Maths in words

I want to share my method I found during my stats class at Cardiff University that seems to work for me when it comes to learning maths procedures.

It involves focusing on learning the procedure in words. Focusing on the concepts, expressed verbally. Writing these out as a questionnaire was a great way for my mum to help me revise for my stats exam, and I managed to get a first!

To use an example from my current studies:

How do you convert a time expressed in years to one expressed in seconds?

Multiply the time in years, as in expressed in standard form, by the amount of seconds in a year, as expressed in standard form. This gives the amount of seconds in each year in your original total.

I don’t want to practice using the formulas – including the numerals leads to errors. I was always told I was ‘overcomplicating things’. However, it’s more that I simply can not use formulas unless I actually grasp the underlying concept – and so long as I revise the concept of the procedure, I don’t seem to even need to practice the formula to use it!

I hope this might be of use for someone else out there (and please correct me if I’ve gotten the concept wrong in the example given, I’ve typed it out from memory from only having begun to work with it).