How To Get Rid of the Fear of Mathematics?
This is no secret that you will come across lot of people who are simply afraid of the subject mathematics. No amount of made easy math books are going to help if some crucial points are overlooked. In fact made easy books are not recommended at all because it has been observed that students tend to skip the though process needed to solve the problem and on the contrary they just refer to the made easy book which ruins the merit. Here is the way out to do well with your most feared mathematics.
The main reason behind not being able to solve a mathematical problem is FEAR. Fear comes along when you are not confident. Confidence builds up when you understand the concept. To understand the concept you need to conceive. In order to conceive you need to get your mind ready for the same. To get your mind ready, you require to get the base founded strongly.
In most of the cases it has been seen that Absence of a good teacher is one of the main reasons of FEAR A Good teacher can instill confidence by making the student understand in a way the student would be able to understand.
At the same time the student has to understand the problem first. Then identify what to be found out and what are the given parameters. Then relating the given parameters with the parameter to be found out. Then solving the equation to reach the solution. That’s it.
I would make it even easier to understand by citing an example problem and solving it with the standard approach.
Sample Problem 1
There are some lotuses and Birds. If one bird sits on top of one lotus, one bird doesn’t get to seat. Similarly if two birds sit on a single lotus the a lotus becomes extra. Find out the no of birds and lotuses.
Solving the problem with the above mentioned approach
There should not be any difficulty in understanding the stated problem. It is also clear the the parameters to be found out are
no of birds and no of lotuses.
Lets name these unknowns. Lets assume The no of birds =x and no of lotuses is= y
Now it’s time to understand the conditions that are given in the problem itself. The first condition states that If one bird sits on top of one lotus, one bird doesn’t get to seat. That means the no of birds are greater than No of lotus by one. And we can write this like below
x=y+1———(i)
Again consider the second condition. It says if two birds sit on a single lotus the a lotus becomes extra. That means If we multiply 2 with the no of lotus minus one, we will get the no of birds. Lets write it in the form of equation.
x=2(y-1) —–(ii)
Here if you find it difficult to understand how the conditions are converted to equations, you need to give time to your brain with various other sample problems. Analyzing the sample problems and understanding how things work would always help. You can get the solution by solving two equations. It’s that simple. The above problem can also be solved in a trial and error basis but to make you critically understand the problem, i solved the problem this way. Hope it helps.
Another important tip in this regard is to give time to mathematical problems for critical analysis and that is the only way to become confident in mathematics.
