Thursday, July 23, 2009

Learning Math for Kids and Adults


I am not a math person. let me get that out there right now. I majored in English in college and back in the 70's math was not required for an English BA degree. I could choose a math or science. Ha! Science won hands down!

Back in elementary school and middle school, math was not so difficult for me. It made some sense and algebra was pretty easy. The following year was geometry and that made NO sense to me at all! I think I really needed something more tactile than a damned book! Jeez! When my kids asked me "why do I need to learn this?" I always had an answer. "See that tile floor? It required geometry for Dad and I to put it down!" It also required algebra and basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Thank goodness I have my husband for that! Really, it is pathetic. He is really good with math and numbers, he is a programmer.

My kids were 10 and 13 when we started homeschooling so the math fear for them was already there. My daughter a little less so than my son. Third grade, in Catholic school, brought math speed drills. Now I understand that the purpose was to have them learn the basic multiplication tables by heart to make math easier later on. Sounds good in theory. Sadly, for a dyslexic child like my son, who WAS good in math, they were simply torture. Of course, because it is school, the name of the game is ridicule and shame. There was a lovely chart up on the wall with each student's progress or lack thereof. Naturally, everyone could see the "smart" kids and the "dummies." His teacher never "got it." I talked to her, my dad (who is also dyslexic) talked to her but she either didn't gave a rat's a** or she was too stupid to understand that not every kid learns that way. My son changed that year and has never really been the same. Luckily she left teaching after one more year. Of course the damage was already done to MY son. Thanks Mrs. B.

Learning math is very natural if a child can learn on his own with some manipulatives. Legos work just fine! Of course I would love a whole set of Math-U-See manipulatives but, well, it was not in the budget for kids who were already 10 and 13. If they were younger, and I could have gotten more years out of them, maybe.

My theory about teaching math is that a child will learn, with your help, how to "do" addition, subtraction, muliplication and division.
Addition: Mom, I have two cookies, can I have one more?
Subtraction: Hold on, you have too many cookies there, let me take a few. Dinner is in a few minutes.
Multiplication: Sally is coming over. I have three cookies, do we have six so Sally can have three, too?
Division: I have six cookies, here Sally, you take three and I take three.

Very natural stuff. To make it even more clear you can use those Legos. Set up three piles of four Legos each pile. Your child can count them to see there are twelve. Now ask him to put them in two equal piles. He then divides. Make sense? There is NO SENSE making it much harder than that until your child "gets" the sorting. He can SEE what math looks like. Once he is good at it and can understand the relationships in the math, he can start learning the terminology. I think schools get so caught up with the terminology that it scares kids away from math. Oh and did YOUR school have nice manipulatives for each student? I didn't think so.

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