"You know, I don't think maths is a science. I think it's a religion."
"A religion?"
"Yeah, all these equations are like miracles. You take two numbers and when you add them, they magically become one new number! No one can say how it happens. You either believe it or you don't."

A quote from Calvin and Hobbes, thanks to 3Blue1Brown's YouTube channel on linear algebra for introducing this to me :)

Most of the times maths are indeed taught like that in schools...you memorize the formula, apply it, and see the miracle, and you believe in it. That's not how mathematics work, they are there to solve real world problems, but too bad some of them are just hard to be visualized or have easy examples.

When I saw that drawing on multiplication, it reminded me on how the cross product thingy in vector calculus looks like. Yeah, it sounds like rocket science, but the visualization of the thing is just taking two lines, add two more lines at their ends to make a square (or most of the times, a parallelogram), and find its area, which is exactly as how people multiply numbers. Isn't that multiplication is denoted as a cross? Rocket science.

A good explanation goes a very long way and I'm indeed happy to come over this post...it's really relieving to see that maths is still taught like this and let the students experience the miracle instead of just seeing it. It really makes a very big difference.

Have a nice day :)