DailyDirt: Help For The Mathophobic

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Plenty of students in school don't like math. There's not much room to argue for points when grade school arithmetic is either wrong or right. With a better understanding of how our brains work, we might be able to devise some ways to make math more pleasant for everyone. At the very least, we can remind people to always show their work. If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
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Filed Under: arithmetic, aromatherapy, brain, fmri, math, pain


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  1. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 27 Nov 2012 @ 5:13pm

    pain from anything you don't like...

    on that "math causes pain" study: I'd like to see them do the same thing for people who don't like to read 19th century british literature. I'm sure some ppl out there also feel the pain of having to do thier English homework assignments.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. icon
    Watchit (profile), 27 Nov 2012 @ 6:33pm

    During Highschool, one of my teachers gave us all perpermints. Who knows if they helped, but they certainly didn't make it any worse. If anything it at least made the test more pleasant.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    AgonizingFury, 27 Nov 2012 @ 7:10pm

    People great at Math

    I remember watching an episode of superhumans where they were looking into a guy who could super complex math problems, to several decimal points, in his head faster than college math students could punch them into their calculators. Turned out from the fMRI scans that he used the wrong part of his brain to do math problems. Instead of the logic center he was using the part of his brain that is responsible for coordination. It makes sense since that part of our brain is capable of calculating extremely complex things very fast. Thought it was kinda cool, and somewhat related.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Rekrul, 27 Nov 2012 @ 11:45pm

    I never did very well at more advanced math such as algebra. It wasn't that I couldn't do the work, it was that we were almost invariably given problems that included portions we hadn't bee taught how to solve. Maybe it was supposed to be a way of teaching us how to figure things out on our own, but in my case it didn't work. They'd teach us how to solve for X and then give us a few problems that included Y as well.

    Of course now I've pretty much forgotten all of it...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 29 Nov 2012 @ 6:22am

    Re:

    "more advanced math such as algebra"

    Sorry - but algebra is not considered advanced math. Algebra is part of the basic building blocks upon which more advanced mathematics is built.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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