the problem issues, teachers need to be close enough with the students.
Usually schools and tuition centers have large batch sizes. It is difficult for teachers to concentrate on each and every student. Therefore, the core problems related to the understanding of math remain unidentified. To score more marks, students tend to learn by rote math problems and do not learn by understanding.

There are very few schools and Math tuition centers in Punggol that focus on building the math concepts in students with innovative methods of teaching. These tuition centers have large batch sizes and they charge huge fees. They do not even have experienced teachers to understand the problem of the students. As a parent, before you select a math tuition center for your children, please be assured about all these points.