Maths as a life skill and not merely as a course subject

Among various life skills that a child learns through the initial years, the attention paid to Maths is much lesser than what it ought to be. Indeed, Maths as a subject is taught at a very tender age during kindergarten, though not as a life skill. Maths has probably not been given the stature of life skill during schooling, which is where the gap exists.

I recall that in my engineering college, Mathematics was a part of the Humanities department, and not any of the science or engineering department. Even in the lower strata of society, to earn minimum livelihood, one needs elementary knowledge of maths. And that's where Maths stands to be recognized as a life skill and not merely a subject. It is a sad affair that the way Maths courses are structured, they expose a child to many lessons in Maths, but very little to build this skill as a way of life.

Lets take an example...When a child learns walking, what s/he learns is how to walk and not what it takes to walk. That's because parents know that learning to walk is more important than knowing what does it take to walk at that stage. Moreover, the child is so naturally engaged in learning to walk that the parent does not face resistance in making child to walk. Now lets look at Maths education. During primary school, a child is taught LCM, HCF, perimeter of a rectangle, prime numbers and such. Is the child being taught to feel the size of objects around ? E.g. the size of different rooms in the house can be easily compared by counting the number of floor tiles, and all you need to know is counting and not the knowledge of calculating area. In fact, the child will be thrilled to observe things around and feel them. This also generates curiosity to further explore different shapes and sizes. The need to learn geometry gets seeded, rather than first teaching the subject and then giving the examples. This is just the same as how a child feels the need to walk rather than first gaining the knowledge of what does it take to walk. That's in my opinion, Maths as a way of life !

To extrapolate it further, learning mathematical skill should be visualized in the same league as learning walking, speaking & reading a language, playing a sport etc. In subsequent articles, I would share more thoughts on how to nurture Maths as a life skill.  It is grossly demeaning to say that Maths is a difficult subject compared to other course subjects. Instead, one should say that Maths is difficult like mastering a sport or another life skill. That's when Maths will get its due honor and value in life.

Assessing inquisitiveness in education

I often wonder about the incompleteness of the assessment methodology that exists in our current education system. Traditionally, the assessment has focused on evaluating the answers given by the student for a set of questions provided. This helps to judge one's ability on certain dimensions like analytical, comprehension, memory etc. We also have assessment through lab practicals, which helps to judge one's ability to experiment and produce results. With time, advanced ways have also been introduced to assess one's creativity, be it in the form of making certain models, art-work etc. However, I feel one critical gap in current education system is the absence of assessing one's inquisitiveness.

The question is - why should you assess inquisitiveness ? Is it not inherent in any learning process ? Yes, it is inherent, and that's where the challenge lies. How can one enhance this ability to inquire and explore ? This is where the role of assessing this skill plays a vital role. It is a well known fact in quality management parlance, "what you can't measure, you can't improve". The measurement can be in tangible or intangible terms. This applies to the quality of output from the education system as well. If you can't measure inquisitiveness, you can't be sure to improve this skill. There are always exceptions, and several examples of great leaders, who reached great heights without any such support from education system. At the same time, there are thousands and millions others, who do not develop and grow as much as they can due to the inherent weakness of the education they get. We are talking about this mass segment. Needless to say, being inquisitive is essential for one to accomplish leadership in one's own chosen path.

So, how can we assess one's inquisitiveness ? Fortunately, the answer is not too difficult. In simple terms, it can be assessed in the similar ways as other skills. What is important is to be conscious about it and give its due importance as a part of overall education. Let me take a simple example. In a language comprehension test, a passage is given and then few questions are asked to evaluate the student's ability to comprehend an unseen passage. On the similar lines, can we demand the student to frame questions from the given passage ? To provoke inquisitiveness, evaluation can be based on the quality of questions framed. A question whose answer can reveal key insights or the human feelings or implicit message etc. can possibly be rated high. This is just an illustration, however, there can be guidelines for assessing the quality of question framed. Ability to ask exploratory and open-ended questions need to promoted. Another example could be - provide a graph from a business news article and let the student ask questions from it.

Why should we reserve the right to ask question and limit the student to only answer during assessment? This is just in-sufficient. Promoting an individual's ability to inquire and thereby preparing one to find answers to own questions builds a stronger person to navigate through real-world challenges. The results can be stunning. 

To quote a personal experience, I was coaching my daughter studying in sixth standard about the concept of percentage. I adopted an unusual approach of first asking her to self-study the chapter, answer questions given in the exercise, and then ask me anything which she could not understand. To my great surprise, she answered all the questions except two. This was indeed a great performance at the face value. It did not take me much time to discover that the questions she could not solve were those, which were different than the examples explained in the chapter. So, why did she get stuck up with these questions ? Simply because, she could not associate the meaning of percentage in the context of these two questions. It made me to ask her what is percentage, and she could answer it well much to my pleasure once again. So, where is the problem then ? I asked the next one - why do we use percentage or how would the life be different if the notion of percentage did not exist in this world ? And this was the real tough one for which she struggled to put the thoughts in place. And this is where the root of the issue existed for why she could not answer those two questions. Subsequently, I explained how percentage makes a difference in life, and also guided her to answer those two questions. The point to ponder upon is - could she have raised this question while reading the chapter instead of just limiting to what was stated there ? If she had asked this question (instead of me), it would have made a sea-change in what she learnt and how she learnt. 

This incident illustrates the power of being inquisitive. To inculcate this habit, we need to embed this as a part of the assessment in our education system. As I have highlighted through couple of examples, it is not difficult and does not require a big systemic turnaround to happen. For sure, what is needed is to recognize that developing and assessing inquisitiveness skill is critical and consciously, we need to extend assessment format to include this. As always, baby steps lead to revolutionary results and so will be proven true by assessing inquisitive skill and building a holistic education system.