It has amazed me to see the extent to which children equate maths with numbers and formulae. They have strong conviction that maths is numbers and rules. They hardly think about maths as a story, drama or an event. As a result simple word-problems baffle them.
Well before we get down to actually doing the maths, we must understand what happened in this story. Say, Meena goes to market to get a dozen bananas, a dozen times. We need to play this drama in our mind, only then can we figure-out what to do. Is this a multiplication or a division sum. A fraction or a square-root sum. Unfortunately, well before children are hooked to stories of maths, they are made to learn the maths of the story.
One way out is to start teaching elementary maths only through stories. It doesn't matter if they don't know the generalized rules, as long as they know how to resolve the situation in the story. In Meena's case she could have made 12 trips and buy 12 bananas each time (hence 12 times 12, which is 144 bananas). Or, she could have made 12 trips to buy one banana each (hence 12 times, which is 12 bananas). These possibilities are there. The maths (as symbols and rules) hardly enters here.
It would be easy to teach children generic rules once they understand many maths-stories. However, if they know the many generic-rules, its not easy to figure-out which of these would apply to a specific story-sum. So treat maths more like a story than a formula.
