Students' views of Mathematics

Although children spend a lot of time doing mathematics, we know little about how

they view the mathematics they do. It is important for us to understand the students’ perspectives for learning and doing Mathematics if we want to help them improve their mathematics performance. I know it sounds way too easy, just talk to them about the various dichotomies that defime the nature of mathematics and ask them what they favour. But this approach is next to impossible. Forget about our students, I wonder how many of us – the teachers essentially understand the nature of mathematics. We teachers are treated like Gods of Mathematics by the students, parents and the society but considered passive and disinterested by the Principal and the head mistresses when the result discussion in underway! No doubt what the boss feels is totally baseless. We maths teachers slog, literally. We write. We speak. We ask. We answer. We shout. We console. We motivate. But somewhere we lack the time, energy or resources that will help us develop the art of understanding our students’ perspectives on mathematics which they do everyday in their classrooms.

Through my math assemblies and the math songs and math art activities that we do, I have always tried to give my students a chance to feel and understand Mathematics and its nature in their own unique ways. I cant go out and discuss the various dichotomies in the nature of mathematics and ask them to take sides. But i try to understand what they feel by talking to them about mathematics whenever I introduce a new concept to them in the class and encourage them through questioning to make connections of the concept at hand with their real life or woith their previous experiences. This probably helps them in balancing the external and internal conceptions of mathematics as was discussed in an earlies post on the nature of Mathematics.

I once tried to ask the question ‘what is mathematics’ to my students who were nearing the end to their academic session and their journey with me to the MathWorld. These are the few responses that I got (from groups of students) –

Maths is not just about numbers; maths is something that you can make really fun, especially with

geometry and symmetry, because you can draw shapes and draw characters that you like.

I would say maths … has a lot of different strands like geometry and stuff, where you work with

shapes and there’s hard sums and easy sums and shortcuts and such things.

Patterns … because plus is minus and plus is times and times is division and division is fractions

and fractions is decimals and decimals is percentages and it goes on and on.

Some children’s responses reflected the difficulty they experienced in trying to say

what mathematics is.

I know you use maths for everything in normal day life, but I’m not sure what it’s about… I’d just

say it’s about numbers and working numbers together and taking them away to work out stuff

Maths is like, you write down, you’ve got all these numbers and you’ve got all these maths

symbols so you’ve got numbers from 1 to 10, you have to try and squash them together, so like for

example, 1 plus 9 equals 10

Just memorising numbers, learning how to divide, subtract and stuff, ‘cause if we didn’t have the

numbers then it would be totally different, you wouldn’t be able to count things so you wouldn’t

be able to know how much you’d need for stuff, you’d put the wrong amount, there wouldn’t be an

amount.

I don’t believe that these responses show that my teaching has been a total success nor that it is a total failure. The best part about these responses is the fact that I was able to make them say something about Maths as they view it. Please try the same exercise with your students and share the responses. I also request all the maths mentors, all the math teachers to introspect and ask this question from themselves as well. I assure you that you will have amazing insights to the mathematics that you teach and it will surely help you in developing newer strategies in your maths classrooms.

I hope we all are able to help  our  students get to the deepest levels possible of understanding and appreciating Maths.  I know I am still doing!

God’s Maths.. its so wonderful. God’s Maths its so wonderful. So high, you can’t get around it. So deep you can’t  get underneath...Oh! Wonderful Maths!