What We Love About Math

Math needs love too!  All too often math gets a bad rap so this Valentine’s Day we thought we would shine some light on all the things we LOVE about MATH! 

Math has the Best Answers! 

Have you or your student ever gone off the deep end stressing over a question that asked them to select the BEST answer?!  As if sometimes the correct answer isn’t hard enough to find, let’s give the student multiple correct answers and ask them to pick the BEST one? What kind of sick joke is that?! In math, that doesn’t happen. You solve a problem and arrive at a solution, period.  Sure, multiple-choice questions will try to supply you with answers that may be close to the correct answer, but only ONE of them is correct. 

Numbers are Always What They Seem

The English language is riddled with so many rules and exceptions to those rules that sometimes it's a wonder we can produce a grammatically correct sentence.  Wait a minute, who are we kidding?!  If it wasn’t for the spelling and grammar checking tools available on word processing apps we probably wouldn’t be able to produce grammatically correct sentence! Even with help I still constantly find myself wondering whether to use “affect or effect” or “it’s or its” or questioning whether I should put a comma here or not? For the most part in math, numbers are what they seem.  Last time I checked there was only one way to write whole numbers 1-9, which then can be used to make all the other numbers, and commas are always placed in numbers after every third digit to the right.

Math is Useful

While we are all familiar with the math complaint of, “when am I ever going to use this?,” the foundational math taught in grades 3rd-6th consists of skills that are very important and applicable to everyday life! Yes, yes we all have calculators and use them often, but you still need to be able to understand the concepts of adding and subtracting decimals and calculating percentages so that you don’t get taken advantage of when it comes to your money! Also, how many times have you whipped open that calculator app to add, subtract, multiply or divide only to have to punch in those numbers again because the answer was wrong due to operator error?  Well…..if you don’t know the basic concept of these operations how would you know the answer was wrong? Finally, while many of us love to hate fractions, they also show up on the daily, just check out Fraction Sense: More Than Just Pizza for an eye-opening look at how we use fractions every day without even knowing it!

So THANK YOU Math! Even though we sometimes want to pull our hair out as we try to figure out the correct way to solve a problem, at least there is only one answer and no need to determine the main idea of it or put it in our own words!  Happy Valentine's Day!