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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 13 2017, @06:03PM
In my failed quest to get cisfemale programmers to precipitate out of the æther, which I have given up out of sheer frustration with third-wave feminism and their sexually abusive, homophobic white knights (not to be confused with their blatant transphobia and blind, right-wing-authoritarian-follower's reverence of the gender dichotomy wrapped up in oppression Olympics), QBasic and GWBasic were two that I considered: QBasic for being one of the first IDEs that I used (also Turbo Pascal), GWBasic for resembling TI-Basic on the TI-99/4A (not to be confused with the Basic interpreter on TI's graphing calculators). One co-worker even suggested that it might not be a bad idea to load up a TI-99/4A emulator and use that.
I settled with Ruby because it supported both. Perhaps in hindsight I should have done Python, but I knew Ruby at the time and not Python. (Also significant whitespace is against my religion.) Vim became our IDE, and irb became the line-mode equivalent of GWBasic/TI-Basic. I felt it worked very well. We even tangented into a few side-quests having to do with basic algebra, and I was left with the impression that my mentorship had helped at least put a dent in her math anxiety.
Unfortunately, my last student became infested with evil and is now a Deadite. If it's not obvious, I write bombastic comments to cover up for my own pain at the betrayal and abuse I've experienced at the hands of feminists. I have been crying a lot lately....