Math - Taught as a life skill

I realized since I started teaching contents with math in my lab classes that Math could be a challenging subject for many, uninteresting for others and burden for several. Me personally I  have always enjoyed Math and now I look forward to teaching it as and when I need to. I have come to realize  our love for math was because of how we simply grew with math. When we were little, after school we were primarily either doing random stuff like playing or following directions of our parents, so our unstructured time is basically in oour parents hand that's when my love for math started.

A normal scenario on a summer evening at our home would look like this. We all would be sitting in balcony due to a power outage (very frequent), as we lived in a small town in India. Then papa would say 'tell me the multiplication table of 2, 3,4..'. He would want to hear this from all of us. me , my brothers. Mummy was on the same page. She would tell us the same multiplication table in bengali. They both so encouraged us to be perfectionists in math all the time be it for school or not.

Papa being the genius in math once challenged a colleague to use a calculator to do mutiple digit multiplication of two numbers and won the challenge in a breeze. These stories and many more were a part of our lives. Calculator was not even used till in college and considered a tool for cheating. All calculations were to be done mentally or by working out on paper. 

Another normal incidient which I can think of is also something that is hard to relate in present day, space and time. We would go to buy groceries and the shopkeeper would list everything on a paper and the prices in front of items. So he would use a "calculcator" to ensure a correct total and we were told to make sure that the total was correct by doing it mentally. So we would quickly add (8-10 numbers with decimal) and ensure that everything is ok. This we did everytime we went shopping. Those were the days when items were not scanned, computers were not used and typed reciepts were not generated. 

For us it was hard to think of Math as a subject in school, in all essence we were taught math like it was an essential life skill. Naturally we embraced it as a life skill.