Tools for maths skills

I REFER to the editorial on the maths problem plaguing our 20-year-old democracy (Cape Times, July 30).

The maths problem arises essentially from a failure to provide pupils with exciting gadgets, materials and instruments.

It is through an experimental and evolutionary process that a deep understanding of a new concept arises. This is common cause.

If educators provide schoolchildren with actual experience of experimenting with gadgets and instruments, within which a concept is embodied, the concept takes hold in the pupils’ minds and grows clearer with each new activity.

When children apply mathematical knowledge to real-life situations, maths becomes attractive and laden with value.

A solid foundation allows for the progressive construction of a superstructure of knowledge, leading to successful abstraction.

The purpose of abstraction is to make analogies, understand the generality of a principle and formulate rules.

It is the practical and perceptual understanding that will lead to higher levels of abstraction.

Pupils must become aware of abstraction through manipulating instruments, experimenting, observing and recognising the principles at play.

Thinkers such as Piaget and Vygotsky, among others, understood that the processes of perception and assimilation led to processes of understanding and accommodation.

It is easy to teach trigonometry, which accounts for nearly 25 percent of the Maths paper, in a dynamic and exploratory manner.

By reducing the emphasis on recipes and allowing a visible discovery of ratios and relationships between angles and sides of triangles, the skills easily transfer from one activity to another.

At Classes4u, a Saturday top-up school, pupils will use a variety of gadgets that will lay bare all the mysteries of trigonometry and leave learners excited and stimulated.

I invite educators, government representatives, media practitioners and sponsors to visit our centre on August 5 at 11am to examine the array of unique teaching aids.

Our approach, we hope, will be a game-changer.

The venue is behind the Hilton Hotel at the corner of Longmarket and Rose streets.

We offer an immediate 25 percent solution to the massive maths problem in South Africa.

If we can make trigonometry easy, geometry will follow and algebra will come into its own. Farouk Cassim

Century View