The daily grind of math - making connections

I wanted to briefly touch some more on this topic of "grind" or daily grind that learning math might sometimes become that I mentioned briefly last time.

I didn't mean to imply that learning to add, subtract, multiply, and divide whole numbers, decimals, fractions, percents, numbers with exponents, and integers has to be such a boring task. You can avoid that type of feeling.

One way:
Make connections between the concepts. Don't make math appear as fairly separate compartments of "fractions" and "decimals" and "percents" and "geometry".

I sometimes wonder how students feel when every year (on 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade) they have a chapter on fractions, a chapter on decimals, a chapter on whole numbers, a chapter on geometry... Almost the same thing over and over.

We need to make sure they can see how these things connect.

An example:
A jogging track is 3.5 km long. If you jog 2/5 of it, how far was that? How many percent of the track is that?

|--------------------------------------------|
0                                           3.5 km

|--------|--------|--------|--------|--------|
0                                            1

|--------------------------------------------|
0                                           100%

Can your student solve it? What do you think, when are they ready for this sort of problem?

Tags: math, mathematics