For generations of students, the complaint has been "Is there any need to learn math? I'll never need to use it in the concrete world. I want to be a fireman or a cowboy or a news reporter and they don't need to know what a number is. Nowadays, with the advent of pocket calculators and all sorts of electronic wonders which are skillfully operated by school age children, it's a better question than ever before. Why should someone learn the formulas and memorize the times tables they learn in class Why would it make sense to take any effort in working with formulas, and even worse, memorizing them, when the same thing can be done with a calculator a zillion times faster? It seems like a valid concern, and it turns out that students ask it all the time

The answer to this question has some depth, which goes a bit further the evident. It is obvious that no one enjoys memorizing just for the sake of memorizing; nevertheless, the foundations is what is usually better learned initially. It is possible that reversing the way facts are presented might do much toward helping students to comprehend why the study of math can be helpful.

Among the reasons why the study of math is necessary is that it creates the need for students to read and comprehend, which also encourages them to learn how to organize their cognitive processes and to see depth in the problems. The formulas by themselves won’t help to comprehend how to apply a formula. In order to master that ability, the students need to get their brains active in order to recognize patterns and elements that will allow them to associate knowledge and to gain a more complete understanding. This new found understanding, obtained from the practice in figuring out the parameters in a math problem also contributes in other fields of study.

In addition to the need to organize your thinking due to math, you will need to understand how to apply formulas and procedures in order to come up with the answer to the questions. In other words, unless you really understand something about how math works, you won't have any idea how to enter numbers into a computer. While the actual calculation performed by a calculator does greatly simplify even routine problem solving, to raise three generations of students with no understanding of how to use a calculator to establish which of two items in different sized containers costs more is a travesty of the concept of mathematics education. Many adults fail to understand the concept of reconciling a bank statement, or calculating true cost of an adjustable rate mortgage.

This problem is a daily situation for educators all around the globe. Standardized tests put in evidence a decrease in the math understanding of our students and the tendency doesn’t seem to get any signs of getting reverted in the short-run. Criticism of teachers for 'teaching to the test' has been widespread, but in the case of math, it is difficult to see how logic and inductive reasoning which are required to solve most real life math problems can be considered teaching to the test.

Robert is a member of StatisticsBrain, a tutoring company that offers    .