According to many surveys, the vast majority of children in the UK believe that Mathematics is the hardest subject in school. People in the past didn’t pay much attention to this “hatred” of Maths in school children, but the modern age requires exceptional numeracy skills in every individual in order to make progress in their career. In other words, it seems that numeracy skills today are more important than ever.
There is more than one reason why more than 30% of adults in the UK believe school Maths didn’t prepare them well for Maths in everyday life. One of the things that make Maths the most disliked subject is the boring and inefficient syllabus. When education authorities prepare the Maths syllabus they should definitely take care of the liking of children. It is very difficult to motivate and inspire children to start reading and learning these syllabus books when they are so dry, uninventive and plain boring. There is an opportunity to fix this with the use of modern technology. Tablets and computers are used in many schools and this is a chance to present Mathematics in a different light. It can be more interesting and more challenging.
While we are talking about schools and their influence on Maths skills, we must mention the teaching method. There are many math teachers in UK schools that actually don’t like Mathematics. If they seem to be indifferent about this subject, they cannot trigger interest in young students. What most of them fail to present is the connection between Maths and everyday life. It is not unusual to hear students thinking out loud and talking about how Maths is useless and cannot be used in everyday life situations. Then they start losing interest and when they turn 30, this interest is completely gone. It is good to mention that numeracy skills are starting to deteriorate with the aging process.
So, if you can’t keep the children interested and they don’t know how exactly Maths can help their progress, they will naturally lose interest and focus on other subjects. The easiest way to change that is to provide good examples about where Maths is needed. Luckily, there are many examples to showcase, because we are living in a time where Mathematics and numbers are used in most companies. Both managers and regular employees need to use numeracy skills in order to finish their tasks in a timely manner.
Maths is not taught in the right way, at least not in the UK, and this is something that needs to be changed as soon as possible. According to the official statistics, only 24% of the students between the age of 16 and 24 that have achieved A-C grade when they were 15-16 years old reach the equivalent level in the Skills for Life assessment.
While we are waiting for the necessary changes in the education system and Maths syllabus, we can also help ourselves and our children by using some other teaching methods. One method like this is playing games that are focused on developing Maths skills. These Maths games have proven to be very effective for both young and old people.
