Math Stinks by ali

Math Stinks by ali - October 2016 Scholarship Essay

Math stinks--at least for a lot of people it does. Until I developed new ways of understanding it, I dreaded going to math class. I hated the fact that it was so useless in the real world. My teachers all told me to memorize steps like this: combine like terms, isolate x, and evaluate the equation--and voila, you're done. Great. I still don't understand what I just did. I never understood the concept of equations as well as other mathematics concepts, and I believe this is the case with a myriad of students.

I'd love to be a mathematics teacher, preferably teaching fundamental mathematics: pre-algebra, algebra, etc., preventing problems before they worsen. I don't ever want students to go what I went through: memorize my way through problems and not understand the significance of an equation. Instead of telling them to combine like terms, do this, then that, I'd show them what is actually happening in the equation. Instead of saying "whatever you do to one side, do to the other", I would explain to them that adding, subtracting, multiplying, or modifying an equation on both sides doesn't change anything--and here's the important part, the "why"-- because and equation is balanced when it is affected on both sides. Perhaps I'll propose a funny example, saying something along the lines as "imagine a beam balance that has 5 pounds on each side. If we add 2 pounds on the right, the left will lift; however, adding 2 pounds does nothing because you are maintaining balance

Implementing these examples into my learning drastically helped me. Through using strategies similar to that mentioned above, I've taken math courses up to AP Calculus, and my love for math continues to grow. We should conquer our fears by learning a subject, not memorizing it, for memorization is meaningless when we don't understand a concept as simple as equations.