Why teaching Maths needs a real-world connect

‘Ma’am, why do we need to learn this?’ It is a question Maths teachers hear often. And almost inevitably, it arrives when students encounter Sine, Cosine, and Tangent. It sounds like an ordinary question.

But hidden in that question is a beautiful doorway into trigonometry — a way of measuring the unseen with what we can see. For many students, trigonometry begins as a collection of unfamiliar words, formulae, and ratios. They learn SOH-CAH-TOA (a memory trick used in trigonometry to remember the three main ratios of sides in a right-angled triangle), substitute numbers into a formula, and wait for the calculator to produce an answer.

(SOH means Sine = Opposite side over Hypotenuse side, CAH means Cosine = Adjacent side over Hypotenuse side, TOA means Tangent = Opposite side over Adjacent side) But somewhere between memorising the formula and finding the answer, something important can get lost: the Maths itself. I remember watching students struggle with a simple trigonometric problem.