Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore it.

Its math I am talking about – darling of a few, nemesis of many and the fact remains that without math you just can’t study any subject.

Humans and even animals possess an inherent sense of numbers though very elementary. You show a toddler two candies in one hand and one in the other and he will almost always go for two. A predator in wild setting would intuitively know a lone deer from a herd and will alter his hunting plans accordingly. Similarly, a prey would know if it is being attacked from one side or three and will make survival attempts accordingly.

The math teaching to kids starts to build upon this intuitive sense of numbers. The elementary math focuses on concrete examples from the child’s surroundings and moves on to simple operations like adding, subtracting, multiplication and division. There are techniques but most of it essentially revolves around real life instances and concrete situations.

Slowly, the math starts becoming abstract. Pre-Algebra introduces abstract situations and introduction to geometry starts building the platform. As the student progresses through grades, algebra starts becoming increasingly abstract. That’s when it starts demanding advanced thinking and analyzing skills from the student. He needs to be able to comprehend things which usually are just concepts and then figure out inter-linkages between them. He needs to logically decipher what leads to what and how, everything is distinct yet connected. This is a transition many of the students find difficult to make.

Go further and you meet coordinate geometry, trigonometry and calculus which demand abstract problem solving skills on a fairly advanced level. That’s where the kids who could not make the erstwhile transition from concrete math to abstract math generally flounder.

That a student has not been able to make the transition can be manifested in many ways. It could be a dislike for math, poor performance, stress and lack of confidence or a general disinterest. The situation becomes complicated if the kid wants to do science because high school physics, for example, does demand abstract math skills.

The situation is interesting – a subject, an area of enquiry which starts as being inherently present in us gets so alienated that so many kids find it a steady source of stress. More often than not, the culprit is faulty teaching.

The focus in middle school math should be on developing the abstract thinking skills instead of giving a set of techniques to solve problems and get the homework done. Techniques you forget if you do not work with them for a while and even if you do remember them by excessive repetition, it adds little value apart from enabling you to solve that homework problem.

The skills required at least till high school math are basic analytical skills and it doesn’t require an Einstein to master them. Moreover, these skills are extremely essential in almost any subject the child plans to pursue. You cannot do psychology, history or even literature if you cannot play with ideas in your head – ideas which have no physical equivalent.

High school math is a level which every student can achieve and should ideally have fun doing – even if they do not have an inherent passion for math.

The below par development of abstract thinking skills is typically what goes wrong with so many students who struggle through middle and high school years in math.

The answer lies in focusing on developing thinking and problem solving skills rather than “methods”. A child should know why he is doing what he is doing to solve a particular problem, how the second step follows the first and he should be encouraged to think what other ways he can come up with to solve the same problem. Some of them may be outlandish, some incorrect and some long and tedious routes to the same answer (or even the wrong one) – but, at every stage they should be encouraged, even made to think on their own and figure out ways of solving problems by themselves.

Give the child all the basic concepts and then involve him in “discovering” the solution. Encourage him to ask questions, howsoever illogical. Discuss the merits and demerits of his method of getting to the solution and then provide an easier, simpler, shorter, elegant way to do it. (Don’t be surprised if the kid actually comes up with a better solution !!!).

To borrow a phrase from Built to Last, by Jim Collins and Jerry Porass, the focus of the teacher should be to be a clock builder and not a time teller.

Do not give him cut and dried techniques to get to the answer. Get him to figure out his own way through the jungle by arming him with the right axe, flashlight and gun.

Of course, in a traditional class room setting, the task becomes much more complicated. Every kid would have his/her own pace of getting the concepts and unique style of “wading through the jungle”. It may not always be possible for the teacher to give detailed critiques of individual problem solving methodologies to each individual student. Moreover, the teachers are under pressure to complete the curriculum and also take along all the students together.

However, as long as we are unable to find out an alternative method of community teaching that focuses more on personalization, we have to live with what we have. It is a tough job but then making every kid good in math is a worthy goal and anything worth doing will invariably be challenging.