Summary
Here are five reasons why you need speed math. Speed math…
- Improves your speed, accuracy, and confidence
- Deepens your understanding of math
- Fosters curiosity
- Improves concentration
- Improves your creativity and lateral thinking skills
Learning speed math is an exciting and empowering journey. Speed math equips you will the skills to calculate seemingly impossible arithmetic questions with agility and accuracy.
In my article ‘The Secret of speed math’, we discuss what speed math is and different types of speed math techniques. In this article, we will unveil the power and importance of speed math in enhancing mathematical understanding, promoting creativity, improving concentration and developing effective lateral thinking skills.
1. Improves your speed, accuracy and confidence
Learning speed math using non-traditional techniques, helps to improve the speed and accuracy of mental calculation, in turn boosting student’s confidence in their mathematical proficiency. Using such techniques, students can immediately begin to apply their learning, even after merely one speed math lesson. After a few days of practice with these new techniques, students will see significant improvement in the speed and accuracy of their mental calculations, thereby, boosting their confidence in math.
As discussed in my previous article ‘The Secret of speed math’, non-traditional techniques simplify mathematical thinking processes, by reducing the number of steps required to solve arithmetic problems. Hence, these methods are a simple and effective means to enhance student’s mathematical agility and accuracy.
2. Deepens your understanding of math
Most of us learn traditional math techniques at school. If we need to calculate subtraction across zeros, for example, 100,000 – 57,981, most of us will apply the traditional method of subtraction by regrouping or borrowing.
However, many of us may not be aware that a slight deviation from this method enables us to perform this calculation with greater agility. Approaching this straightforward problem from a slightly different perspective, we can easily solve the above equation without borrowing or regrouping and read the answer out almost immediately.
For instance, in the above example, we use the following method. We use the rule ‘all from 9 and the last from 10’. This involves minusing each of the individual digits in 57, 981 from 9 going from left to right. For the last digit, we minus the digit from 10. In other words, focusing on the individual digits in 57,981, 9 – 5 = 4, etc., and lastly 10 – 1 = 9. This process allows us to quickly obtain the answer 42,019.
These non-traditional techniques not only help to improve our speed, accuracy, and confidence with arithmetic calculation, but also deepen our understanding of mathematics, re-introducing basic math concepts from a unique perspective.
3. Fosters curiosity
Allowing us to create a wholistic picture of our mathematical understanding, these creative and unique methods, enrich students understanding and motivate students to approach arithmetic problems with interest and curiosity.
Promoting creativity and innovation, non-traditional speed math techniques encourage students to adopt a curious and inquisitive approach to learning in general. Transforming students from rote learners into motivated, curious thinkers, eager to explore, discover and learn, non-traditional methods empower students to extend this inquisitive approach to learning to other non-math based subjects as well.
4. Improves concentration
Practicing and applying speed math techniques, helps to improve concentration and memory. Rather than involving, a slow step by step process, written out with pencil and paper, speed math techniques involve several simple mental calculations to obtain the final answer.
5. Improves your creativity and lateral thinking skills
Pushing the boundaries of traditional mathematics techniques and ideologies, non-traditional speed math techniques promote lateral thinking and creativity. Based on approaching problems from a unique perspective, these methods encourage students to actively engage in out-of-the-box thinking and to apply their skills, not only to quantitative mathematics problems, but also qualitative problems in other fields. In this manner, non-traditional speed math techniques are eye-opening for students and seek to foster excitement about mathematics.
Despite the myriad benefits of these invaluable non-traditional techniques, speed math is not taught as a part of the conventional school syllabus.
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Esther Cheung is Co-founder of 3C Learning and the author of numerous online educational programs for gifted elementary students. Passionate about empowering gifted children and growing their unique learning abilities, Esther is dedicated to creating educational resources to develop skills that are not addressed by the conventional school syllabus. Revolutionising gifted education, Esther developed 3C learning to support and empower gifted students to reach their academic potential. Join her Facebook Group for gifted education tips, techniques, ideas, and resources.