For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for February 23, 2015

I feel your pain, Mike. Mathematics was never one of my strong points either.

Um… 1%?

And thst’s why he went into journalism. I was an English major. Math makes my head hurt. LOL

Never tell someone ‘this is easy’. If it was easy for them, they wouldn’t be struggling with it.

I did get to be decent at ambition, distraction, uglification and derision simply by memorizing the basic tables. Don’t talk to me about algebra.

As an occasional math tutor, I can say that approach makes it harder. Get down to exactly how it Is done and Mike will get it.

How about something that Michael can relate to? And of course it would make sense to you John, you’re an adult!

And this aversion to math (and science) is what is putting our country (and Canada) behind other countries that actually embrace these subjects.

C’mon, Michael, you’ve heard the expression – “ya gotta give it 110% effort!”(Which is further proof Americans are marching toward ignorance.)

When kids have trouble getting math when using just numbers two approaches that can help are to:1. Get to the breakthrough by using words instead of numbers to explain the concepts.2. Use an illustration. For example, using graph paper is a great way to get across multiplication. Even little kids see it that way.Since i have a lack of depth persception and mild dyslexia (flipping and skipping, especially w anything that has a loop and a tail, things that flip often for me, including 9 and 6, p,q, b, and g) geometry was especially hard for me. On the other hand, even though i needed lots of practise i found that i truly loved probability. Sometimes a person will hate one type of math but love another, like enjoying certain types of literature but hating others.

BEGIN BY EXPLAINING THE MEANING OF “PERCENT”!

argy.bargy2: And that was written by a math professor: Charles Ludwidge Dodson, aka Louis Carrol.

@argy bargy2 Oops I meant Lewis Carroll.

I think that people are exactly right when they point out that too many grade school teachers are way too afraid of math, and since they never understood it they can not teach it. In my grade school we had a floating teacher for science classes just as we did for art, music, shop, home ec, and gym. Frankly, we would have greatly benefited if math had been taught that way, too. The only grade school teachers i had who grasped math well were my fifth and sixth grade teachers, Mrs. Darling and Mrs. Trull, especially the latter, and both used images successfully to explain what our earlier teachers had approached as black box mysteries to be memorized. I would live to see kids get more science and math in school, and think all high school students should study probability, and also critical analysis. Along the lines if what is disappearing, why do so few children learn basic grammar these days?

When division was first introduced in grade school, I knew in my head how it worked, but I couldn’t for the longest time understand how the long division on paper worked… it took me weeks but finally I got it..This business of 110.00% gets me everytime. I always shake my head whenever I hear someone say it.

Personally, all I know about math is that 2 + 2 = 22.

in my state i needed a chapter of algebra to get a degree in either English Lit or History. That’s why i didn’t go to college. Math is a foreign language to me.