Class 1-2

In this article, I have argued that it is important not to bunch all the students’ errors as “careless mistakes” or “over-generalisations”. We can classify the errors to understand – (a) what is their mathematical source and (b) what could be the student’s thinking underlying such responses. This will help us in designing appropriate interventions for handling these errors in classroom.

Education is a prime concern of society. Naturally both as individuals and as a society we always think about a better education for all round growth and development of the individual and, ultimately, society. Today the term quality education has gained pace and is a matter of concern and debate among educationists and even common people. In fact education itself is qualitative in nature and outcome. The matter of discussion or concern should be the process, the contents etc.

It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do, We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.  ~Steve Jobs

This adage doesn’t seem to be understood by many school managements in India. They hire good teachers, and then tie them up with so many instructions that the teachers lose their freedom, their unique style of teaching, and are eventually labelled as unsuccessful teachers. One of these instructions is about the planning of a lesson.

Many people are of the opinion that mathematics is only about numbers and number operations, and thus myths related to who can do mathematics and who cannot, abound. It is possible that children may struggle with numbers, but it is hard to believe that there could be a child who doesn’t recognize patterns. We see children creating patterns all the time using stones, sticks, leaves, flowers, finger prints, vegetable carvings, rubber stamp impressions and also mathematical shapes.