Huntington Learning Center Celebrates Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month 2020

The month of April marks Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, and Huntington Learning Center is recognizing this important annual event. 

Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month aims to increase the understanding and appreciation of mathematics and statistics. These disciplines play an important role in addressing real-world problems facing our society, including security, sustainability, disease, climate change, the data deluge and more. 

This annual program began in 1986 with a proclamation made by President Ronald Reagan to establish National Mathematics Awareness Week. The event was renamed in 1999 as Mathematics Awareness Month and moved to April and has been called Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month since 2017. It now celebrates mathematics and statistics and the diverse researchers and students in these fields who are contributing to furthering discoveries, solving problems, and finding beauty in the world. 

Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month is a program of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics, which is a collaborative effort of the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association, the Mathematical Association of America and the Society for Industrial Applied Mathematics. 

Eileen Huntington of Huntington Learning Center reminds parents that math and statistics are essential aptitudes used in so many different fields. “We recognize that math and statistics are integral to researching and solving worldwide problems and also are a big part of fields like medicine, technology, business, energy, manufacturing, biotechnology and others,” says Huntington. “Our goal in teaching children is to help them see the practical application of math and the power that it has to drive true innovations in today’s complex world. We’re pleased to join educators, parents, universities, schools and others nationwide to recognize this annual event and to encourage our communities to do so too.” 

Huntington offers parents the following tips to put math at the forefront of their children’s lives and remind them of its applicability in daily life and big-picture importance:

• Get your children familiar with STEM (Science Technology, Engineering and Math) career opportunities.
• Incorporate mathematical thinking into your conversations with your child.
• Bring math into the kitchen, having your child measure, decide on appropriate mixing bowl size based on the amount of ingredients, convert recipes and more.
• Get your child into your weekly fantasy football league, and have him or her follow along each week with fantasy points.
• Have your child estimate the bill whenever you shop or dine out at a restaurant.
• Involve your child in maintaining the family checkbook or family budget for essentials like groceries, bills, mortgage and more.
• Have your child keep track of family data in a spreadsheet, such as everyone’s height, shoe size, hand size and hair length and create graphs every six months to identify interesting patterns.
• Open a bank account for your child, encourage your child to earn and save money, and talk about the concept of interest. Discuss financial goals your child has for him or herself such as buying a car at 16 or saving for college.
• Talk about how statistics are used to make predictions about weather, stocks and other things and have your child make a few predictions him or herself.

To learn more about Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month, visit www.mathaware.org.