Home | How It Works | Stats Login | Register         Case: Why do I need to learn this? After coming up to the board to complete a sample problem, a student in your middle school algebra class becomes frustrated when she cannot solve the problem. In her frustration she remarks "Why do I have to learn this stuff, I'm never going to use it anyways!" After giving her several every day scenarios that require the use of algebra she is still not convinced and refuses to do her work. Now other students are complaining about the same issue and classroom participating is declining as well as student grades. How do you resolve this issue? Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) This is a super difficult question for teachers to answer, and aside from giving them some real-world examples, there are some other things you can tell them. For starters, you can tell them "This won't make sense to you right now, but you'll understand it later in life." Ask them to trust in you that what they're learning is important. You can also follow up real-world scenarios with the fact that these problems help them develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills, which can be applied in all sorts of places outside of school or a job. Go the extra mile by giving example of how these extraneous skills are applied outside of the academics or the workplace. You can also point out how certain skills develop inside math classes. Point out from time to time (in passing) that your math class and the work they do helps them with other skills. Time management, problem-solving skills, critical thinking, etc. Finally, while you can try to integrate the real world into math problems, you can instead talk about how various jobs use math when you wouldn't expect them to. Waiters and cashiers need to be able to count money quickly, firefighters need to be able to calculate PSI to effectively spray water with a hose, and they use "fire dynamics" math to calculate the stability of a building. Even pottery requires you to know algebra. Showing your students that math up to the pre-calculus level is used in all sorts of jobs will motivate them more to learn.