To all of you who had to learn Maths at some time: do you remember thinking that Maths is one of those scary subjects that strikes fear and sometimes anxiety in the pit of your stomach? I remember expressing my difficulty understanding this crazy subject that sometimes made no sense to me. Math was supposed to be about numbers, and yet there I was with all these letters-x,y, even i sometimes! It was madness!
I often said in some form or another, “I just don’t get it. It’s like a foreign language.” And now being a Language teacher, I find myself saying that “learning a language is like solving a Math’s problem, if you follow the grammatical rules, you’ll get to the correct answer”. Sometimes I also compare the learning of languages as a big “Puzzle” where everything must match in gender and number, especially with the Latin languages.
Think about it. If you are trying to learn Spanish, for example, how would you go about it? Would you simply memorize a list of vocabulary words? If you memorized every word in the Spanish language, would you know how to put them together correctly to form sentences? That’s when your Mathematical way of thinking must kick in and believe me, it will help you more than you ever imagine.
Marisa