The maths of children working on the streets is much better!
Children from poor families around the world often find it difficult to learn maths in school. Many children are not able to understand even the normal math formulas. But, an interesting thing is that children working on the streets are very fast in doing mental calculations. So what is the reason that these working children are great in maths, but their maths gets stuck when they come to school? To know the answer to this question, a survey was conducted of children (1436 children) working in the markets of kolkata and delhi in India.
In a survey conducted by Nature Magazine, it was found that almost all the working children were solving difficult maths problems in the market very well. They were good at selling goods, keeping accounts and exchanging money with customers. They also solved verbal math problems related to everyday things quickly. But, when the same math problems were given to them in a difficult way as taught in school, they could not solve them.
On the other hand, there was a group of children (471 children) studying in nearby schools who had never worked in the market. The result of these children was exactly the opposite. They were able to solve easy problems more correctly, but only 1% of them were able to solve the real market math problem correctly which was solved by more than one-third of the working children. The school-going children used very poor methods of calculation in writing, they could not do different operations simultaneously and were so slow in answering that they could not be used in real life or in future maths.
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