Door-2-Math Blog

“If we could start again,” my husband of 12-years said to me the other day, “I’d take better care of you.” Yes, I’m lucky. That got me thinking though, how much of us would say that to our kids too.

If we could start again, I’d take better care of my cat, my daughter, my son, my husband, and myself. The list goes on. Yet, psychologists say our ability to think for future is what makes human unique. I think they are wrong. To me, it’s our ability to express regrets. Think about it, does a lion regret yelling at its cubs? Does a pine tree feel bad about sending its young to the rigged mountain cliff? A dandelion reproduces by sending its seeds with the wind. The wind — as in go with the flow. We parents are the oddest lot. We fret about what we could’ve done better constantly: should’ve stayed home more, should’ve cooked a gourmet meal instead of taking out a Little Caesar pizza special, should’ve said no to the carpool, should’ve read more books to prepare ourselves for parenting…. I read it somewhere, life is simple if we could justify our ‘I have to’ with our ‘I want’. Want a 7,000 square foot house enough to justify 80-hour week? Want a mint BMW enough to justify 3-day a week travel? Want Ph.D., M.D., D.D.S. or whatever suffix enough to justify staying in school for another 12 years? If the answer is ‘yes’, do it. Do it now and do it without regrets. If the answer is ‘no’, oh boy.

I always wondered if on their death beds, lions ever say ‘oh, I wish I had spent more time raising my cubs.’ Who knows, maybe it is a blessing that they can’t think ahead nor show regrets. I think I want to be a dolphin next time around.

Happy Parenting!

(C) 2008 Feenix Pan. All Right Reserved.

With finals coming, what’s the best way to review for finals and get the best score you can at this point? Here are ten pointers that I teach my students to improve their performance on finals:

1. Review sheet is your best friend.

If you are lucky that your teacher gave you a review sheet for the final, by golly, study it! It’s the best hint that any teacher can give on what to expect on the finals. Hound down the correct answers if you have to and grab anyone who can understand any one of the problems better and have them explain just that one problem for you.

2. Avoid careless mistakes by writing slower.
   
   All mistakes are created equal – they all cost points. One point here and three points there, pretty soon, they become a mob robbing you of the score you deserve. So take the time to literally write slower. You might be worried about running out of time, but think of this way, if you were the teacher grading your paper, would you be more lenient if you got all the problems you tried correct but didn’t finish or would you give yourself more points if none of the ones you tried were completely correct? Just like you, your teacher is human too, and humans get frustrated when they see same mistakes made over and over.
3. Avoid careless mistakes by talking through the problem while writing.
   
   Here is another technique I teach my students to slow them down so that they put down what they meant, not what they didn’t mean. Talking through the problem will force you to pay attention to what you are writing on paper (which is what counts), not what’s in your head (no teacher will call you at home and ask you; Say, Johnny, did you mean to write 24 not 26 for 3 times 8?)

4. Avoid careless mistakes by double-checking your work.

As math gets more involves, so will the steps required to solve them. It’s imperative that you double, triple check each step before moving one to the next. It’s common to find that students messing up the first step and wasting a lot of time in finishing up. If the first few steps are wrong, there is practically no chance for the answer is correct.

5. Avoid careless mistakes by doing a reality check for each step.

Answers to math questions ought make common sense. If you found that answer is negative 500 for the cost of a chicken, then a warning bell ought go off!

6. If you start to panic, think of how you find lost keys in the house and say to yourself: The solution is within me, I just need to remember it again.

Our brain is a funny thing – once the fight or flight response is triggered, almost always it gives up before even trying. One way to prevent this is to tell it: I simply forgot the answer. Now let me just remember the solution again.

7. Connect the difficult problem at hand to the things you do know.

If the problem looks unfamiliar (as on the finals, they tend to appear that way), start with what you do know that looks somewhat like the one that’s unfamiliar. From there, you can dig backward. A simple example of this is factoring x³ – 4x. Although x³ – 4x might not be familiar, x² – 4 is and it can be obtained by factoring an x out. It is surprising how many difficult problems can be made into simpler problems by simply manipulating and factoring.

8. If you are allowed a cheat sheet don’t cram formulas, instead write out examples using formulas.
   
   Formulae are useless unless you know HOW to use them. So if you have to write anything down for the cheat-sheet, go for the examples in the book that show you how to use a particular formula.
9. Make your own cheat sheet; don’t have others do it for you.

The worse thing you can do is have a cheat-sheet, and don’t know where everything is or why the formulae were on the sheet in the first place. Over the years, I’ve seen a handful of students spending their entire final exams looking over the cheat-sheet and trying to decipher their friends’ handwriting!

10. Put it in perspective. It’s not the end of the world. Relax.

Let’s put it this way; there are wars going one right now, the US spends nearly $300,000 per minute overseas to buy foreign oil, the heaviest weight lifted by a tongue is 24 lbs., and in the developing world, every minute nearly 17 children die from hunger or preventable diseases. The world is big and so is your life!