Don't judge students

An unhappy thing happened today, the connector to my external hard drive got torn from the printed circuit board that it’s mounted on. It needs 9 solder joints to reattach it, but its a surface mount component, so it’ll be hard to get at with a soldering iron. If I had a reflow oven then soldering it would be straightforward, except the disk drive would have to be removed from the circuit board, and no doubt that would require unsoldering. Not so simple. At least maths is easier.
Maths can be solved in your head, no fiddling around with hot tools. The nastiest material you come across with maths is ink (that is unless you think that paper is more offensive). It’s one of the reasons that I gave up semiconductor engineering to teach maths, there’s no hydrofluoric acid or arsene involved in doing sums. When viewed from this perspective, maths really is easy.
If maths is such a good option, why do so many children hate it? My theory is that it’s because, the subject of maths forms a pyramid. Every new thing that a pupil learns depends upon them knowing the preceding stuff. If there is something that they “don’t get”, then from there on, they are at sea. Young children can be very shy of pointing out that they don’t understand something, they’ll pretend that they do, and go to great lengths to hide the fact that they don’t. In this way they act against their own best interests, but, of course, they don’t understand it that way, because they don’t see the bigger picture. This has a lot to do with their status within their peer group, and not being seen as being weaker than the others around them, weaker than those who they are competing with. This is where Puppet Maths helps. Children know that they are superior to puppets, and so are more inclined to admit their inability to do something, because it carries no social stigma. They know they are not going to be picked on by the puppets; they know they are not going to be judged by the puppets.