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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: 3, Insightful) by srobert on Saturday May 13 2017, @07:21PM (1 child)

    by srobert (4803) on Saturday May 13 2017, @07:21PM (#509233)

    I don't have any kids (didn't learn to multiply:-) ). But when I was a kid my Dad helped me with math (that's maths for you Brits) by forcing me to spend enough time on it to master it. Don't let your kid get distracted by TV and video games. My dad never got his high school diploma, so I was on my own when it came to trigonometry and calculus, but he set the foundation for that by emphasizing how important arithmetic was when I was in grade school. Math is cumulative. Get a good enough grade in arithmetic and we put you in algebra and geometry. Do well enough in that and it's on to trig, and so on.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Sunday May 14 2017, @01:20AM

    by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 14 2017, @01:20AM (#509311) Homepage Journal

    Math is cumulative.

    That's of the hard things about math. Miss one thing and the rest becomes gibberish. And you won't even know which thing you missed. You won't even know that there *is* something straightforward that you missed.

    So tutoring someone who has trouble with a particular problem can usefully start with simpler and simpler things -- kind of like ranging shots -- until the tutor figures out the simplest thing that the student doesn't know. That's what needs to get taught first. Start with anything else and you're wasting time and effort..