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By the age of 16 years, a young individual is entering into adolescent age where new avenues of life start staring in his or her face. Conditions of life and an introduction to possible opportunities for career as well as personal development impact heavily on their lives. An expansion of subjects on advanced level education and subsequent requirements of time management place a considerable amount of stress on a student's life. Lack of a careful regime of facilities and support around them may create significant amount of tension in family and emotional problems for the adolescents, resulting in problems of self-portrait. Students can feel depression and may fall into traps of 'I can't achieve anything...' - type feelings.
This article intends to suggest how a guided study of mathematics can develop personalities and provide students opportunities of rational thinking about other subject areas as well as their lives.
It is absolutely crucial to keep in mind that an adolescent has, over the past two or three years of his (or her) age, been through a difficult and 'panicky' phase of all the physical and psychological changes and the stress that comes with these changes. During that phase, the individual may struggle to form a meaningful view of the outside world and their own place in the world. Parents face the brunt of the pressure during this phase because they have to answer many awkward questions by their adolescent child(ren) about objects and people of this world. Many young individuals may struggle to feel satisfied by their parent's answers and, in worst cases, their parents may seem to them as the most ignorant, inexperienced and incapable people of the world.
In my view, these young adults need a planned mentoring. They have very strong potentials as individuals. All they need is a self-assurance through appreciation, listening to them seriously, respecting their opinion duly and making suggestions with the help of live examples. Often in my experience, most of state comprehensive schools have not been successful in instilling confidence in these young adults, especially in the vital subject area of Mathematics. I view this subject as vital because the typical thinking style for mathematics enables a personally think logically and make rational decisions. I have experienced, and parents have also pointed this out, that mathematics-based mentoring can have considerable impact on improvement in attainment of other science, humanities and language subjects too.
A mathematics tutor with a mentoring tendency for the young individuals can use this subject in a variety ways for students' personality development and rational thinking. There are areas of mathematics where nature of definitive questions can help a student become confident with correct concepts, and at the same time, creates concrete opportunities to improve upon the weak points (concepts). The existence of concepts, which are not so defintive and are stochastic in nature, are also useful for a young individual to learn that issues in life are not as clear as 2 + 2 = 4, infact quite the opposite. This helps building the thought process in other scientific and non-scientific academic disciplines as well as their approach towards life. However, a tutor must look for, or create, opportunities to find these similarities between the subject of mathematics and issues of life. This will enable the individual develope methodical ways to deal with life and look further ahead into the future for a better planning.
Schools / institutions are a great place of learning. However, being a part of a group of 30 GCSE students (or a group of 10 A-Level students) sometimes does not help. This is when the class teacher is not able to provide the amount of attention a student may need. The amount the Maths homework is simply not enough for students of this level. There are many distractions including peer pressure on matters that seem insignificant. Many comprehensive (state) school Maths teachers need to bring the PSHE within their secondary student's mathematics.
Conclusions
In this short article, I have proposed the use of the subject of mathematics as a tool that can improve a student's self-portrait and also their approach towards life. This article is a result of many success stories after exercising a mentor-like approach for teaching Mathematics and an explicit indication to the individuals that they have more potential than what they think they possess at their stage of life. The aim has been to generate an independent, confident and rational thinker. The method and determinsitic / non-determeinistic nature of topics in mathematics can be useful for a young individual to reflect on the realities of life and plan for life issues as if they are problems in mathematics. Tutoring practice with this approach has also recorded improvement in students' other subjects, remarkably (if not surprisingly) in languages and art.
