Terrified with maths? Welcome to the largest community in the world. Ask 10 people and about 9 of them would tell you that either they are afraid of maths or they are bad at maths. If you or someone else has similar feelings, there is nothing to worry about. Maths can be made easy. All that you need to make sure is that you are willing to learn.
Once you make your mind that this is a difficult subject, there is no way that you will learn it well. Hence, from an early, rather from the elementary level, you should start to take maths as an interesting subject.
Since there is no short cut to learning anything, I wouldn’t tell you that you will be able to get over with maths faster, solve maths problems in a wink or get great scores right from day one! But, what I would guarantee you is that this subject will not give you nightmares anymore. You will be able to solve the problems better and with much ease.
There is no way that you can proceed in science-based future studies without maths. It is imperative that you follow these simple and easy steps right from your elementary school.
- Learn the multiplication tables:
There is no second thought to it; there are no shortcuts, and there is no escaping this compulsory rule – you have to learn multiplication tables! This might seem boring, and you might think that there are calculators or you will get time in manually calculating every problem.
But, this is not what happens in reality. There will be times when there will be no calculators and no time to do an elaborate calculation on your own. What will help at that time? You are right, the multiplication tables!
I made this mistake in my elementary school and had to suffer a lot till I realized that it is the time that I started all over again. Trust me, multiplication tables really help!
- Use tricks to make multiplication tables easier:
Though there is no alternative to learning multiplication tables, there are shortcuts and tricks that will help you to memorize these. Some of these include –
- Add numbers to itself, for example, 2 x 7 = 7 + 7.
- To multiply with 9, use your hands. Hold your hands in front of you with your fingers extended. If you are multiplying 9 x 7, fold the 7 finger in the sequence of the two hands, starting from the index finger in one hand. Now count the rest of the fingers before and after the folded finger. In this case, this will be 6 and 3 and the answer is 63. (9 x 7 = 63).
- While multiplying 6 with an even number, the last digit of the answer will match with the even number itself. 6 x 2 = 12, 6 x 4 = 24, 6 x 6 = 36, 6 x 8 = 48.
- You can simply add a zero after each digit to get the answer for multiplication of 10.
- For multiplying with 11, just repeat each digit after itself, until 9 x 11. This means, 1 x 11 = 11, 2 x 11 = 22, 3 x 11 = 33 and so on, till 9 x 11 = 99.
These are some of the easiest ways to memorize multiplication tables. There are many others that you can always search online or ask your teacher or an online professional tutor to guide you with.
- Do not learn too many facts at a time:
I have seen students boasting that they know too many tricks and have learned many facts about maths problems in a single day. But this doesn’t really help you when it comes to solving your problems. You must not overdo it as it might make it difficult to come to a conclusion regarding which formula will suit the problem best.
- Learn to search for key phrases:
Most students of elementary level face problems with the word problems. But I personally find them more interesting than blankly calculating some numbers. There is a small story that you deal with and interest to solve a problem, rather than just calculate a sum.
To make this easy, you need to identify the key phrases. For addition, you will get added, both, and, plus, together, sum, etc. keywords or phrases can be found in the problem. For subtraction, you will get decreased by, less than, have left, change, etc.
There are key phrases or keywords for multiplication as well as division. While solving word problems, these words must be searched for. This makes it way easier to solve the problem easily.
- Practicing maths:
Maths can’t be learned; it has to be understood and practiced. This is the basic fact regarding this subject that you must keep in mind. And when I mean practice, I mean it seriously. There are a few rules that you should follow in this regard and this include:
- Time of practice:
You should never practice maths till late at night. This makes your mind exhausted and hence, it is quite likely that you will fail in solving your maths problems. Always do maths in fresh mind!
- Keep it short:
Never do too many problems at one time. This will only increase your mistakes, carelessness and will make you bored. It is not about how many problems you solved in a day; it matters more how well you learned the tricks.
- Paint a picture in mind:
Now comes the fun part of this entire learning session. Do not consider your sum to be a real life problem. Not all your life problems will be about the speed of the train, water leaking from a pipe or distributing mangoes amongst a class. There will be way more interesting things to do in life.
But, as long as maths is concerned, there is nothing wrong or painful in painting a picture with your word problems, using your imagination. As you read a word problem, try and paint a picture of the entire situation and figure out what is happening in the picture. This will make it more interesting, easy and fun to solve your problem.
If you have other serious problems with this subject, you can always seek professional help. You can ask your teacher to give you extra classes after school, or you can hire a tutor online to guide you through your problem.