Why on earth am I learning this? ~{Math Syntax struggles}~
I'm a math tutor. I've been doing it part-time for over 7 years, and notice that a lot of students struggle with syntax . I mean, it is a science, but how the information is communicated in symbols makes it a language. Logically, if it is also a language, that means it should also be taught in ways that people easily ingest language. Not suggesting that math has to turn into an English and Linguistics subject, or that ELL teachers suddenly have more on their plate to get involved with math departments in schools, but let me just use an analogy: My current student initially struggled a lot with summation and series. She memorises formulas, such as the sum to infinity of a geometric series, or basically counting the number of terms in a series. Initially, she did not understand what this meant: All the math peeps out there, and also social science/data science/ML people, you guys know what this does. It's a summation operator. It does something, to something. To my student, ...