MoMath – in Manhattan

For people of my generation anyway, if we were asked the question ‘what subject did you really dislike at school’ then many of us would have the same answer. Mathematics!

I don’t really know why that is but I have an idea. Could it be that it was taught to us in a very boring way? We had to learn stuff so that we could parrot it back – times tables come immediately to mind (and I still have a hard time with 7 x 6). Sines, cosines, logarithms – snore.

Sure, my generation, and those before, can be pretty brilliant when it comes to agile mental arithmetic and can probably convert kilos into pounds in a flash, plus kilometres into miles (and there are many kids today who don’t even know that there are such things).

Sales tax at 7.5%? No problem. How many inches in 5’3″? Easy. But maths as a subject? BORING.

You see, it was ‘learn this’.  No one ever told us why. Or how anything worked the way it did. It’s only later in life – after those dreaded schooldays – that we discovered that in fact, it’s not a boring subject at all – that we see it in action every day – that we use it several times a day.

Yet today’s kids are so lucky. Today they can visit an entire museum that’s dedicated to the fascinating subject of mathematics.