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 As adults negotiating life, parents are well placed to draw the connection between school and life, and bring alive boring textbooks and notes for their children. It’s not important to be an expert on everything the child
learns – what’s important is to look out for real-world application of knowledge, share wonder with your child, and model strategies for structuring thinking, and finding out unknown information. This article is about what we can do to bring the oft-dreaded Math home.
Math in Art
So what does Math have to do with snowflakes or paintings, or maps or architecture, or with history? What role does it play in our daily lives? As parents, we can play a huge role in helping our children see math in the world around us, and appreciating its usefulness, symmetry and order, rather than viewing it as something that is boring and straitjacketed, and is all about right and wrong.
One of the first things we need to do is to open our own minds about Math. Math is not just about fractions and calculus. It turns up in all kinds of unexpected places. Nature has shapes and patterns – circles, squares, triangles and spirals – appearing in various forms and materials. (Think honeycombs and leaves, snails and seashells).
There exists a deep connection between art and geometry. Geometric patterns are the backbone of Islamic art (which frowns upon the representation of the human form); but they are also a vital part of art from other periods and places. Several works of art that are considered masterpieces draw their appeal from an elegance of proportion and composition from geometry.
Certain rectangles, known as ‘golden rectangles’, turn up often in obvious or hidden ways in these art pieces (see accompanying box). Geometric repeating patterns on tiles and mosaics and Escher’s paintings are other places where Math turns up unexpectedly. Drawing children’s (and our own) attention to these can help see Math in a very new and different light – as something that is connected to beauty and aesthetics, and not just to boring sums in textbooks.
Math in Everyday Life
Math is also extremely useful in our daily lives, and involving children in various projects can help them see the point of a lot of what they learn at school. Opportunities for these projects and activities exist everywhere – while shopping, planning holiday budgets, figuring out if we need a refuelling stop, following recipes, predicting India’s chances of winning the cricket match that’s going on, planning furniture for a room, or wrapping a present.
A friend of mine travels very frequently, and his family often gets free trips from the miles he earns. He asked his 7-year old son and 9-year old daughter to figure out which airline has the best frequent-flier program so they can maximize these free trips. Taking into account the ratio of miles travelled to free miles earned, and then looking at how many free miles are needed to buy tickets on various sectors, the children came to the conclusion that their Dad should be travelling by Kingfisher to get the best deal!
Another group of slightly older children I know (11-12 year olds) are very interested in, and good at, art and craft. They got excited about starting a venture to sell their creations. One of their parents, an entrepreneur herself, decided to encourage them to take the idea forward. She taught them elementary accounts, and a few basic principles of business (pricing, elements of marketing, stocktaking). The children created some beautiful cards and stationery, wrote to several corporates a little before Diwali, and actually received and delivered a sizable number of orders for Diwali cards and corporate gifts! Needless to say, their Math got sharpened, and they also developed several extremely useful business skills.
You can build many such projects for your children, to get them really excited about and comfortable with using Math. Keep some of the following pointers in mind while creating these ideas:
Keep it real, and don’t oversimplify
Look for real problems that require solving, don’t make this one more extension of homework! Asking children to come up with a menu, and then give you a shopping list for ingredients with quantities is an example of the former, giving a problem like ‘I use 2 bottles of milk every day, how many should I buy for a week?’ is an example of the latter.
find connections with other things your child is learning
An example of this could be studying Egyptian pyramids, and then constructing our own. Figuring out how to construct a pyramid of a given height could pose a higher-level challenge.
Build on your child’s interests
If your child is a sports freak, sportsmen’s statistics are a good place to start; for a child who loves building things, figuring out how much wood to buy and then making a piece of furniture could be far more fun; for someone who loves art, looking for symmetry or ‘golden rectangles’ in paintings can be fascinating.
The idea is to think through problems together, to model your own thinking process for your child, and help her develop an ability to structure real-life problems, understand that the same problem can be solved in different ways, and most importantly, begin to appreciate and enjoy Math!
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