Math is quite a dreaded subject for kids. However, when you are an adult you realize the true significance of math. Most of the math functions are life skills. These skills essentially come into daily use without you realizing. Regular activities such as balancing a checkbook, being on time, leaving tips, comparing prices while grocery shopping requires basic math knowledge. You might not be able to maintain a decent lifestyle with basic math skills!
You need to put more stress on the real-world usefulness in order to change your student’s attitude toward math.
Here are the top six reasons why math matters:
Leaving tips at a restaurant
It is a prevalent courtesy to leave a good tip for your waiter or waitress while eating at any full-service restaurant. Servers usually depend on tips. These tips often make up the bulk of their income. Forgiving proper tips, you need to calculate a 15% gratuity. This simple calculation does require you to have basic division and subtraction skills. A meal at a lavish restaurant turns out to be highly satisfactory when you leave good tips! Strange but true!
Paying bills
Paying bills is a necessity of adulthood. You require knowing how to calculate bills when you own a car, a home etc. With liabilities come bills. There are various types of insurance like the auto, homeowners or renters, health, life, etc. When you decide to start a family, these bills get bigger by manifolds. There are many other daily bills like gas, electric, water, Internet, cell phone, and cable. Whichever kind of bill it is, you need math to figure out the payments. You necessarily require to come up with a payment schedule and to deduct what you pay from your bank account. When your child is a bit older, you can take his help to calculate and pay bills in a systematic manner. Thus, math skills are an essential life skill.
Keeping track of your finances
You truly need math skills to properly understand all the finance-related concepts. These include bank accounts, 401(k) plans, budgeting, credit cards, interest rates, loans etc. Today you are provided with multiple offers by many banks or agents. All claim to be beneficial to you. It might be the case for some deals but certainly not for all. You need to be smart enough to realize which of those deals is actually good for you and shall benefit you in the long run.
In order to make wise financial decisions, you need to have a stronghold of math skills, at least the basic ones. Try educating your children on these various complex mathematics right from an early age so that they can grow up to be worldly wise in the true sense of the term!
Making smarter and healthier lifestyle choices
Starting from counting calories in a specific food item to measuring the running speed, you require math skills at every stage of your life. You life is what you make out of it! You need to follow a healthy lifestyle in order to live a happy life. The health of your body is not the only thing that matters. The health of your mind matters too. So, you need to make proper lifestyle choices constantly.
Fitness freaks need to have a good hold on math. They need to figure out how much exercise is required to burn a certain amount of calories. Sometimes, they also need to calculate the daily intake of calories and then exercise accordingly to burn those calories. While doing online shopping, you always look out for discounts. You need math to understand which deals are suitable for you. In short, you need math at every step to make wise decisions.
For Cooking
As weird as it sounds, it is true that cooking requires math. Good cooks always measure amounts, calculate ratios of ingredients, and double or triple the batch accordingly to make the final product taste better! They never take a risk when it comes to the amount or ratio of the ingredients. This is a safe cooking practice. It saves you from several cooking mistakes and experiments with drastic results.
The atmosphere in the kitchen often gets tensed up when there is a large family gathering or function during a festive season. You need to be very cautious and strict about the exact amounts and ratios of the ingredients. Slight alterations might lead to an unsatisfactory output. The last thing you want is to ruin the dinner for your entire group of loved ones!
Getting a stable career
When it comes to jobs, math skills are more than important. No matter which field you work in, math comes into play everywhere. You need math skills to check whether your gross salary is properly calculated! You might be a real estate agent, a broker, a CEO, a doctor, a small business owner, or a construction worker, math is an inevitable part of the equation certain times.
Math enhances your analytical thinking. When you have an analytical thinking, you can develop the ability to investigate and know the truth about the world around us. It helps you to recognize the blurred lines between truth and deception. You can be alert for error when you know math. You can save yourself from falling into a trap laid down by frauds. After all, mathematics allows you to reason in a logical and practical manner. You do not have to rely on unverified statements of others but look into the real data to establish the truths.
As parents or teachers, you need to make the young kids realize that math skill is a real-life skill. Survival is hard without knowing the basic math skills. Today you cannot trust your own relatives in money matters or any other crucial matter of life. You need to be self-sufficient to analyze things on your own. Math skills enable you to be exactly the same.
So, suggest your child to practice Math on a daily basis. Math is all about practice after all!
