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Stocker: Math that Matters

In the reading, the author made some good points about how teachers should teach math and how math can be a great language to communicate. His ideas on how we should "distinguish between using things in the world around us to do math, and using math to understand the world around us" really struck me. Many textbooks use "real-world examples" to put the topic into students' perspectives, however, such problems just make students wonder why they have to learn all that and eventually grow to hate the subject. Even though those problems have been made to link math to students' daily life, some even fail to address the importance of learning such math concepts and how those are applied to certain real-life situations. Rather than just introducing new math concepts and giving them problems to solve using those concepts, school textbooks should let students do more critical thinking about how they can relate math to the real world and how math can explain things around the world. Doing so, students will learn to make connections between math and social justice. Social justice issues are always around them, and if they learn that they could relate math to some of those, they will definitely show more interest in math.

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