I’ve posted this on other teacher forum websites. One teacher told me she was going to turn this list into a classroom poster. Others liked it, but they haven’t told me how they would use it.

Alternatively, start the first day of your class by introducing yourself and then, while you check attendance, give the list to each of them as a printed handout. Or you could just stand in front of the class and talk about all the reasons math is valuable.

OK, here is the list:

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Simple math helps you to learn harder math. It also helps you to learn science, computers, and other things you’ll be taught later in school.

When people try to persuade you to believe something, they sometimes talk about numbers that seem to prove what they say. If you know how to check their math, you can avoid being fooled.

A famous nurse, Florence Nightingale, used math to convince people in government to change how medical care is done. Some day, you too might need to test something and measure the results.

Even if you eventually get a job that involves dealing mostly with people and not numbers, you probably will still need math. And you certainly will be required to study it for science, engineering, or computer work.

Math allows you to understand ideas that may seem surprising at first. For example, disease tests sometimes wrongly show that a person has a disease when really that person doesn’t have it; math reveals that this mistake will happen much more often than you might expect.

If you want to remodel your home someday, you’ll use math to add and subtract measurements and figure out square footage.

Math could help you decide where to place furniture and other things when planning a special event like a birthday party with lots of people at your house.

Math is crucial when you must decide how to create the very best arrangement of equipment and people at your workplace.

Math can help you make art. Sometimes you can’t just look at your artwork as you create it. You’ll want to use numbers to get sizes and color mixing correct.

Multiplying fractions makes it easier for you to adjust cooking recipes for the number of people you want to serve.

In your personal life, you will use math to plan how to spend your money. At work, you might plan how to spend the company’s money; if so, you’ll need math for that too.

You might decide to work in medicine. Doctors and nurses need to know how to calculate appropriate drug doses using basic math.

At some point, you might decide to work in law. Lawyers must sometimes evaluate facts involving dollar amounts, measurements, and other numbers. Some cases might demand that you understand more difficult math than just multiplying and dividing. Also, law students’ thinking skills are improved by studying math.

Jobs that pay above average for unskilled labor are becoming hard to find. Good pay increasingly depends on you offering special skills that not anyone can offer; some of those skills require knowledge of math.

Arithmetic gives you the ability to compare different choices you have. For example, if your boss at work offers a choice of a 4% bonus now or a 2% raise starting after next year, which should you prefer? Arithmetic and logic let you choose wisely.

Certain kinds of math, including one called "game theory", tell you how to make strategic decisions. This might help you in your personal life and in many kinds of work situations.

Computer programming requires at least a basic knowledge of high school math. Programming 3D computer games requires an excellent grasp of physics and advanced math.

By solving word problems, you will learn what kinds of real world problems you can solve with math, and you’ll have a good chance of solving them successfully.

Learning math and solving problems is mental exercise and improves your thinking ability. It’s like running and weightlifting, but it’s for your brain instead of your body. Learning different kinds of math is good for you, even if you never use all of that math in your life.

You might be tempted to avoid learning math until you know you need it (like for a job you want). That’s risky. It takes a long time to get good at math, so you shouldn’t start only when you realize you need math skills.

Your mathematical abilities probably will be greatest when you are college age, so that’s a good time to be learning the most difficult math for the first time, rather than learning basic math. So try to learn as much of the simpler math as possible, as early as possible, even if you don’t think you need it.

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That’s the end of the list.

I thought of another way to present it:

You can do a one day reward scheme on the first day of the school year. On that day, yo
References :
Life experience, intuition

i.e. my math teacher from high school acted like a kid, one of us. And it was pretty cool.
References :