It's probably the way you were taught - as though numbers had no meaning off the page. Your kids are probably going to grow up with a better understanding than that because their teachers are expected to teach using manipulatives, so they're likely to get to high school without ever being asked to learn a math concept without representing it visually in some way - with blocks or at least with drawings and most often with both.
When you're never asked to think about what the numbers mean but only about how to make them move around to become more abstract answers, you never learn the key thing about math: it's a language used to describe the world. Absolutely anything can be described with numbers, and every math question is describing something that exists in the real world.
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Date: 2009-03-12 12:12 pm (UTC)When you're never asked to think about what the numbers mean but only about how to make them move around to become more abstract answers, you never learn the key thing about math: it's a language used to describe the world. Absolutely anything can be described with numbers, and every math question is describing something that exists in the real world.