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posted by mrpg on Saturday May 13 2017, @04:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the 2x²+x+64 dept.

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.

Here are a few tips from what we've learned:

Do Soylentils have better tips, things that have really helped their own kids learn math?


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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday May 13 2017, @02:05PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday May 13 2017, @02:05PM (#509146) Journal

    Great comment. I agree that practical problems are the key, and primary teachers often don't find ways to integrate this stuff.

    The problem is: kids with math-allergic parents won't get the support they need. And far too many elementary school teachers are math-allergic themselves, and don't understand even basic math well-enough to pull of the steps described above.

    This is the really hard part. Math is a kind of language. Like actual speaking or reading, it takes TONS of practice to become fluent, particularly in terms of abstract reasoning or broad understanding. Lots of parents and unfortunately primary teachers never actually achieved that -- instead, they learned the "crutch" of symbolic manipulation and symbolic algorithms as a proxy for actual math intuition.

    Then the teachers are faced with kids whose natural inclination is to explore the world and develop intuition about things, and inevitably kids figure out other methods of doing problems (sometimes good alternatives, sometimes things that are wrong). Teachers who are "math-allergic," as you put it, can't cope with this intuitive childhood exploration of math concepts, so they at best smile and nod when the kid comes up with the right answer through alternate means, and at worst shut down such exploration pre-emptively. They often aren't competent/intuitive enough with math to recognize whether the kid has happened upon a good way of doing things or whether the kid's method is actually something that will fail when applied generally. Instead, focus on symbolic algorithms that they KNOW work. (This, I think, is even a bigger problem than rote memorization.)

    Kids rapidly pick up this "math-allergy," because (1) they learn it's NOT about exploration (which is fun), (2) symbolic algorithms are the most abstract representation, so kids often find them the hardest to understand, thus making the math seem harder than it is, and (3) abstract symbolic manipulation is BORING for most kids. They may even pick up the anxiety directly from the teacher.

    It's a real problem.

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