Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinaa
I think she may see all those letters in the equation and just freaks out.
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That seems very likely.
I teach maths, mainly to adults, and mainly at a fairly low level and in a real-world context.
The people I teach are not stupid, but aspects of maths genuinely scare them. A mix of letters and numbers can, as you say, freak them out.
Recently I tackled this by showing them a "scary" equation:
T = 40W + 30
Once I'd given them time to make guesses as to its meaning (one thought "40W" meant a 40 Watt light bulb, which is not an unreasonable guess) I explained that it was something a lot of them have probably done for a Sunday lunch.
For cooking a certain kind of meat, T is the time in minutes, and W is the weight in kilograms.
I was hoping this would make equations less scary, and to some extent I think it worked.
The main problem, I believe, is that if you do know some maths, it is very hard to think yourself into the mindset of those who simply don't. One student asked me if the letters in algebra have values - "Is it, like, A is 1, B is 2 and so on?" Another time, I was trying to explain pi, but one student thought I'd written a capital T followed by a small i - Ti - and she couldn't understand why I was apparently calling it "pie"!