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A Concerned Parent Asked:
I wanted to see if you had any suggestions for my family. I have been looking all over for a math curriculum to fit my son, and have not had a lot of success (I homeschool). I was wondering if there is a book out there that teaches you how to teach the concepts to your child in different ways?
In other words, he is having a hard time figuring out regrouping and quite honestly, the poor kid is just not a mathy person. I chose whether it is to his/our demise or not, not to push him to hard in math as I don’t want him to hate it!!! I would love to have a book that teaches me how to teach concepts so that I could then just use any age appropriate worksheet for practice. I hope you can understand what I am looking for, when I did a learning style evaluation my son came up abstract random and in the only info. I could find on line, they said the best math stuff for his type is games and personalizing the learning.
Would love to hear if you had any suggestions as I am at the end!! Thanks, Brian.
PS – Also if you happen to have knowledge of a math curriculum that is great, please pass it on!!
Professor Homunculus’s Response:
I don’t have any specific recommendations for curriculum per se. I don’t even like the idea of curriculums, for various reasons. That is because I think there is a much better way for most people, and that is: books.
Not textbooks, but books written by real people with a passion to help other real people .
The ones I recommend most are “The Realm of Numbers” by Isaac Asimov. It is out of print, but you can usually find a used copy somewhere online. It is a brilliant book, and will help anyone make sense of math. Everyone I recommend it to who buys and reads it writes me that they loved it. Even mathematicians!
Another good book is “The Number Devil” by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It is written like a children’s story (albeit not a “babyish” one). It is fascinating, and is a good way to get a resistant learner interested in how numbers work.
If you head out to a bookstore and check out the math section, there are great books like “The Joy of Mathematics” by Theoni Pappas.
My favorite tip is to head out to your local or library, and check the “Recreational Math” section (about 793.4 in the Dewey decimal system). You can sometimes find real gems in there. Recreational Math may seem like a contradiction in terms, but it a pretty cool section.
The reason I’m not naming too many specific books, is because the child you are teaching should have a chance to look through a bunch of them and decide for him/herself what looks interesting. If he gives you the “none-of-them” routine, go get the nastiest textbook you can find and make him work through that till he begs you to take him back to the library.
My general theory is that you can have the best curriculum in the world, but if the kids “just hates math” it will do you as much good as a screen door on a submarine.
The first thing is to pique the child’s interest on his/her own terms. One huge problem with text books and “curriculums” is that they are generally written by a team of dorks (sorry guys, but it’s true.)
Many of the nice people (or dorks) who write textbooks and curriculums are are so entrenched in mathematics, or education, that they can’t see the forest for the trees (the forest being the children as actual people instead of just “students.” )
Even those in the business who are not quite dorks are handcuffed by the rules that are made by mega-dorks (NCLB, anyone?) Between the bureaucrats and the lobbyists, anyone with passion, integrity and humanity gets squeezed to death.
You can notice by the language they use (modules, rubrics, curriculum, standards, activities, partial credit, pedagogical models, traditionalism, constructivism, etc.) Those are all fine words when kept within the industry, but they turn children off like an ice bath.
The flip side of that is the absolutely brain-deadening politically correct drivel they try to instill in lessons. Just the right amount of “each kind” of person, etc. Aside from the fact that it is distracting from the actual lesson at hand (math), it is demeaning to people. Kids notice that there is a self-conscious agenda going on (no matter how well-intended the agenda may be).
I hope nobody takes this as racist – what I’m trying to say is that that kind of stuff is racist, and all forms of racism are despicable.
And of course, there is the issue of “product placement” in our modern textbooks and curriculums. “If Joe has three Oreos, and Lakesha has six Oreos…”
How do those pandering dorks even get jobs? Geez!
How to get around the “name” and “brand product” problem? I like to use fantasy names. “If Ragula has seven gortniks, and Al Fresco has sixteen gortniks, how many gortniks to they have altogether?”
Yeah, it sounds stupid to you, but kids giggle about it. Once they’re giggling in a math class, you’ve got a teachable moment.
You may have the problem of not being able to find clip-art graphics to represent your gortniks, though. I think that’s the kind of problem that creates a good teachable moment for teachers.
As far as regrouping goes, I’ve written a lesson at:
http://mathmojo.com/interestinglessons/regroupingandcarrying/regroupingandcarrying.html
It’s not for everyone, but I find that it helps a lot of kids who otherwise have not been able to get the light bulb in their heads to light up.
I hope this helps.
It would be nice to hear other people’s input. Mine is pretty iconoclastic, and may not be for everyone (at least I hope it isn’t!)
Let me know how you did with any of these suggestions, OK?
Hi-ho!
Professor Homunculus
“Just as any sensitive human being can be brought to appreciate beauty in art, music or literature, so that person can be educated to recognize the beauty in a piece of mathematics. The rarity of that recognition is not due to the “fact” that most people are not mathematically gifted but to the crassly utilitarian manner of teaching mathematics and of deciding syllabi and curricula, in which tedious, routine calculations, learned as a skill, are emphasized at the expense of genuinely mathematical ideas, and in which students spend almost all their time answering someone else”s questions rather than asking their own.”
- Peter Hilton in The Pleasures of Counting)
Just to lighten things up for anyone reading this, here’s a weird math question:
What does (n-a)(n-b)(n-c)…(n-z) equal?
[Hint: It's kind of a trick question.]
The only way I’ll give you the answer from me is if you sign up for the Math Mojo Monthly newsletter. The answer will be in the next issue. (heh, heh, heh…)
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I think Brian gave you some great advice and book reccomendations. I would just like to add though, that I think one of the most important things to know about teaching math is the child’s “math maturity” level. If you try to teach something to them and they are just not getting it, it is most likely because they aren’t ready to comprehend it yet. If you just go about using math in real life, and reading great math books like Brian suggested, then approach the concept later, it will most likely go very easily. When a child’s brain is ready for the concept, it doesn’t take much to teach it. But when you force it to early, you feel like you are teaching it over and over, hitting a brick wall with your head!
I use a program that helps me keep track of what I have taught my boys, what they are reviewing for long term retention, and what I need to cover over time in order for them to get ready for Algebra at some point. And it encourages math in real life as much as possible, and waiting for math maturity. I use Math on the Level, available at http://www.mathonthelevel.com . This is NOT your traditional “curriculum” and in fact has NO worksheets! But it does have instructions for the teacher (you) so that you know HOW to teach or introduce a new concept to your child, and most parents are finding it very easy to learn and teach with. You might want to take a look at it!
Professor Homunculus sez:
Cindy, that is brilliant advice. I had never heard of the mathonthelevel stuff and just checked it out. It looks like a very well-thought-out program that doesn’t have any of the “pap” stuff of other programs.
Thank you as well, for mentioning “math maturity.” This is an Idea that needs to be talked about more. One of the worst educational crimes of our school systems is to tell kids what they’d “better know or else you fail or get left back.” That is the dumbest way to teach that I can imagine. Much more about this later, but I just wanted to say how right on target I feel you are.
Folks, it’s comments like Cindy’s that make this site worthwhile.
Keep it comming!
Hopefully this comment doesn’t come too late for the parent (and the child(ren) involved: the issue isn’t curriculum, but knowing about teaching math to kids. And for that, you can’t find anything else on the level of the books of the late John van de Walle. He has a one-volume book that covers grades K-8 (and earlier editions than the current sixth, used, are available at reasonable prices via Bookfinder.com and Amazon.com).
There is also a three volume series that covers three grade bands, all together comprising K-8 again. I have two of those, for the lower and middle grade bands. Not a lot to choose from based on my limited experience with the latter series, other than the notion of working one’s way up over time, if you’re starting with really little kids. It’s safe to say that van de Walle was well aware of the notion of mathematical maturity, though this is a complex notion that partially involves notions of developmental psychology, and later perhaps involves ideas that are specific to mathematics itself (like notions of proof, for example).
Stepping out of the above, I recommend checking some free materials that I believe most kids (and many adults) will find engaging: COMPUTER SCIENCE UNPLUGGED is a series of lessons now downloadable as pdf files that look at some of mathematics underlying computer science as well as important applications (e.g., searching algorithms, minimal spanning trees, etc.) from discrete mathematics. Check http://csunplugged.org/ Also worth looking at by one of the same authors, Michael Fellows: THIS IS MEGA-MATHEMATICS: http://www.c3.lanl.gov/mega-math/papers/main.ps
Professor Homunculus sez:
Thanks for the suggestions. I haven’t checked them all out, but I have checked out the last one, and it is excellent. If you introduce a child (or adult) to the material in that book, you will probably help him/her learn more than a year of public school curriculum.
Which seems to reinforce the point that a good book, or books, can whup some canned public school curriculum any day.