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Studying Mathematics seems to be sometimes daunting. At the higher levels of Mathematics, somewhere close to GCSE, the students don't seem to see the relevance of the topics they study. You as a teacher need to make sure they understand why they are studying it and why they need to do it.
On one side explaining why Mathematics is important to study is very easy. We all travel, we all do shopping (even the students can be involved in that), we all pay for travelling, we all pay bills. Everything comes down finally to figures so Mathematics is waiting for us round the corner. But we have to make sure we don't study in just that context, travelling or shopping, because at some moment we can think about redecorating our house, so we need again some figures but not exactly those used already when travelling. At some point we have to tell students and they need to understand it that the figures are the same in different contexts. It seem to be easy but sometimes is not.
Of course there is more than just travelling or shopping when studying Mathematics. They are just very handy examples, very easy for everyone to understand. You really start to enjoy Mathematics when you study it out of context and you hope that some of your students will see it the way you see it. Then they can study and enjoy some really hard topics and progress to the University for difficult studies where thay can notice that the Mathematics they studied before is very useful.
