Homeschool Math Blog

Again, I want to share some thoughts from the How to Learn Math course by Jo Boaler I took recently -- this time about how timed tests and speed affect students in mathematics learning and their "ability" to make mistakes : ). You see, all of our brains actually GROW and make new connections when we make mistakes and think about them. There is no brain growth if you can just sail through a problem set! That is why it is so important for our students to make mistakes -- and then we need to VALUE those mistakes and help them learn from them. People with so-called fixed mindset are usually afraid of making mistakes. We need our students (and ourselves!) to have a GROWTH mindset - the attitude that I'm not perfect nor smart already, but making mistakes helps me learn and grow my brain . Jo has written a book, What's Math Got to Do with It?: How Parents and Teachers Can Help Children Learn to Love Their Least Favorite Subject . I do not have it... but ba...

Recently I have been studying a free, online course titled How to Learn Math by professor Jo Boaler from Standford University. It has been really GREAT - I have really enjoyed it and learned a lot. I would recommend you also take it, if you have the time! But, I am also planning to write about the things I'm learning... in order to help all of us become better teachers. The first thing - and this comes straight from NEUROSCIENCE research - is about PRAISE . The stunning result is that praising children for being SMART or intelligent HINDERS them! Instead, we should praise them (somewhat sparingly) for their effort and hard work , but NOT for being good/smart/great/intelligent. The way it works is this: when you praise a child for being smart, that child comes to BELIEVE it is smart. Then, later on, when a task or problem comes along (and it will!) where the child struggles and cannot do it easily, the child will start shying away from such tasks... for FEAR of bein...

It's very good to know something about the most common misconceptions students might have. The website CountOn.org has 22 examples of them at http://www.counton.org/resources/misconceptions/ . Here are some examples: #2. Multiplication always increases a number... is that really so? Well, to small kids it appears to be so - but only if you just try whole numbers. Take 10 for example. If you multiply it by 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., it does get bigger. But all you have to do is multiply it by a fraction less than 1, or by a negative number, and 10 does not get bigger... 1/2 x 10 is 5. 1/4 x 10 is 2.5. -3 x 10 is -30. We must remember that repeated addition is not the only meaning or definition for multiplication . That's what it is for whole numbers. For fractions, 1/3 x 12 is better understood as 1/3 of 12. #3. As 1 x 1 = 1, then 0.1 x 0.1 = 0.1. This one was new to me. Quite curious. A child might think of 0.1 as some kind of "unit" like 1. But seriously, 0.1 is one tenth....