Home Schooling Your Child In Vedic Maths
If you enjoyed maths at school - or since leaving school - you will probably already use mathematical language comfortably with your children and find that they understand basic concepts such as the counting numbers and simple fractions at a young age. Unfortunately, a large section of the population found school maths so confusing - or even distressing - that they avoid anything remotely mathematical. Fear of maths can put parents off the whole idea of home education. Yet parents who know little about history or geography don't find this off-putting, as they usually expect to learn from books as they go along. Parents who are unmusical, or don't know any foreign languages have few worries about educating their children themselves. But fear of maths is somehow over-riding, and becomes almost irrational.
If this describes you, your fear may be passed on to your children even if they are in school. If they see you looking in horror at their maths homework, they're unlikely to be inspired and confident! So whether or not you're considering home education for your children, it's worth re-thinking your whole attitude to maths.
What is maths anyway? It's the underlying structure of the world, which we see in patterns, shapes, quantities and intelligent guesses. Why do we need it? We need to understand the concepts of numbers and quantities when we bake cakes, or decorate a room. We see patterns in art and music. Businesses need to make intelligent guesses (or ‘estimates') of how much something is going to cost, how many people need their products, how fast it is going to sell. We need to keep track of our bank accounts, and ensure we do not spend more than our income.
Unfortunately the modern system of arithmetic does not stress on learning mathematics by pattern recognition and hence it becomes uninteresting and painful to children.
So How would you like if suddenly all your math worries are taken care of and your children not only adore math but they sleep, eat and breathe math? Wouldn't it be amazing if such a system exists and they be able to master and learn it easily?
The solution to all the worries and boredom lies in ancient Indian scriptures called Vedas. Well you must be wondering What on earth has ancient Indian scriptures got to do with your high school kid struggling with math? A lot if you read carefully the next few lines.
The ancient Indian scriptures called Vedas are a storehouse of knowledge of every field including mathematics and science. Through this System of Mathematics every mathematical problem no matter how difficult can be solved faster and easily without much effort. The system is called High Speed Vedic Mathematics and this is the secret to the distinguished edge of the Indians in Mathematics over the centuries. It is a worldwide fact that the zero was invented by the Indians and the numbers we use today form a part of the Hindu System of Numbers.
A big part of this method is learning the recognition of patterns in numbers , letters or pictures. Once the student has learnt efficiently how to find symmetry and pattern of numbers or objects, learning mathematics becomes fun and simple! It arouses interest in mathematics and the children suddenly want to discover more and more of this beautiful method cause it gives them speed and accuracy which they desire. Vedic Maths is a zero-error technique and this take care of the very root of the phobia of mathematics.You may want to home school your child into Vedic Mathematics and get him the edge which he deserves. Any teenager can learn Vedic Mathematics and enhance his numerical abilities. It helps the students not only inside the class room or traditional academics, but it also enhances the IQ by enhancing the analytical skills and thought processes. This happens cause the system is very coherent and intuitive and uses both sides of the brain thereby giving the student the winning edge.
Some interesting notes on Zero Evolution.
India: 458 A.D. (debated)
The final independent invention of the zero was in India. However, the time and the independence of this invention has been debated. Some say that Babylonian astronomy, with its zero, was passed on to Hindu astronomers but there is no absolute proof of this, so most scholars give the Hindus credit for coming up with zero on their own.
The reason the date of the Hindu zero is in question is because of how it came to be.
Most existing ancient Indian mathematical texts are really copies that are at most a few hundred years old. And these copies are copies of copies of copies passed through the ages. But the transcriptions are error free...can you imagine copying a math book without making any errors? Were the Hindus very good proofreaders? They had a trick.
Math problems were written in verse and could be easily memorised, chanted, or sung. Each word in the verse corresponded to a number. For example,
viya dambar akasasa sunya yama rama veda
sky (0) atmosphere (0) space (0) void (0) primordial couple (2) Rama (3) Veda (4)
0 0 0 0 2 3 4
Indian place notation moved from left to right with ones place coming first. So the phrase above translates to 4,230,000.
Using a vocabulary of symbolic words to note zero is known from the 458 AD cosmology text Lokavibhaga. But as a more traditional numeral--a dot or an open circle--there is no record until 628, though it is recorded as if well-understood at that time so it's likely zero as a symbol was used before 628.
Which it probably was, considering that 30 years previously, an inscription of a date using a zero symbol in the Hindu manner was made in Cambodia.
A striking note about the Hindu zero is that, unlike the Babylonian and Mayan zero, the Hindu zero symbol came to be understood as meaning "nothing." This is probably because of the use of number words that preceded the symbolic zero.
Vedic Maths: Mental Maths?
Numbers have fascinated man since their inception. They demand very fine sense of discrimination, alertness, and power of reasoning. There is no doubt in the fact that dealing with numbers calls for the best the human mind can give. The numbers have become inseparable part of our curriculum and our daily life.
Mental Arithmetic is a form of training which deals with carrying out arithmetic operations with out the use of paper/pencil or even calculator. There are Chinese method of mental arithmetic which is based on 'Abacus' i.e. a Chinese calculator, consisting of beads. The concept of mental arithmetic based on Abacus is useful for children as it is easy for them in the brain development stage to practice on Abacus and after some time they don't think about numbers but they convert numbers in to Abacus beads and perform mental operations and again convert beads back to number and give answer with amazing speed and accuracy. However this mental arithmetic has been found effective for the children of the age group of 6 to 13 years only. For students who have surpassed this age bracket Abacus Mental arithmetic is not very useful.
in most of the competitive examinations conducted by IIT's, IIM's, other engineering and management course entrance examinations, the ability of candidate with familiarity with numbers and fundamentals is tested against time. It has been observed that most of the students who are selected for these prestigious competitions have very keen understanding of number, which traditionally comes after a lot of practice and memorizing tables, squares, cubes of numbers up to two or three digits. This is a very tedious and time consuming task, a student who is weak in mathematics is either ill prepared in this subject or his/her other subjects get ignored.
Vedic method of Mental arithmetic is a well researched subject, by His Holiness Jagadguru Shankaracharaya. Though the subject is quite vast and universal in nature, here we teach the techniques of Vedic mathematics which are simple and do not involve memorizing tables beyond 9. Arithmetic problems, which usually take 15 to 20 steps to solve, can be solved in a few lines. The course is quite useful for the students in competitive examinations, because it gives them powerful tool of analysis, logic, speed and accuracy in solving problems.
VEDIC MATHEMETICS BASED MENTAL MATHS. Vedic Mathematics is based on simplification of all arithmetic operations through some highly researched Sutras. The aim of Vedic Mathematics is to ensure that student can carry out any type of arithmetic operations with much ease and accuracy and speed. However for understanding Mental Arithmetic based on Vedic Mathematics, the age group of student is 13 years upwards. To understand Mental Arithmetic based on Vedic Mathematics Students trained to understand and quickly select the most efficient technique to solve the problem in the least time. This technique has following advantages: -
Very high speed of calculations
Analytical faculty of student becomes vary sharp
The decision making skill are developed
A natural flair for maths will develop
A tremendous sense of self confidence is developed in the student
This technique is very useful for competitive examinations i.e. IIT's, IIM's, IAS and other competitive exams where speed and accuracy are the prime requirements. With adequate practise through extensive exposure in the class room and regular 25 minutes practise every day the student master the scientific art of mastering numbers.
contemplating infinity philosophically
This is true no matter how you approach the concept. Many of us might consider numbers the most sure-footed way to come within sight of infinity, even if the mathematical notion of infinity is something we'll never even remotely comprehend.
We may think, for starters, that we're well on our way to getting a sense of infinity with the notion of no biggest number. There's always an ever larger number, right? Well, no and yes. Mathematicians tell us that any infinite set—anything with an infinite number of things in it—is defined as something that we can add to without increasing its size. The same holds true for subtraction, multiplication, or division. Infinity minus 25 is still infinity; infinity times infinity is—you got it—infinity. And yet, there is always an even larger number: infinity plus 1 is not larger than infinity, but 2infinity is.
Of course, just when we think we have infinity in the palm of our hands, we watch it evaporate in the harsh light of another of those confounding paradoxes: the numerals 2 and 3 are separated by both a finite number (1) and an infinity of numbers. This conundrum spawned one of the great paradoxes of history, known as Zeno's paradox. Zeno was a Greek philosopher of the fourth century B.C. who "proved" that motion was impossible. For a runner to move from one point to another, Zeno asserted, he must first cover half the distance, then half the remaining distance, then half the remaining distance again, and so on and so on. Since this would require an infinite number of strides, he could never reach his destination, even if it lay just a few strides away.
It wasn't for 2,000 years that Zeno's paradox finally got "solved," for all intents and purposes, by the calculus. Its inventors, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, showed us how an infinite sum can add up to a finite amount, that it can converge to a limit. Thus, even though we can't count all the numbers between 2 and 3, we know they converge to 1.
