Whether you are checking the scores of your favorite sports team or creating a budget, math is present.
Remember those days in your math class when you might’ve said, “I’ll never use this math in the real world,”? Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but math is present in everyday life and will impact a lot of your decisions making.
For example, budgeting. According to Be the Budget,
“Budgeting is important because it helps you control your spending, track your expenses, and save more money. Additionally, budgeting can help you make better financial decisions, prepare for emergencies, get out of debt, and stay focused on your long-term financial goals.”
Luckily, budgeting requires simple addition and subtraction. First, write down your paycheck amount and subtract estimates of your monthly expenses. Then preplan your future costs and add them up to fit within your budget range.
Some careers that are not STEM-based still require math skills, such as journalism.
Journalists must understand statistics, percentages, ratios, rates of change, and other relationships between numbers. Specific fields of journalism that deal with numbers heavily are data journalism and sports media.
They use math when covering the Wall Street stock market or calculating the probability of a football team going to the Super Bowl. Then the journalist must convey that information to the public in a manner so that the average reader can understand.
Math anxiety is a problem that causes some people to struggle with math. According to the University of Nebraska,
“Math anxiety affects about 50 percent of the U.S. population and more women than men.”
Math anxiety is caused by continuous struggling and fear of math equations and tests; it starts at a young age and if not addressed can cause issues later in life.
To help make math enjoyable and not a chore, find how you can personalize your learning experience and know that there’s always more than one way to solve an equation.