Why maths

The kids are enjoying it while improving their math skills. They grasped concepts they were having difficulty with all year long after only a couple of sessions. Mathnasium's approach is both effective and fun. July 23, The tutors are great. We like the way they interact with our son. They motivate him to work hard and not give up.

July 22, My daughter is learning a lot and receiving great help with the staff. She already has much more confidence and many more skills. July 20, Amardeep Hoonjan.

Our daughter has been at Mathnasium for over a year. Her confidence with math has grown tremendously. She now looks forward to the online sessions and seems to enjoy the interactions.

The transition from in-office to at-home during the pandemic was flawless and Debbie and her team have made the process seamless. July 19, Adolfo Serna. Denville Mathnassium delivers results that my kids and us where able to see. Thanks Report a concern. Mathnasium has given my kids the confidence to feel like they are ready for next year's math curriculum.

July 14, Debbie is just phenomenal. Very accommodating and very knowledgeable. Her staff is also superb. My kids have benefited greatly from the lessons at Mathnasium. Thank you Debbie Report a concern. July 7, Heather Mayer. Mathnasium is a place where people care. June 26, June 23, Debbie is awesome. She always makes everything happen. The instructors are great and my kids are doing phenomenal. Mathnasium is amazing Report a concern.

June 4, Lynn Conetta. I am very happy with the service that the staff provides to my son. He has made progress and acquired a better understanding of mathematical concepts.

He is more confident to solve his equations. I thank you for all of your attention and work with my son. It has a made a tremendous difference in his performance with his work. June 2, The owner and staff are are an excellent resource for my kid and he loves going there. Thank you all. May 23, Mike Fraser. During this unprecedented time, I take my hat off to Mathnasium. They persevered and managed to get it right. The online process for my daughter continuing to receive the great experience and helpfulness they offer all in the safety of her home, has been nothing but exceptional.

I truly appreciate how Mathnasium has been willing to work with us during a time of uncertainty and keeping my daughter on a schedule she was used to. May 21, The Denville Mathnasium is different from many math centers in that the owner is part of the classroom. She doesn't just sit in the office but also teaches the kids. What I like the best is that the staff there tries to understand the children's personalities in order to take the best approach in teaching them.

My kids have been going there for years and don't complain about having to "learn" math The Center Director is always looking out for the overall development of all the students. The encouragement that the students get from the environment of Mathnasium of Denville is unparalleled. The staff follows the same format and always tries to help children focus and excel.

I would highly recommend the Denville center. April 18, Sachin Rath. Besides some connection issues, the experience has been great. April 12, Debbie and her staff are warm, courteous and really great with our daughter. They continue to challenge her to do better. Her time spent at Mathnasium is reflected in her math grades at school.

During the online learning period we are in due to the Corona virus, the Mathnasium setup to continue learning has been seamless and made it easy to continue. We are really pleased with the easy transition! April 10, The team works well with students in this difficult time and are as professional as ever.

April 7, We love the Mathnasium help we get while we are dealing with the Cover outbreak. It is helping in many ways. Great place to learn math! Shilpa Marria. My daughter loves Mathnasium. Even during these difficult times of location closures due to coronavirus, Debbie and her team have managed to come up with amazing solutions to keep the learning process going for the kids. I love the virtual at home platform and the transition process has been fairly smooth.

April 1, Owner goes above and beyond, great, knowledgable staff. March 22, Debbie and the staff are just amazing. Great instructors and my kids love the lessons. My kids are getting great grades as a result of amazing tutoring at Mathnasium Report a concern. March 15, Great for enrichment or if your child needs help! March 11, Mathnasium has given my daughter some confidence in math which she lacked completely before we started coming here. She raises her hand to answer questions in math class frequently now.

She usually gets one on one attention here depending on the time of day we arrive, which makes the monthly cost great value when we go more often.

She has found the tutors to be very friendly, kind, intelligent and great at explaining math topics. March 1, My son started liking to visit Mathnasium more often. That is a positive sign. February 23, Fadila Gathers. Quick results. My son's grades started to improve quickly due to excellent support with homework and test prep.

February 17, Miruna Sriram. Great staff and my daughter looks forward to her classes. February 10, Keith Crowning-Shield. February 4, The staff and everyone at Mathnasium are so friendly, it is a truly warm environment for kids to get the extra help they need! February 1, We have definitely seen an improvement in my son's math skills. The staff is very friendly and encouraging.

I highly recommend them. January 16, Debbie and her team are great. They are always so pleasant and positive about learning math. My daughter often wonders why she is there as she is "good in math". In my mind I think, well its working!

The great French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, whose famous 'last theorem' problem was recently solved and who contributed a number of important theorems to the field of number theory, was in fact a lawyer by day who solved mathematics problems as a way of relaxing.

It is his hobby we remember him for, some years later, not his profession. One difference between mathematics problems and jigsaw puzzles is that some mathematical puzzles turn out to have consequences in the real world. Indeed, many of the puzzles mathematicians solve arise from efforts to understand how features of the world work, though certainly not every problem arises this way. Riemann's generalization of Euclid's geometry, for instance, turns out to be exactly the language Einstein and others needed to explain gravitation.

Mathematics is humanity's best tool for trying to describe how the world works; indeed, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics at explaining the world is a bit of a mystery.

This unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is both a asset and a curse. It's clearly an asset in that it generates interest in the subject and funding for research from private companies and government agencies willing to pay to have key problems solved. On the other hand, it's a curse because it leads people to misunderstand the reason for doing mathematics in the first place; because some math turns out to be just what we need to solve certain problems, suddenly people expect all math to have obvious immediate applications.

It's sort of like a musical group that starts composing and performing music out of love for their art form, but then has a hit song which sells well -- people then get the idea that music is about making money, and if the group's next album doesn't sell as well as their first hit, suddenly they're considered laughable failures, even though to the group it was never about the money.

A record that doesn't sell well initially may become a big retro hit in later years, and records can have big success within smaller music circles without necessarily topping the mainstream charts. Similarly, mathematical concepts that are not successfully applied to real-world problems immediately after their conception are frequently found to have important applications later on as the subject matures or as new developments in the other sciences call for new mathematical approaches.

Some mathematical ideas may be useful for very specialized problems without necessarily having a broad range of applications. In any case, the study of mathematics motivated by sheer intellectual curiosity is known as 'pure mathematics,' while mathematics studied as means for solving practical problems rather than as an end in itself is known as 'applied mathematics. This can even lead to some pure mathematicians criticizing other pure mathematicians for wasting time on ideas without applications!

The moral is that what counts as an 'application' depends entirely on what you're interested in. That is, what is the significance of mathematics in the overall school curriculum? As a point of departure we offer a few thoughts on why mathematics should be treated as an important subject in overall curriculum.

If we reflect on the history of curriculum in general, then mathematics geometry and algebra were two of the seven liberal arts in Greek as well as in medieval times.

This historical role supports the notion that mathematics has provided the mental discipline required for other disciplines. It is vital that throughout their schooling they have opportunities to explore misconceptions and work through their understanding of these, finding new methods to work out what they thought they knew. A very common example of this is when multiplying a number by ten. This is an understandable misconception as we, by our nature, look for patterns in things around us.

However, when the child is then given the calculation 5. Not only can this make it difficult for the child to move forward into more complex calculations, it can also massively knock their confidence and take a while for them to find their feet again with their understanding of number. We must ensure, through the study of maths, that we take no shortcuts at any age, as each step in numeracy builds on the last. Studying maths also allows us to find more efficient methods which save us time, and to work out maths much quicker mentally than we would be able to relying on paper and pencil, or a calculator.

You have heard, in the 21st Century, the argument that we no longer need to know a load of mental maths as we all have calculators smartphones on our pockets. However, it is not always obvious, even, using a calculator, what we need to work out and which steps to go through, so knowing basic number skills by heart, such as times tables, is a key component.

An extreme example of when mental maths would come to the fore would be in the operating theatre. Nobody wants their surgeon to stop to use their smartphone to decide how much blood we can afford to lose before they intervene! This might be an unlikely example, but we definitely want to have as many numeracy skills in our mental maths toolkit as possible. This reduces cognitive load, which put simply has an impact on how much brain power we need to complete simple calculations, how flustered we become and therefore how likely we are to make mistakes in our calculations.

Even in the most everyday of examples, most of us do not take out our smartphones to work out every offer in the supermarket to decide which one is best. Even when we do use our smartphones or satnav to work out journey times and distances for us, we make then add our own decisions on whether to take route A or route B, and our reasons for that choice.

We are all still humans and our own knowledge added to the maths is what helps us to make good decisions for ourselves. Regular studying — whether of new concepts or simply revising and revisiting things we have learnt before — helps our grey matter and has been shown to improve IQ over time.

This is just one of the reasons as to why maths is important! Just as there is no age at which it is too young to start learning maths, there is also no age at which you are too old to learn or practise maths. Studies with older adults and retired adults show that brain training, using puzzles and quick maths recall such as times tables, can have an impact on brain function and awareness which has a knock-on effect to health and wellbeing.

We know this can have a positive impact, or even more importantly we know that low numeracy levels correlate with poor outcomes in life in many areas — not simply in our career choices and opportunities, and we want to help as many children as possible avoid this outcome. We all are, by nature, mathematically minded when we are young.

Good maths teaching and practice are what keep us all mathematically minded as we grow up — ensuring a level playing field for everyone. Learn more or request a personalised quote to speak to us about your needs and how we can help. Maths tuition for 5 to year-olds focused on the national curriculum and delivered online.

One to one interventions that transform maths attainment.