3 Real-World Ways
to Remember Math

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Students often dismiss lessons in math classes, thinking that they are unnecessary for people to remember after the tests are taken. They’ll think “When am I ever going to use this in my life?” And where not everyone will need to make simple change in their profession or handle millions in accounting firms, knowing bits about numbers can prove to be beneficial for everyday life. But in order for that information to become helpful later in life, people need to find ways to retain it. Students need to remember their lessons.

Making it Relatable

Making math relatable can be helpful in inspiring student learning; it’s all about finding the proper medium they will respond to. For instance, someone interested in sports could look at the NFL, and think about the fact that there’s 32 teams divided between two different divisions, with 16 in each, the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC). In looking at games, 22 players are allowed on the field at a given time, with 11 for both the offense and the defense. The offense is given a chance of four attempted plays, called downs, to make it ten yards down the 100-yard-long field in order to obtain another set of downs. If a team scores on offense, they gain six points for a touchdown and three for a field-goal, with the opportunity for an extra point after the touchdown or a two-point conversion. It could also be interesting for people to consider the large salaries the players make, and that even the referees make salaries in the tens-of-thousands for 16 weeks of work out of the year.

Trick of the Trade

One trick people are taught to help them with arithmetic is to break-down the problem to better help them find the answer. That is to say they still perform the desired mathematic action, but they avoid taking the problem on as a whole. People could still use this practice, even if they don’t work with numbers. If someone wanted to figure out a rough idea of their yearly income and they made $452.00 a week, they could consider the problem “452 x 52 = ?” Rather than trying to solve the problem outright in one mathematical move, segmenting the problem would allow for easier avenues of thought to take over. For example, each digit in either number could represent a different amount depending on its space; for “452,” the number 2 is in the “singles” space, 5 is in the “tens” space, and 4 is in the “hundreds.” To continue the problem, one would multiply each space in one number by every space in the other, and add up the answers to solve the problem: ? = 4+100+800+100+2,500+20,000 = roughly $23,504.00 a year. 

Proper Percentage

In a practical, real-world sense of mathematics, decimals are used by many people throughout their daily lives. Whether it’s meant for leaving an appropriate tip, following the correct steps in a recipe, or taking measurements to move furniture, people use decimals in their configurations. A good thing to keep in mind when using decimals is that the number of spaces represents different parts of the whole; a single space “0.0” represents tenths, a double “0.00” hundredths, and a triple “0.000” thousandths. In continuation with the segmentation of problems lined-out in the section above, the same chain of thought could be carried over to decimal usage: the number of decimal spaces in the equation should be the same number of decimal spaces found in the answer. For instance, one could find the appropriate tip for a $67.83 bill by remembering that the tip rate of %15 = 0.15, and should be multiplied by the total amount of the bill, leaving one with 10.1745, or roughly $10.18 for a tip.

These tips may not be helpful for everyone, but they should help people keep in mind the layman’s real-world need for remembering mathematics, even if it’s only for leaving appropriate change. 

Author Information
Noelle Eberts is a part tutor and a full time mom. She is very passionate about helping children learn to enjoy math. She is an independent writer for www.mathnook.com which she considers an valuable resource for learning tools.

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