math - dont get me started! I hated math in school, all the way from grade school thru college. Now, I cannot stay away from books on physics!
kids in the USA, for the most part, hate math. Not because its hard, but because you actually have to take a few min to think thru the work! As a group, Americans do not like anything they cannot do instantly, and 3 things at once. With all the instant hardware out there, kids dont care about thinking, only about doing.
Schools have a hard time dealing with this - this need for speed in all things. Plus, growing up, it was said by every adult, "girls are bad in math," what a crock that was! we use math every time we alter a recipe, make a quilt, do anything around the home. Don't let a teacher tell you, well, its harder now, theres more to learn out here. 0-9 have been around since the Greeks or earlier, we have an alphabet that hasnt changed in 500 yrs. (and, I was in literacy volunteers, trying to help adults learn to read - there are 1000 site words out there that we use more than 80% thru our whole lifetime - if you make sure your child knows these words thats 80% of the battle for learning how to read well). Mostly, kids do what they see their parents doing - if you dont act scared of numbers, and read in the home that will help your kids more tha you can imagine.
Here's all anyone needs to do math: grasp the concept that the numbers we use are 0 thru 9, and then, how you can take those numbers and add them, and subtract them. That is all there is to math: 10 numbers, adding and subtracting. Division and multiplication are formulas to add and subtract faster. After that, once you learn the formula, the "tricks", the short cuts to that long list of adding and subtracting, well, you can do rocket science. After that its a matter of learning there are what I call recipes, or formulas (depending on what doesnt intimidate you!) that can manipulate those 0-9 numbers. Algebra, calc etc - once you grasp the idea of the symbols, the Xs, Ys, the numbers will always come down to 0 thru 9. The biggest block is always in your own head saying its too hard and you're to dumb to "get it".
The best gift a parent or grand can give their kids is teaching them their numbers 0-9 and not making them afraid to use them. A love for numbers, reading, and writing are just about as basic as it gets - after that its all gravy. Teaching your child that they can do anything they put their minds and hearts in after these basics are understood is a gift to them, and to the rest of us, really - they are our future even if we've never met any of them.
If I had not been afraid of math growing up I could have been a phsyicist and been quite happy about it. I hated math and got a A in a college level accounting course that was mandatory for me to take. It took 60 yrs for math to click in my head, like turning on a light.
We are producing a society so dumbed down we are importing engineers and math folks from overseas. Hubs retired as a Chemical PE and they were hard pressed to find a replacement; he worked with Egyptian, Indian, Polish, British and Italian engineers (not American!) who could barely speak English but were really good in math!
As for making change, with machines that think for you a person only needs to know how to push the right buttons in the right order - its impossibly sad to me when anyone cannot count out proper change to the penny. This is second grade work. How in the world can anyone get a job in this country when they cannot function at a second grade level! sharet