On a podcast last year, a lovely chap named Eric asked me what advice I have for parents.
I always stumble over that question. Advice requires specifics. What’s your kid into? What excites, bores, and terrifies them? Who are their heroes, best friends, and aspirational Disney characters? What math have they enjoyed, hated, and regarded with cold indifference? I need to know all that (and more) before I have any definite idea how to help.
But I do have advice of a sort.
To thrive in math, you need the know-how. Solving systems of equations. Writing geometric proofs. Manipulating spreadsheet formulas. All of the understandings and abilities that allow you to solve mathematical problems.
But you also need the want-to. Mathematics needs to satisfy a desire, a curiosity, an impulse. You have to experience mathematical work with a kind of satisfaction, as something more than demands and drudgery.
So where’s your kid at right now? Are they brimming with energy and excitement? Well, then buy a book of puzzles. Have them dive into deep problem solving. Get them going on Beast Academy. Anyone with enough want-to is ready to build the know-how.
But more often I see the other combination: precocious skills, without much intrinsic love for the subject. Such a kid may love math, in the sense that they love being good at it, but that’s a fragile love. The moment the success dries up, the love will too.
What to do with such a kid?
Try to build some joy. Watch Numberphile. Play sudoku. Read brilliant stick-figure-illustrated books (Randall Munroe’s, obviously). Find experiences of math that will develop an affinity for the subject itself, a joy that’s more robust, a want-to that goes beyond mere pride in their know-how.
Eric also asked me what turns kids off of mathematics, and this is what I told him:
It comes back to the weird tournament atmosphere that we’ve set up…. You have 25 students all about the same age. For bureaucratic reasons, it’s more efficient to put them all in one classroom, with one teacher teaching them the same thing…. So you get students who could be wonderful mathematicians but who instead feel like, “Eh, it’s not my subject. I’m not one of ‘the math kids’….”
But it’s an artificial scarcity.
When you get into the adult world, there’s a genuine scarcity of mathematical understanding and mathematical excellence. Every organization would love to have more people who know mathematics.
I try — with far more failure than success — to remind kids of this. The tournament atmosphere of school math has nothing to do with “math,” and everything to do with “school.”
Guard the candle of your want-to, and the know-how will carry you far.
The tournament atmosphere of school math has nothing to do with “math,” and everything to do with “school.”
I think this can be applied to pretty much everything at school – science, PE etc. Kids start associating learning (which is lifelong and should be a joy) with school (which isn’t). We need to decouple them so kids enjoy learning.
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Kids start associating learning (which is lifelong and should be a joy) with school (which isn’t). We need to decouple them so kids enjoy learning.
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Having taught for more than two decades, I can assure you, we have successfully decoupled learning from schooling.
Wonderfully concise and spot on.
Thank you!
My son asked me this weekend if I favored Tau or Pi. I think I have a math lover.
Ben, another insightful & thought-provoking post, thanks for sharing this. I read another blog today (from John Rowe) who mentioned the “content-highway” that students and teachers are traveling on in schools… very similar framing as your “tournament atmosphere of school math” that we have creating in schools.
I hope that we can provide some alternatives to these, give students (and teachers) time to mess around with some math away from the tournament. Thanks again. Karen Campe
While I love classic “math,” my advice has changed over the years. I no longer suggest that parents do activities that are obviously math with their kids. Instead, I encourage them to focus on rich activities that they both (parent and child) enjoy doing together. At the risk of this list being read as exhaustive and definitive (which it isn’t!), wonderful activities include:
baking, sewing, knitting, model building, card and board games, music, biking (esp with bike repair), sports, photography, gardening, programming, dancing.
If you want to hit many of the meta-mathematical skills (mathematical habits of mind), you can talk about what you’re doing with the prompts “I notice…” and “I wonder…” and “How was this [activity/event/specific experience] the [same/different] from this other one?”
For each category of activity, there are more mathy questions to ask or explore, so it is hard to add all the potential examples. Opportunities to measure (materials, time, space) and to count (combinations, variations, alternatives) come up in almost all places. Probability shows up a lot, too.
If really pushed, I would double down on games. I’ve heard of this guy named Ben Orlin who has a great book of mathy games…. Classic strategy and modern board games are almost all wonderful. Mathematical prompts here are “who has a winning strategy?” and “how do we know that strategy works?”
Finally, puzzles and riddles: anything affiliated with Martin Gardner or Raymond Smullyan could be interesting.
As a volunteer “Math Lady” at an elementary school, I get a half an hour a week in front of a 3rd 4th or 5th grade class. My basic message that I say every time is “Math is the Language of the Universe”. I tell them the more they know, the more they will see it everywhere. I introduce things to them they won’t see in a classroom until middle school or high school. We play games. We do brain teasers.
Last week we talked about the most important number in the world – zero. That led to a history of counting and numbers and ended up with base 10, 8, 5, and 2.
Today we talked about tic tac toe, figured out good strategies, how many possible games there are, and how many times x wins o wins and it’s a draw. Then they play a bit and I change the rules. The first change is that 3 in a row loses. The second change is 3 in a row WINS, but on your turn you can always play an x OR an o. If you see two of something in a row, you are going to win. The classroom is SO engaged.
We will eventually get to infinity and Hilbert’s Hotel and all manner of things.
One issue at the elementary level is that elementary school teachers are not necessarily math lovers. And they teach it that way. So some kids are turned off before they even get to middle school.
My two cents, and I think ALL kids can be math lovers, if they’re inspired by an adult math lover.
You can’t answer that question without learning something about the parent’s attitude towards math. The question itself suggests either that they are not fluent beyond basic math facts, or that math includes perspectives they may not have considered.
I say that as someone who hated math but loved making things. It got me into and through engineering school, but it wasn’t until much later that I realized math was a language and that it clicked.
In the early days of Common Core, our elementary school experimented with math nights, inviting parents and students to come do math together. It was a great idea but didn’t survive other pressures.
One last thing: kids who have learned their math facts by heart have more energy to spend on subsequent concepts. Carrying the facts around in their heads enables them to recognize them when they pop up in unexpected places.
Also, use your math, when you can. I went into engineering school, and none of the prof’s ever worked as an engineer !!! I dropped out and wound up in finance, I learned alot more about math, and how to use, by working with it in realistic situations.
Also, in your book about Change, you reference the Laffer curve, and Taxes. The tax thing is about after tax returns. A manufacturer can make an investment that yields 10% pretax. If combined tax rates are 80%, the after tax return is 2%. If the combined tax rate is 40%, the after tax return is 6%, triple the 2%. More people will invest with an after tax return of 6%.
My 2 cents. Bob U