Homeschool Math Blog

UPDATED! I pretty much rewrote an old article of mine that lists some of the major factors that contribute to math anxiety in students and gives helpful ideas for teachers to motivate children. This is how it starts: A major factor in the development of math anxiety and dislike towards math in students is the way the teachers feel about math. It is well known that good teachers love the subject they are teaching. On the other hand, if the teacher feels negative towards math, it probably shows up when in his or her teaching and affects the students similarly. So one very important factor in motivating children to study math is that you as the teacher stay positive about math – if possible, enthusiastic! Now, that may be hard if you feel differently. As an adult, you can analyze your past experiences, beliefs, and feelings, and work consciously to change those. If you really hate math, you can also explain to your child (if she's older) how you feel, where and h...

This is one of the entries to the Great Math Moment(s) contest I ran in January 2014 -- a story of a girl who used to hate math but that all changed! I am homeschooling my kids.  The kid I'm writing about is my oldest--a unique, amazing, beautiful, extremely bright 8-year-old.  She has light red hair and a giant smile that shows all of her teeth and gums.  She's outstanding. I know that everyone says that about their child, but really, she's outstanding. She is the best big sister I could have ever have hoped for, she's loyal, she's funny... and she's smart.  She caught onto reading very, very  early, and is well advanced at that subject for her age. But she hated math. Oh, how she hated math.  Her smile and loyalty would vanish at the mere sight of her math book. She'd snap at her precious little brother and the tears would freely flow.  Our days would turn from joyous to sad on a dime.   And since we are a no-tears-in-school-when-they're-li...

Denise just posted an article How to Recognize a Successful Homeschool Math Program on her blog.  I enjoyed that a lot and recommend you read it too, no matter what math curriculum you are using! She summarizes it this way: If you are wondering how well your homeschool math program is working, pay attention to your children. Do they understand that common sense applies to math? Can they give logical reasons for their answers? Even when they get confused, do they know that math is nothing to fear? If so, then be assured: your children are already miles ahead of most of their peers. Their foundations are solid, and the details will eventually fall into place as you continue to play with mathematical ideas together. She also notes her 'yardstick' for measuring math anxiety : if your child does not fear word problems , he/she is not suffering from math anxiety. Photo by wecometolearn There was a time when my second daughter actually relished word ...

About this thing where people say, "I hate math", or "I'm not good at math", or "I never understood math", or similar things. It's well-known that in the U.S. at least, people seem to be able to say such things with ease -- it is totally acceptable socially -- but no one readily admits similar things about their reading abilities! I just read two interesting posts by Bon from Math is Not a Four-Letter Word that deal with this topic... They can HELP you or others you know overcome this line of thinking. How to Get People to Stop Saying "I Hate Math" How to Quit Saying "I Hate Math" You might also be interested in an old blogpost of mine: Developing a Positive Attitude (towards math) .

This is a very interesting piece of research, and I personally believe in this "effect": that a teacher's attitude towards math can easily be passed on to his/her students. In this case, all the teachers studied were elementary and female. I figure the same could happen with male teachers too, affecting boys, if the teacher feared and/or disliked math. It's just a lot less likely because most elementary teachers are female, and also because math anxiety is more common among females. Girls may learn math anxiety from female teachers The article also points to the best solution: the elementary teachers need trained much better in math so they can teach it confidently, including teaching the concepts and the 'why's of math. Elsewhere: Girls inheriting math anxiety from female teachers? at Casting Out Nines

Question: " I am a homeschooling mom, with two children still at home. We use Switched On Schoolhouse almost exclusively. My son will be a senior this fall. He took Algebra 1 and geometry but was against taking trig. I had him take Consumer Math this year and I am trying to find him something for his senior year. He is not leaning towards college, but perhaps a tech school. ANY advice you can give will be greatly appreciated! Thanks! " Well, if you don't want to do trig or algebra 2, consider the book Mathematics, a Human Endeavor: A Textbook for Those Who Think They Don't Like the Subject . This book by Harold Jacobs covers a wide range of mathematical topics, aiming to show students how interesting math can be. The topics include for example number tricks, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, number sequences, functions and their graphs, large numbers and logarithms, polygons and symmetry, mathematical curves, probability, and topology. Jacobs always giv...

What are the incentives needed in order to develop a positive attitude in children and other students towards mathematics? I don't think special incentives is the main factor in developing a positive attitude towards mathematics. I feel it is sufficient to get a few of the basics right, and then that alone will take care of most of it, and then students will like math just fine. Disliking math is not something that is inherent in us or in our kids. Little kids don't dislike math or numbers. They're just fine with them! This "I hate math" or "I don't like math" attitude seems to develop during school years. Now, I also don't think that children are disliking reasoning, because they're happy to do puzzles and play games where you have to think. And, students' negative attitude towards math also is NOT due to (school) math being difficult. The math we learn in school is not difficult. You don't have to be a math whiz to understa...

X (however many) Habits of Highly Effective Math Teaching: Part 4: Living and Loving Math You are the teacher. You show the way - also with your attitudes, your way of life. Do you use math often in your daily life? Is using mathematical reasoning, numbers, measurements, etc. a natural thing to you every day? And then: do you like math? Love it? Are you happy to teach it? Enthusiastic? Both of these tend to show up in how you teach, but especially so in a homeschooling enviroment, because at home you're teaching your kids a way of life, and if math is a natural part of it or not. Math is not a drudgery, nor something just confined to math lessons. Some ideas: Let it make sense . This alone can usually make math quite a difference and kids will stay interested. Read through some fun math books, such as Theoni Pappas books, or puzzle-type books. Get to know some interesting math topics besides just schoolbook arithmetic. And, there are even story books to teach math concepts - se...

I want to blog again on Julie's great Living Math website. You can really get help there if you're one of those who don't care for math, or even hate math, but want to get rid of that feeling. She has suggestions on how to start teaching "living math" - teaching math in a way that makes connections to real life, takes away the dryness of it, takes away the 'kill' from "drill and kill" (note that drill in itself doesn't have to be always bad - drill is a tool amongst many), etc. On this page , Julie has book suggestions to many different situations... Consider finding one or a few (from library or bookstore). Reading a math book that's not a school book can do SO much good! For your kids too! As you probably know, I wish everyone would get to know some of the interesting, fascinating, fun, curious aspects of mathematics. Or, get to know a bit of math history. You don't get those in school books. Or, finally learn why things work. Thes...

Just found this... decided that it's good reading for all. When you have lots of motivation, like these kids did, you can learn and will learn - math or anything else. It may not be easy at all times, but the motivation will make you persistent so you will eventually learn. A certain arithmetic class at Sudbury Valley School QUOTE "Because everyone knows," he answered, "that the subject matter itself isn't that hard. What's hard, virtually impossible, is beating it into the heads of youngsters who hate every step. The only way we have a ghost of a chance is to hammer away at the stuff bit by bit every day for years. Even then it does not work. Most of the sixth graders are mathematical illiterates. Give me a kid who wants to learn the stuff -- well, twenty hours or so makes sense."

I've been looking over the website LivingMath.net recently. Lots of good stuff there. What is 'living math'? How do you make math "come to life"? Well, I guess we could ask that when did math become 'dead' and who killed it? Some people feel that it is worksheets, tests, drill, and 'scope and sequence' that killed it. But I don't feel it's that simple. Those things are tools you can use, and they don't necessarily make math 'all dead'. There are many ways to make math 'living'. One important way, I feel, is to show your kids when you do use math in your daily life. I've written about it before. When YOU use math, it conveys the idea that math and numbers are things we use, not some obscure school subject that one does for half an hour five times a week, and then tries to forget the rest of the time. I have never understood mothers who say they didn't like math, hated it, etc. Don't say that! That attitude wi...

I just read a very inspirational article Teenager or Tyke, Students Learn Best by Tackling Challenging Math (PDF) ( html ). It tells about two teachers who frequently employ open-ended problem-solving sessions in their teaching - and the students (almost all) like it well and are very motivated. In math education, OPEN-ENDED problem usually means it doesn't have a specific step-by-step solution. You can solve it in many different ways. Or, it may have more than one solution. The problems these teachers use are often from real life, and not quick to solve. Instead it can take some time and struggling to get anywhere. (Hey, that's how problems in real life often are, too!) But, struggling can be valuable. One of the teachers featured in the article, Heidi Ewer, says: "Struggling helps them see this as an investment of their own time and energy. It makes them more willing to learn," Ewer says. "Struggling to solve problems requires students to use their intuiti...

Have you ever felt like your child needed something different for math than whatever you were currently doing? Like your math program didn't work anymore: your child didn't learn, or was bored? What to do? Here a little while back I received a question along those lines. We exchanged a few emails and I got permission to post her situation here on this blog. I think it is a good example of what many times happens in home school. "We have 4 children; boy-12, girl-8, girl-5 and boy-3. With oldest we have used the gamut of curricula for math and eventually settled out with Abeka for the past 3 years. However, the material seemed to not sufficiently explain new material, but run old material in the ground until the grinding sensation was numbing. That in itself seems to be contradictory, but my son was really not getting much better at the basics, mainly I think because he was bored with the repetition. I narrowed his assignments down to every other one and if I found he misse...

This story is cute, and even though it happened several years ago, it was new to me, and I really want to share it with you. Maybe you've heard that it's impossible to fold paper more than 7 or 8 times, no matter how hard you try? Well, that turned out to be a myth. Then high-schooler, Britney Gallivan tackled the challenge of folding paper 12 times and succeeded (in 2002). She experimented and thought about it, and found out what exactly limits the folding process. She discovered an equation linking the minimum length of paper needed, thickness of paper, and number of foldings. Then, she calculated she needed paper about 4000 feet long to do 12 foldings! Britney found one special toilet paper roll that would do, went to a mall with her parents and started folding... It took 7 hours for her and her parents to do it, mostly on hands and knees. Don't you ever think or leave that impression that girls can't do math - even if you're a female yourself and weren't go...

Good teacher loves his/her subject matter. That's old wisdom. Obviously not all people who teach math actually like or love it - I've had homeschooling moms admit that, for example. The sad thing about that is that you're probably transferring your attitudes to your students: your students will end up not liking math either. What to do? Well, try change your attitude: --> Think back and try find the reason as to WHY you don't like math. Was it some bad experience in school? See if you can overcome or ignore that factor, whatever it is. Maybe you had not-so-enthusiastic math teachers yourself. Maybe you don't like math because you don't understand it. Or, you feel "I'm just not a math person - I'm no good at math." The last one is probably not true... it's largely a myth. Any normal person with normal intelligence can learn basic math. Maybe you as the homeschooling parent suffered from math anxiety yourself? If so, I encourage you to...

Have you ever met anyone who feels, "I hate math", or "I don't understand math at all", or "I'm not a math person" ? Wonder when and where those feelings got started? I recently read an article called Formula to bring back thrill to math . The author argued that calculus should be reserved to college studies, not high school. His point was, while the nation is suffering from a shortage of math teachers, the good math teachers are needed, not at advanced-placement calculus classes, but instructing 'the masses' so that they would learn to love math. He also said that besides a drastic shortage of math teachers, there is also a severe shortage of math majors. In other words, fewer and fewer kids are studying math as their major in college, and there are fewer and fewer (qualified) math teachers... Of course the result is that schools then hire just about anyone to teach math. I just wonder, is there a connection between the lack of good math t...

Some of us are math enthusiastics: we love math, think it is full of beauty, logic, and patterns; we think it can be fun, exciting, amusing even. (I include myself in this category.) And then some of us don't care for math, didn't like it in school, didn't do well in it, don't want anything to do with it anymore. And I'm sure there are people in between these extremes, too. As a teacher, you would like your students to belong to the first category, of course. Now, I sincerely think that the biggest factor in whether student ends up liking or hating math is what kind of math teacher and teaching he/she gets. Parents' attitudes play a role too, but teacher's attitude to math and the way math is taught are the weightiest factors, I feel. But books such as The Adventures of Penrose The Mathematical Cat by Theoni Pappas can help too. It is intended for fun reading, exploring exciting mathematical topics in an easy-to-understand way. The storyline includes Penr...