If math never quite stuck for you, Ben Orlin is here to change that. He says think of math as a language. Numbers are the nouns and the arithmetic operations are verbs. This episode, learning the language of math to help you in your day-to-day life. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to lifekit from NPR.
Hey, everybody, it's Marielle.
Today on the show, we're going back to math class.
For a lot of us, the math we learned in school felt perplexing or unsettling in some way.
Maybe you couldn't get the right answers, or maybe you could, but you just wanted to know, what are we doing here?
You know, I think it's clearer in other lessons in your english class or in your science class what this subject even is.
And with math, it's not even totally clear for the people learning it what exactly they're learning.
It's the strange game with no obvious connection to their lives.
That's math teacher Ben Orlin.
Now, you may have understood the basics.
I have five apples.
Cindy gives me two more.
How many apples do I have?
Okay, I see the real world implications here.
But at some point, maybe when you learned about negative numbers or imaginary numbers or the concept of PI, you're just.
Like, I do not know what these marks mean.
And you just start pushing them around the page, trying to do whatever is happening up on the board.
And it's game of kind of mimicry and trying to sort of do the dance without being able to hear the music.