Forming mathematicians: Maths is an enjoyable science

Mathematics is a science that is applied in all other sciences and to say that you don´t like it, it is wrong, because you will meet maths everywhere, even in history, biology etc. When I was preparing students so that they could study at the university, was a great challenge for me because these young people mostly had no preparation, and they have to take a test that they had to approve so they can be admitted. I realized that we teacher are responsible of given young students a method that make maths a science easy to understand and not a science I have to suffer.

I studied 1 physics, and 3 mathematics, pure mathematics, applied mathematics and advanced mathematics, in a college in the United Kingdom, this was the preparation I was going to receive to get a place at the university with the purpose of studying Operational Research and if there was something I had at that time it was the best teacher in the world, I had Mr. Lett. This teacher was already in years, but he had a brilliant mind, we all wanted to be in his class since they were hours of fun and of course it was a time of intellectual growth.

Professor Lett taught us to think before answering and his teachings were based on the reasoning of a mathematics of letters and without numbers, supposing that these letters could be replaced by numbers and the PI number was used as a symbol and we did not solve the problems giving numerical answers, they were logic problems and based on real life, he also taught us to explain mathematics in each step we took in solving the problem.

Another thing that he taught us was that we had to analized the problems before writing because the exams were written in ink, the use of pencil and calculators were forbidden and the exams were really long. He asked us the proof of the formulas, we could not memorized them but we were clear that if he asked us to do it was because we could do it.

Since we were kids we started using our fingers to count, we know that there is a sun and a moon that if we have 4 bananas and ate 2, we are left with 2; we begin to familiarized with the world of numbers since little. When we get to school, we begin to do simple additions and subtractions, but almost all teachers forget to teach children that multiplication is a sum and that division is a substraction, and we make children to undergo stress learning the tables by memory.

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When I was teaching young students, I was very surprised that they didn´t know the difference between an odd and an even number and when I asked them which was the only number that was even and prime at the same time they got confused (in case you don´t know it is 2). The prime numbers are only divisible among themselves and between 1. It is good to teach young people about the different types of numbers that exist, which are used to count and which are not, we must teach them about important signs such as the use of greater than> and less that <and so many other signs.

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The love for maths start at school since we are kids. There are specialists in the matter that are trying excellent methods in the teaching of this science, not everyone is going to study maths but for the students will be easier at the school having how to hundle with this science at the moment they have to do it.

One of the things that I put into practice was the use of reasoning problems and asked them to think before trying to solve them, but of course the mathematical mind is made with practice and it is not necessarily something that we are going to learn easily, we made mistakes and the practise will give the experience unless you are a genius born out of time. I will give you some examples of simple things that you can put into practice and that will help you to think to solve simple problems and not to solve a test all rushed. There are problems that can be solved only thinking them, we can start with basic things so that we can wide our minds to accept this beautiful science.

It is important that you can write the following sentences in a mathematical way:

• The sum of one number and half of another (a + b / 2)
• The difference of one third of a number and the triple of another (x / 3 - 3y)
• The square of the difference of two numbers (a-b) ^ 2
• The perimeter of a square of side a (a + a + a + a = 4a)
  There are so many things that can help us widen our mind to comprehend this science, but you have to build the knowledge from zero, step by step.

• How can it be that 2 parents and 2 children are distributed 27 dollars and it corresponds 9 dollars to each one?

By reasoning 2 parents can be 1 grandfather and 1 father and 2 children can be father and son

We can write it this way: G + F + S = 3 people and they are 27 dollars 27/3 = 9 dollars

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