It Doesn't Add Up!

Positioning our school work

Mathematics is a means by which we make sense of the world.

We do this through discovering, clarifying and studying relationships in numbers, patterns and structures. In this sense, mathematics plays an important part in finding our place in the world.

Yet, historically, mathematics in schools has been focused on deriving and applying known relationships between numbers, patterns and structures. This limited version plays to the left hemisphere’s strengths.

For some people, this limited version puts them off mathematics altogether, even if they can easily do the procedures.

Teaching a mathematics that incorporates discovery and clarification as important steps is a way of bringing the right hemisphere back into the process and keeping more people interested in it.

Discovery seems to be intrinsic to very young children; they make discoveries as a matter of course.

Clarification is best done by a group with multiple questions and perspectives teasing out the contours of number, pattern and structure. An individual can also do this but over time.

Everything we see today that is constructive in education is helping to bring hemisphere balance and mathematics can play a major role in this.

A difficult but necessary step.