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If you've ever had to help your child with math homework, you really appreciate their teachers, who do it every day. "Math anxiety" isn't something only kids experience.
Maybe you haven't seen an algebra formula in years, and weren't that comfortable with them when you were a student. Maybe you're a skilled mathematician, but don't know how to explain what you're doing to a child. Whatever the case, math homework can leave parents feeling every bit as frustrated as their children. Homework doesn't have to lead to unpleasantness, though.
What I've learned through my own experience—as a teacher, a researcher, from helping my own children, and now watching my daughter work as an elementary school mathematics teacher—is that communication is (excuse the pun) the common denominator when it comes to making math homework a positive experience.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), where I work, is dedicated to research. We support scientists across the country who study learning and education systems. But we're also teachers at heart. On lunch breaks in the past, a group of us gathered to help our NSF peers with their own questions about how to help their kids learn math.
Do Soylentils have better tips, things that have really helped their own kids learn math?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13 2017, @06:49AM
You seem to misunderstand what I am trying to say. Every single part of human knowledge requires understanding of facts, and You cannot understand something without first remembering what it is -- I agree with that. And I'm not trying to push something that will magically make memorization disappear. The crux of the problem is in what You had said: teachers at some level retreat to rote learning. But that is just a symptom of a problem -- that educators have to teach people who have no interest nor ability in the subject. The only way for a teacher to do so to a class of X, where X is sufficiently large, is rote memorization -- which for mathematics looks like it works, because each year students show that they can solve progressively more complicated "problems". So that is the first thing that I'm trying to say: stop teaching it to everybody.
Maths is still required for some tasks, though -- but mostly to show precise relations between real world objects. But the problem I see with education, is that kids are shown the solution to a problem before they even know what the problem is.
The candy example is almost good: but make kids actually do things, and then show them a solution. Show them two heaps of candies and make them choose which one they want. Or show them two heaps of peas, and make them choose which one they prefer to eat. Which one is smaller, and why? After several attempts, on different objects, they will get it, although they will probably be unable to describe how they do it. That's the second thing: don't start by making students learn the solutions to problems they don't know about, but describe (or even better: help them describe) ways of solving problem they already know. This can show them that mathematical notation is useful for describing general solutions, which can be applied to various classes of problems. But, as You hopefully see, this is totally impossible without rote memorization (I have to remember the tasks that I have done). But mathematical notation actually requires less memorization and is more general to problem solving, than solving the same problem over and over again for different kinds of objects. Rote memorization of mathematical notation is also required, but this can be done eagerly by children only after they can understand that it actually helps them, and saves them effort.
Now for systematic work: again, children learn by doing, and not by me saying things to them. They have to be shown that systematic work pays off, right now. But that can only be understood by them iff they show interest in a solution -- and that is usually not so in the case of mathematical problems shown in class and at home. If anything, mathematical problems are reduced so much because they not only have to be described in one class, but usually a solution to them has to be describable within the duration of the same class. There simply is no time for systematic testing of hypotheses -- systematic work and systematic reasoning are two different things. When can a child have the leisure time to sit down and think for an arbitrary amount of time, to employ their minds to come up with different solutions to problems and allow them to test each one systematically? Certainly not at school, next period is biology, drop that maths, and after that is history, stop thinking about that biology. I think, the reason why You were able to teach Your children before they went to school is because they have had the time to understand the terms You tried to teach them in their own time.