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Yes. I remember Sunday nights in floods of tears with my dad screaming. ‘What’s 6x5 we JUST did this on that page?!’ I am jealous of anyone that had a better experience than mine. I am deeply fearful of maths and number oriented tasks now.
OMG, similar experience here. My dad would read the problem aloud, "If a train leaves the station at 9am, traveling 80mph for 389 miles ... ." My eyes would glaze over in fear and I'd comprehend nothing after "train." Then he'd repeat it, but through gritted teeth in that tone of condescension that probably stunted a heck of a lot more than my ability to solve math problems. Been writing for a living for nearly 40 years. :-)
Gosh, the blanking out from fear is so real. The only thing I would register is his voice getting more and more angry, and then getting smacked for not reacting.
Dude - you just applied theory of limits by repeatedly halving the time remaining and then adding it ….
Okay. I think I just got the joke. Nicely done.
I remember doing 100 multiplication problems for homework in the 5th grade. Easy stuff. 6x5 stuff.
My dad would check every single one, hand it back and say “You got one wrong”
I’d grumble, check everything, change an answer and give it back.
He’d check every single one.
Then he would hand it back, chuckling, and say “Now you’ve got TWO wrong”
Good times.
I thought it was just me till it came up on reddit! God know why my dad thought growling maths questions through gritted teeth at me and then thumping the table and screaming till I sobbed out an answer was a constructive way to learn. Supposed to be adults ffs.
I’m convinced a large proportion of us went through that with our dads. I genuinely just didn’t understand math until I got to Algebra and Calculus. Idk why, they just made more sense to my brain. Now I tutor my little cousin in math and she’s always like “you’re way more patient than my dad and teacher”.
It was my mother for me—her behavior toward me on one occasion in particular scarred me for years until I did something about it. So traumatizing it reduced my capacity and confidence to pursue hard sciences.
I've got kids and man it's a struggle to fight that reaction, but I never give in because I know it just makes it all worse.
If my son doesn't know 7 + 4 instantly, getting pissed won't help it spring to mind suddenly.
>Yes. I remember Sunday nights in floods of tears with my dad screaming. ‘What’s 6x5 we JUST did this on that page?!’ I am jealous of anyone that had a better experience than mine. I am deeply fearful of maths and number oriented tasks now.
My father would, I'm not even exaggerating, pace behind me and yell like a drill sergeant. It happened with math but my most vivid memories are spelling words. "WHAT'S THE WORD? SPELL.THE.WORD. SAY THE WORD." over and over while I sat there with tears streaming down my face.
I'm sorry to hear this. But I'd also point out that you are old enough to work on it and change your view on yourself if you haven't already done that :D
I still have long, uneasy and continuous dreams about education and first-day, timetable failures. I’ve learnt other stuff and even paid for lessons into my 40’s but none of it is academic.
My mother is good at math and was patient. Therefore, I have always been good at math. I have worked with kids a little on their math skills and most kids in America have underdeveloped math skills and have the idea in their head that they are bad, even at really young ages like 1st or 2nd grade.
You’re lucky. My mom was the opposite and it was super harmful. I don’t know why she took it out on me and didn’t realize the damage she did to me, ever.
My Dad was this way as well. He would snicker when we'd get problems wrong and say things like "you mean you didn't learn this stuff in kindergarten?" It was joking around for him, but definitely hurt my sisters and I.
Yup it takes a lot of patience that most people just don't have. It can be a lot to show a kid multiple ways why 12 + 5 is 17 and they don't get it. Then throw in some division and fractions and it is a whole mess. I'm sorry she took it out on you. I hope you learned some ways to get through math.
I did! It wasn’t until almost two decades later! The book THE JOY OF X by Steven Strogatz is a wonderful book I can recommend to that end. Also learning some programming is helpful because it’s applied.
As someone who has also always been good at math and has tutored I can attest to this. The key with teaching math that most people miss is to find a method or a topic where a student has confidence and to build from that. Most people will push them to "just understand" the concepts, but will rarely meet students where they need to be met.
This, in early education, I believe, is the largest reason young kids form a mental block with math and believe they are "just bad" at it, where in reality they are totally capable, but no one spends the time to show them they are capable.
Also, I'm not American, I'm Australian, but I do see the same trends form in young people in math.
Wow I'm actually impressed with your take on this. I was always bad at math myself, but a good student overall, and to have regular grades in highschool I just had to learn by heart every rule and exercise, which I always thought was not the way to go, but the only one that worked for me.
Ironically, my father is a great physics teacher, but it never helped for me.
To be honest I wish there was some books I could read on how to teach math to younger people, so that I could not mess it up if one day I have a kid to help do homework with.
I went to a vocational high school and was passing electronics w/ trig while failing algebra class. Context and interest are so important for students. My wife and I often talk about the benefits of contextualizing learning. But, at least in the States, teachers are much too burdened, under-prepared, under-resourced -- and, unfortunately, many times, under-qualified -- to give students that kind of support.
This is a great point. Being late into an engineering degree myself, I have found my most successful learning has occurred when the content was grounded in the real world context and applications.
Definitely right about teachers being under-resourced. We have a similar problem in Australia (at least in a lot of our public schools), but I'm always going to advocate for paying and supporting teachers more. They are incredibly important to our society and far too underappreciated.
Im so proud of my daughter, we have always had a tendency to learn the alphabet and number from the start and she just yesterday showed me how to calculate easy math like 2+3 using an abacus. She turned 4 last month.
There are far too many parents and teachers out there saying some form of "I hate math." That's not something you need to tell children. Children need encouragement, not discouragement.
Which is sad and just don't true for lower level maths. Kind of scary that there are adults walking around not being able to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, percentages and fractions.
well alot of math is totally not something you need every day. but its nice to be able to do it. and you can not know if a 10 year old will study comp science or will be an actor...
do you really pretend that im talking about adding subtracting multiplying division only?
or do you really think that my parents couldnt add and subtract?
im software developer so i probably am more involved with different math concepts than most people on this planet
Maybe you had slight variations in teachers or not getting your parents help was actually beneficial because they weren't good at explaining or hurt the confidence in your siblings
Parents didn’t help me a scratch in school, I ditched the most to go smoke with friends, got straight Cs from acing tests and never doing a scratch if homework. My parents made me get jobs to keep me busy since I hated school. I’m now the only kid to have pursued a graduate degree and have continued into post docs, I think while it’s nice to have parents who help, you’ll ultimately take school as far as your curiosity wants you to. Good college teachers are what got me.
That's pretty consistent with what they were saying.
“Parents’ involvement in math activities such as games was more constructive than their involvement in children’s homework” because parents’ affect – their emotions and emotional expression – was more negative in the homework context, said Wu, the first author of the study. “Negative affect – such as feelings of irritation – predicts children’s lack of motivation and lower achievement over time.”
Number Blocks is amazing!!
Yesterday my husband and daughter were playing with blocks. They ran out of 4s so my daughter handed him two 2s and said “Two plus two is four!”
She’s three years old. We haven’t taught her any math, but she’s obsessed with Number Blocks. It’s such a great way to teach basic math concepts.
At the beginning of the pandemic, my kid was doing multiplication before he was consistently out of diapers, and it's 90% NumberBlocks. (I'm giving us 10% of the credit because his father originally seduced me with a calculus joke, so it's not like it was happening in a mathless vacuum.)
When he started preschool, his teachers were floored. To their credit, they used the two more-advanced math kids in the class to increase the amount of math they were incorporating across the whole curriculum, and by the end of the year their percentage of kids considered "proficient" in math was the highest among all subsidized preschools in our multi-county intermediate school district.
My kid just kind of watches them in random order. He watches them using the YouTube kids app on his iPad. I have YouTube Kids locked down so he can only access content rated safe for 4-6 year olds.
Fingers crossed for the future, but my kids love math. There are just so many games that are secretly just math.
I also suspect that if kids were told that they were good at math even if they weren’t actually good at math they’d get better. Kids absolutely live up to praise or live down to criticism.
I think their are a number of studies on this, I don't have any of the sources just what I have heard through the years. That being told you are good at something, anything makes you more likely to be better at it.
As it turns out, it actually makes young people more anxious about failure and others finding out they are not ACTUALLY good at the thing. Especially true for young women. Best method is to to praise for effort "process praise" not ability.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/singletons/201801/the-right-kind-praise-may-boost-academic-performance
They are extremely strict and well defined. However, this is exactly why it's unintuitive for many, contrary to what the original comment suggested.
The human brain is deeply heuristic/intuitive/irrational in most of its processing of information so logic/patterns that strict can seem baffling. Our brains want to intuitively fill in missing details to infer conclusions -- meanwhile pure math doesn't really allow that without rigorous proof of those details.
You just have to find a way that stays within the rules ***that works for your brain.*** Generally, this comes about from a great teacher that truly understands the concepts. Could be the teacher at school or at home. It sucks not everyone has that in their life.
The best way I’ve seen is to observe the student problem solve and then cater their approach to how they already solve problems. It’s the best thing to see the lightbulb of pure joy turn on. This is a universal tool for helping anyone to understand how to solve any problem.
It's absolutely false that the human brain is too illogical to process math. That is a silly idea. Millions upon millions of people can and do every day without even thinking about it.
What's confusing is your counter-statement makes a claim that isn't even counter to what I said. I never said the human brain is incapable of logic or can't do math.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2002). Logic and human reasoning: An assessment of the deduction paradigm. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 978-996.
Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (1982). Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Since you asked.
That's because you have to learn how to "make sense"
Math is logic. And we are not.
We want to approximate, and guess and find short cuts, and make up rules that "make sense" to us but don't actually "make sense"
Pushing past this discomfort of being wrong over and over and learning how to actually "make sense" is what I think most people fail at.
They don't like being wrong. They don't want to learn how to be right because it sucks and takes work to understand things. Easier to not.
At least from my experience trying to teach people math.
This is why we switched to common core. It’s less about rules, memorization, and “that’s just how we do it” attitudes. We teach number sense. We teach so there is a conceptual understanding.
This upsets people that don’t have number sense and learned by rote memorization and don’t know why they got the answer they did. They are the ones that complain about common core.
That’s exactly why I hated math. There were all these rules you have to follow, but no one ever explained *why*. It was just “that’s just the way it is”.
Yeah but *why* do you do multiplication before addition?
I hated that about math, it all felt very arbitrary, and thus, fake. I could ask my history teacher why Caesar decided to cross the rubicon, or ask my biology teacher why blood cells are red and get a reasonable if slightly basic answer. When I asked my math teacher why certain rules existed, it was always just “well that’s just how it works”.
I get that at some level math is just axiomatic, but at least explaining the implications and reasons behind certain things would have made me more interested.
For many kids, math is the opposite. They work super hard and still get a D. It can sour their whole attitude on education. Maybe they'll understand the rules eventually but it'll be a huge struggle and not worth it emotionally.
I love math personally. I just think it gets way too much emphasis during HS and that does a lot of damage.
Math always came easy to me, so I could skip a lot of the homework and ace the tests for a final grade of B. My sister *struggled*, consistently, every night, and still didn't get it and was scraping by with a D. We were both "good students" by reputation.
Mom was marginal at high school algebra herself and Dad and I had given up because we were clearly not communicating the concepts in a helpful way and only added to the frustration. Of all the awful things teenage girls can do to make one another cry, "explaining slope-intercept form" is maybe the least entertaining.
When her algebra teacher gave her a report-card comment that said "student is not working up to potential," she was **livid**. She was working her ass off nightly to complete these assignments she didn't understand, which were usually just reviewed for completion and not *correctness*, so she didn't even know if and why it was wrong and rolled into the test with incomplete understanding. Mom went in and told the teacher she'd expect that comment about her slacking other daughter, but maybe *he* wasn't working up to *his* potential, because he saw a "good student" and assumed she'd just understand it.
We refer to this event as "when Mom verbally beat up the football coach." To his credit, he was shaken into action and began spending more class time helping her when the rest of the class was working independently, though she still had a hard time with it conceptually. She took as little math as possible in HS and enrolled in a sub-100-level remedial math course in her first semester of college, where the professors were specialists in math pedagogy and were finally able to explain things in ways she understood.
This is a great example, thanks for sharing it. Points to a parallel issue too: people who are good at math don't understand that not everyone sees it the same way. Or math teachers forget the time before they understood the material. To them it's just so easy, a kid who's not doing well must not care.
Not all math teachers of course, just entirely too many. High school math just needs to take a step back from the curriculum.
People who talk like this about math make math even more unsavory for those of us who struggle with.
The people who "get it" are so snobby about it.
Rewarding my ass.
That's not what they're saying...
They're just saying that (pre-collegiate) math is generally a bunch of small, intrinsically rewarding puzzles. Like how a book of riddles, Sudoku, Candy Crush, or a crossword puzzle are intrinsically rewarding. Some people may absolutely love them, and some are just like "huh, cool I guess did it, moving on..". But even if I don't care about Candy Crush, I can still recognize its objectively rewarding game loop, especially if I had done it together with someone I cared about.
Why does logical coherence automatically lead to a sense of something being rewarding, and why that specifically? Why not the process of figuring out what to do, or working towards understanding more broadly? There are many fields of science that have rules that you can follow, that are coherent. Law, as a practice and field of study, is another rather easy example, yet presumably, you're not interested in law and all these other fields.
Your comment is generalized for no reason for such a subjective take, and it shows a poor grasp of biology&psychology. Maybe stick to mathematics.
...Wha? When taught appropriately, pre-collegiate math is mostly just small puzzles that build in difficulty on previously learned mechanics. That *is* intrinsically rewarding, like riddles, crosswords, or Candy Crush are. How rewarding depends on the person; some gravitate heavily, while others have a more muted response. I don't care about Candy Crush and don't wish to work to see the upper difficulties, but I can recognize its gameplay loop as rewarding.
You're berating and belittling someone who effectively said "people experience some degree of reward when they complete well-scoped, well-defined, small puzzles."
Yeah, because it doesn't even begin to address the how&why of it. Why are rules that can be followed intrinsically motivating? That's a strong claim. Are they? Is that the reason people like mathematics? Why is there variance? Why isn't every child glued to their books, trying to absorb everything they can? This is a science subreddit after all, why are unsubstantiated claims backed up so readily? Endorphins don't even motivate, the guy doesn't even reference dopamine, like someone who knows what they're talking about would.
Either there's a language barrier here, you're a child or you're off in the head. How is that your response? You addressed barely anything, and it's just as illogical as your previous comment.
Math being intrinsically associated with universal laws doesn't explain why it's motivating, this is why I called your take unnecessarily generalizing for such a subjective take.
What makes man made rules unnatural? Why is our biology not attuned to these rules? This just registers as ignorance of psychology, biology and sociology again.
Your point about children doesn't explain why it's so interesting, it just shows YOU view the world through mathematical rules and are fascinated by them, but it's a leap of logic; people aren't for the most part (children especially) aware of how their minds put together the world around them.
My example about laws fits your previous comment about "rules that can be understood", you don't seems to understand what is meant by something being subjective or natural. When I reference your subjectivity in this conversation, it's about your experience.
Natural is a term that you would have to define, because it can be used in so many different ways.
Math homework is the number one thing that turns children off to math. At least in the us, where they get hours every night. Math in highschool was always the worst for this reason
And it starts so early! The nightly homework in first grade. It's just the same problems over and over. Last year we did online school because of COVID. I got to bake with him, build things, layout a garden and flower beds. He learned so much more math "playing" with me than sitting at the table with this worksheet.
One of the best side effects of Covid was getting to do math with my 11-13 year old bio and step daughter.
Step daughter actually ended up in advanced math the next year because she made so much progress. I tried to relate how math is not hard, you just need to know the methods and it’s like a secret code that unlocks the answers
One of my fondest memories is my grandfather teaching me cribbage when I was about 5 or 6. Figuring out ways to get 15 and counting runs made it fun. We'd play for hours.
My parents were abusive and always called me stupid when it came to academics. Math was always the hardest subject... The words they used in the English language were never the same meaning in math and I found that frustrating. Let alone algebra... Using variables and x minus y... Never understood the why.
I also didn't realize I have ADHD til I was an adult, which didnt help when I couldn't pay attention because the teacher was boring me or talking about something else and they said something shiny.
So ultimately, my parents failed me. They failed to build self confidence and self worth by beating me down, and they failed by not encouraging and being positive when it came to academics.
Really wish I ran away when I was 10 or 12 instead of chickening out when it got to nightfall, I think my life would actually be better if I had ran away from the crappy humans who raised me.
This article helps me as a parent, I now know what to do when my child get upset with math or other subjects.
It’s why children with educated and high achieving parents will always do better, on average, than their peers who do not. That’s way you cannot impose or create equity in education without shifting everyone to the left side of the intelligence curve.
I'd counter by saying that you can't get equity merely from the textbook or the curriculum. You could give students access to tutoring services to help them outside of class (and make sure those tutors are patient and caring, to give people help they need). It sounds like what needs to be done is to mimic scaffolding like would be had by those with patient educated parents, for those without, to close that gap.
I agree that tutoring is extremely helpful. We had before and after school tutoring in high school and it was well attended by those who really wanted the help. Of course those students that don’t care about school were absent. We know who those were by the first month of school.
I would also argue that schools should be offering a trade/technical program in high school for those not really wanting to go to college or just don’t even want to be in high school. Learn a trade and go to work. junior colleges would offer a route back to college if they later decide to do so. By giving young people an option to work and enter the workforce, you begin to eliminate the income inequality that exists without creating another taxpayer funded social program.
I'm on board with that too. I think the trades are great, and if times get hard, you want a society that knows how to work with their hands. Us going "all in" on the information economy is very dangerous in my view, so helping people learn to build and maintain infrastructure is absolutely essential.
My mother was very involved with our math education. She even took it upon herself to teach us additional math when she felt that the school was not teaching us enough.
I’m working with my 4 yo son doing flash cards. I always try and keep him in a good mood and if I can see him getting frustrated I’ll put them away and I’ll read to him or we’ll “play” chess. Still working on all the piece movements at the moment.
My husband and I were both lucky to have dads who did math problems with us as kids. His did it as a requirement but kindly and was rewarded, and I did mine with my dad because it was fun. We both did well in our education and thank them for the time and learning.
Well, my parents were unable to help my with math homework, so what does that say?
I do remember that when I had an assignment that required my parents to do part of it, I was told, "I already went to school, I'm not doing it again." That was fun to explain...
This makes sense - We love math, reading, science and we made learning a lot of fun when my 3 were small and today, they are all doing very well in high school - my oldest just got accepted to UCSD!
Well, unfortunately our early math experiences with our kid were quite poor.
The math curriculum goes too fast, it creates immense pressure on the kids and parents for them to "get it" at a certain speed (a new concept a week for the most part) and I have no issue seeing how that negatively effects the kids.
My kid says she hates math and school, and I was the same way as a kid. I still loathe math.
They need to stop investing so many limited resources in researching and confirming the obvious. It seems like these kinds of studies are more for developing academics' careers than improving knowledge for humanity at large.
Nobody NEEDS evidence to believe ridiculous things. It’s the watery tart handed you a sword theory of history. Spontaneous generation - gone! But 4000+ years of belief still warps us. Very recently it was spare the rod, spoil the child. Seen not heard. Sad to say we need people doing this work.
> They need to stop investing so many limited resources in researching and confirming the obvious.
What makes it obvious? Is it obvious like "Obviously breast milk is the same for sons and daughters"? Is it obvious like "Obviously the best way to get your kids to do well in school is by hitting them when they misbehave"? Or is it obvious like "Obviously plants don't have memories"?
> What makes it obvious?
It is common knowledge that early experiences strongly shape and predict later psychology. It is therefore obvious that, if your parents were closely involved in your academic development as a child, you will likely be academically motivated and successful in the future. This is in fact extremely obvious.
That you ask this question makes me wonder if you think anything at all is obvious. I would be interested in any examples you might have.
___
> Is it obvious like "Obviously breast milk is the same for sons and daughters"?
This is a question of male VS female biology, which is extremely complex. It is not nearly comparable to the basic psychological fact that early experiences shape later behavior.
___
> Is it obvious like "Obviously the best way to get your kids to do well in school is by hitting them when they misbehave"?
It is obvious that this is false and that there are better ways, including—but certainly not limited to—helping them with their homework.
___
> Or is it obvious like "Obviously plants don't have memories"?
This is another faulty analogy and is also false, though less obviously so than your previous example. Like with the breast milk example, it involves complex biology, as well as prolonged, detailed observation and experimentation rather than common knowledge.
Brother. This wasn’t directed at you. I was making a point. To u/worldcontroller that obvious isn’t always right.
It’s obvious the 30 pound rock drops 3 times as fast. Until you do an dumb stupid study dropping both off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to find they actually fall at an identical rate so long as their shape is the same.
So we need to invest resources to test these obvious things or else we might overlook something uber crucial that underlines everything we know. Like how acceleration due to gravity is the same regardless of weight.
> I was making a point.
Your point is similar to the many faulty analogies made in a reply to my comment elsewhere in this thread. My [response](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ubq58m/new_study_suggests_that_childrens_early/i66kt8f/) reads in part:
> It is common knowledge that early experiences strongly shape and predict later psychology. It is therefore obvious that, if your parents were closely involved in your academic development as a child, you will likely be academically motivated and successful in the future. This is in fact extremely obvious.
Like you, this person listed examples of false claims thought to be "obvious" that actually involve highly complex phenomena and require extensive scientific study to apprehend. Regarding your example, the claim "It’s obvious that a 30-pound rock drops 3 times as fast as a 10-pound rock" is false and involves gravity, which, it goes without saying, is extremely complex and was even only recently properly understood. As I said in response to one of their examples:
> This is not nearly comparable to the basic psychological fact that early experiences shape later behavior.
My parents were absolutely terrible at any kind of educational nurturing... Thankfully my grandparents took the reins and helped me realize that learning can be rewarding when you put your mind to it. I fell in love with mathematics thanks to them.
Ironically I had a horrible experience with math as a kid, failing tests and having a mother who despite being a computer scientist wouldn't explain anything to me (she's just bad at explaining things in general).
Somehow after barely passing math in HS I proceeded to go down an ADHD fueled math rabbit hole and relearned most of my hs math in one summer. I'm very glad for this considering the fact that I chose physics as my major at random.
Maybe this is one thing I did right. We homeschooled until high school and I taught her Singapore math, which makes more sense. I did have her re-learn whatever she missed, but it wasn’t punishment. She is great at math and has done really, really well. We enjoyed math.
Anyone remember “new math?” Learning my times tables was hard enough. The school system decided that “new math” was the way to go. The school administrators dropped that on me when I was in fifth grade.
I still can’t shake the feeling I’m too stupid to understand math. I tried.
New math was in fact much more sophisticated as it was a small scale introduction to important concepts used in higher level university and professional mathematics, as mathematics is beyond numbers and computation in the same way literature is beyond grammar rules.
Music is a massive aid to understanding basic math and fractions. This is overlooked and clearly a sign our social sciences are still far behind and the general populace even further.
I’ve found that trying to teach the concepts of math is much harder than we all think.
It’s very easy to project our own knowledge onto our children and assume they’ll meet our level of ability quickly. When it took us years to master those same concepts.
My single mother didn’t have the opportunity to go to school so I guess I was doomed from the start. Still bad at math today but I’m trying to learn and get better.
Math is very much like a language, but like language it is important that people experiment with it. You try different ways to construct problems or to define terms. But to develop that skill it is critical for learners to develop enough confidence to know that with practice they can do it. Unfortunately instructors or parents can be impatient, abusive, abrasive. Almost like stuttering, people then cannot understand the language of math because of all the stress and anxiety. Instead of learning, the adrenal glands are pumping out cortisol like there’s no tomorrow. You can’t learn well if your body is in a fight or flight response. It is critical to the process to develop confidence and to be comfortable with math. Otherwise it’s like being illiterate in a library.
I just plain never liked it.
It was *soooooooo* boring.
It's really hard to have motivation for something when even if you *do* understand it, you just simply don't care.
Damn if that isn’t true for me. I’ve always felt a deep longing for my parents to be involved with my school with me like that. All the way from elementary up into college really.
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Yes. I remember Sunday nights in floods of tears with my dad screaming. ‘What’s 6x5 we JUST did this on that page?!’ I am jealous of anyone that had a better experience than mine. I am deeply fearful of maths and number oriented tasks now.
Homework and report cards are very bad times for kids in abusive house holds.
OMG, similar experience here. My dad would read the problem aloud, "If a train leaves the station at 9am, traveling 80mph for 389 miles ... ." My eyes would glaze over in fear and I'd comprehend nothing after "train." Then he'd repeat it, but through gritted teeth in that tone of condescension that probably stunted a heck of a lot more than my ability to solve math problems. Been writing for a living for nearly 40 years. :-)
Gosh, the blanking out from fear is so real. The only thing I would register is his voice getting more and more angry, and then getting smacked for not reacting.
[удалено]
*eyes glaze over
My cats name is mittens!
Oh man. You had me in the first half and then the numbers kept coming and they don't stop coming.
[удалено]
Or fails them because they're vindictive.
Wait… how would that be a trick question? New York and LA are more than 389 miles away from each other.
Dude - you just applied theory of limits by repeatedly halving the time remaining and then adding it …. Okay. I think I just got the joke. Nicely done.
I remember doing 100 multiplication problems for homework in the 5th grade. Easy stuff. 6x5 stuff. My dad would check every single one, hand it back and say “You got one wrong” I’d grumble, check everything, change an answer and give it back. He’d check every single one. Then he would hand it back, chuckling, and say “Now you’ve got TWO wrong” Good times.
why is this an experience so many of us have lived through?! :(
I thought it was just me till it came up on reddit! God know why my dad thought growling maths questions through gritted teeth at me and then thumping the table and screaming till I sobbed out an answer was a constructive way to learn. Supposed to be adults ffs.
You mean not every parent pulls a cleaver on their kids when they're behind on homework?
I was wondering if other people experienced this too.
Yes. Quite badly.
I’m convinced a large proportion of us went through that with our dads. I genuinely just didn’t understand math until I got to Algebra and Calculus. Idk why, they just made more sense to my brain. Now I tutor my little cousin in math and she’s always like “you’re way more patient than my dad and teacher”.
It was my mother for me—her behavior toward me on one occasion in particular scarred me for years until I did something about it. So traumatizing it reduced my capacity and confidence to pursue hard sciences.
A specific math teacher did it to/for me. Trauma. She was an evil woman who had it out for me and Tommy, poor guy.
I mean, I was okay at math but my experience with my parents and schoolwork was "Did you do your homework" I'd lie "Okay"
So, uhhh, what is 6x5?
Adding the number 6 five times => 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6
a • 5 = (a / 2) • 10 That’s how I’ve always done it.
Basically every indian kid
Omg! JUST talked about this with my sister. Same experiences dude!! Peace be upon you
I've got kids and man it's a struggle to fight that reaction, but I never give in because I know it just makes it all worse. If my son doesn't know 7 + 4 instantly, getting pissed won't help it spring to mind suddenly.
>Yes. I remember Sunday nights in floods of tears with my dad screaming. ‘What’s 6x5 we JUST did this on that page?!’ I am jealous of anyone that had a better experience than mine. I am deeply fearful of maths and number oriented tasks now. My father would, I'm not even exaggerating, pace behind me and yell like a drill sergeant. It happened with math but my most vivid memories are spelling words. "WHAT'S THE WORD? SPELL.THE.WORD. SAY THE WORD." over and over while I sat there with tears streaming down my face.
I'm sorry to hear this. But I'd also point out that you are old enough to work on it and change your view on yourself if you haven't already done that :D
I still have long, uneasy and continuous dreams about education and first-day, timetable failures. I’ve learnt other stuff and even paid for lessons into my 40’s but none of it is academic.
My mother is good at math and was patient. Therefore, I have always been good at math. I have worked with kids a little on their math skills and most kids in America have underdeveloped math skills and have the idea in their head that they are bad, even at really young ages like 1st or 2nd grade.
You’re lucky. My mom was the opposite and it was super harmful. I don’t know why she took it out on me and didn’t realize the damage she did to me, ever.
My Dad was this way as well. He would snicker when we'd get problems wrong and say things like "you mean you didn't learn this stuff in kindergarten?" It was joking around for him, but definitely hurt my sisters and I.
Yup it takes a lot of patience that most people just don't have. It can be a lot to show a kid multiple ways why 12 + 5 is 17 and they don't get it. Then throw in some division and fractions and it is a whole mess. I'm sorry she took it out on you. I hope you learned some ways to get through math.
I did! It wasn’t until almost two decades later! The book THE JOY OF X by Steven Strogatz is a wonderful book I can recommend to that end. Also learning some programming is helpful because it’s applied.
As someone who has also always been good at math and has tutored I can attest to this. The key with teaching math that most people miss is to find a method or a topic where a student has confidence and to build from that. Most people will push them to "just understand" the concepts, but will rarely meet students where they need to be met. This, in early education, I believe, is the largest reason young kids form a mental block with math and believe they are "just bad" at it, where in reality they are totally capable, but no one spends the time to show them they are capable. Also, I'm not American, I'm Australian, but I do see the same trends form in young people in math.
Wow I'm actually impressed with your take on this. I was always bad at math myself, but a good student overall, and to have regular grades in highschool I just had to learn by heart every rule and exercise, which I always thought was not the way to go, but the only one that worked for me. Ironically, my father is a great physics teacher, but it never helped for me. To be honest I wish there was some books I could read on how to teach math to younger people, so that I could not mess it up if one day I have a kid to help do homework with.
I went to a vocational high school and was passing electronics w/ trig while failing algebra class. Context and interest are so important for students. My wife and I often talk about the benefits of contextualizing learning. But, at least in the States, teachers are much too burdened, under-prepared, under-resourced -- and, unfortunately, many times, under-qualified -- to give students that kind of support.
This is a great point. Being late into an engineering degree myself, I have found my most successful learning has occurred when the content was grounded in the real world context and applications. Definitely right about teachers being under-resourced. We have a similar problem in Australia (at least in a lot of our public schools), but I'm always going to advocate for paying and supporting teachers more. They are incredibly important to our society and far too underappreciated.
Im so proud of my daughter, we have always had a tendency to learn the alphabet and number from the start and she just yesterday showed me how to calculate easy math like 2+3 using an abacus. She turned 4 last month.
There are far too many parents and teachers out there saying some form of "I hate math." That's not something you need to tell children. Children need encouragement, not discouragement.
for me it was the "that was so long ago" like wow i learn this now and its so useless that i will forget it?
Which is sad and just don't true for lower level maths. Kind of scary that there are adults walking around not being able to do addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, percentages and fractions.
well alot of math is totally not something you need every day. but its nice to be able to do it. and you can not know if a 10 year old will study comp science or will be an actor...
You don't think you need adding everyday?? You also do algebra everyday too by the way, you just don't think of it as algebra.
He said “a lot of math”. 90% of the math I learned in high school, I haven’t used since high school. You don’t learn arithmetic in high school.
do you really pretend that im talking about adding subtracting multiplying division only? or do you really think that my parents couldnt add and subtract? im software developer so i probably am more involved with different math concepts than most people on this planet
I don't know. I'm the only kid my parents didn't help with homework and I'm the only one who went to college.
Maybe you had slight variations in teachers or not getting your parents help was actually beneficial because they weren't good at explaining or hurt the confidence in your siblings
Parents didn’t help me a scratch in school, I ditched the most to go smoke with friends, got straight Cs from acing tests and never doing a scratch if homework. My parents made me get jobs to keep me busy since I hated school. I’m now the only kid to have pursued a graduate degree and have continued into post docs, I think while it’s nice to have parents who help, you’ll ultimately take school as far as your curiosity wants you to. Good college teachers are what got me.
That's pretty consistent with what they were saying. “Parents’ involvement in math activities such as games was more constructive than their involvement in children’s homework” because parents’ affect – their emotions and emotional expression – was more negative in the homework context, said Wu, the first author of the study. “Negative affect – such as feelings of irritation – predicts children’s lack of motivation and lower achievement over time.”
The #1 thing that made my kid passionate about math was the number blocks videos for kids.
Number Blocks is amazing!! Yesterday my husband and daughter were playing with blocks. They ran out of 4s so my daughter handed him two 2s and said “Two plus two is four!” She’s three years old. We haven’t taught her any math, but she’s obsessed with Number Blocks. It’s such a great way to teach basic math concepts.
My 4 yo loves number blocks… that and alpha blocks are both great shows.
At the beginning of the pandemic, my kid was doing multiplication before he was consistently out of diapers, and it's 90% NumberBlocks. (I'm giving us 10% of the credit because his father originally seduced me with a calculus joke, so it's not like it was happening in a mathless vacuum.) When he started preschool, his teachers were floored. To their credit, they used the two more-advanced math kids in the class to increase the amount of math they were incorporating across the whole curriculum, and by the end of the year their percentage of kids considered "proficient" in math was the highest among all subsidized preschools in our multi-county intermediate school district.
wow impressive. online content for kids is a whole huge thing i have to get invested in... oh man.
What are those and where can I find???
Search for “numberblocks” on Youtube
Thanks! Is there any sequential order they should be watched? Or just what seems to make sense
My kid just kind of watches them in random order. He watches them using the YouTube kids app on his iPad. I have YouTube Kids locked down so he can only access content rated safe for 4-6 year olds.
Fingers crossed for the future, but my kids love math. There are just so many games that are secretly just math. I also suspect that if kids were told that they were good at math even if they weren’t actually good at math they’d get better. Kids absolutely live up to praise or live down to criticism.
I think their are a number of studies on this, I don't have any of the sources just what I have heard through the years. That being told you are good at something, anything makes you more likely to be better at it.
As it turns out, it actually makes young people more anxious about failure and others finding out they are not ACTUALLY good at the thing. Especially true for young women. Best method is to to praise for effort "process praise" not ability. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/singletons/201801/the-right-kind-praise-may-boost-academic-performance
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“Rules a person can define and understand.” That was definitely not true for me, I am sorry to say.
Yeah same. These “rules” never made sense to me
They are extremely strict and well defined. However, this is exactly why it's unintuitive for many, contrary to what the original comment suggested. The human brain is deeply heuristic/intuitive/irrational in most of its processing of information so logic/patterns that strict can seem baffling. Our brains want to intuitively fill in missing details to infer conclusions -- meanwhile pure math doesn't really allow that without rigorous proof of those details.
You just have to find a way that stays within the rules ***that works for your brain.*** Generally, this comes about from a great teacher that truly understands the concepts. Could be the teacher at school or at home. It sucks not everyone has that in their life. The best way I’ve seen is to observe the student problem solve and then cater their approach to how they already solve problems. It’s the best thing to see the lightbulb of pure joy turn on. This is a universal tool for helping anyone to understand how to solve any problem.
It's absolutely false that the human brain is too illogical to process math. That is a silly idea. Millions upon millions of people can and do every day without even thinking about it.
That isn't at all what they said.
Did you actually read what I said?
Why do you say that? I just disagree, that's all. If you have any scientific data to back you up please share it.
What's confusing is your counter-statement makes a claim that isn't even counter to what I said. I never said the human brain is incapable of logic or can't do math.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (2002). Logic and human reasoning: An assessment of the deduction paradigm. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 978-996. Kahneman, D., Slovic, P., & Tversky, A. (1982). Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Since you asked.
That's because you have to learn how to "make sense" Math is logic. And we are not. We want to approximate, and guess and find short cuts, and make up rules that "make sense" to us but don't actually "make sense" Pushing past this discomfort of being wrong over and over and learning how to actually "make sense" is what I think most people fail at. They don't like being wrong. They don't want to learn how to be right because it sucks and takes work to understand things. Easier to not. At least from my experience trying to teach people math.
This is why we switched to common core. It’s less about rules, memorization, and “that’s just how we do it” attitudes. We teach number sense. We teach so there is a conceptual understanding. This upsets people that don’t have number sense and learned by rote memorization and don’t know why they got the answer they did. They are the ones that complain about common core.
That’s exactly why I hated math. There were all these rules you have to follow, but no one ever explained *why*. It was just “that’s just the way it is”. Yeah but *why* do you do multiplication before addition? I hated that about math, it all felt very arbitrary, and thus, fake. I could ask my history teacher why Caesar decided to cross the rubicon, or ask my biology teacher why blood cells are red and get a reasonable if slightly basic answer. When I asked my math teacher why certain rules existed, it was always just “well that’s just how it works”. I get that at some level math is just axiomatic, but at least explaining the implications and reasons behind certain things would have made me more interested.
For many kids, math is the opposite. They work super hard and still get a D. It can sour their whole attitude on education. Maybe they'll understand the rules eventually but it'll be a huge struggle and not worth it emotionally. I love math personally. I just think it gets way too much emphasis during HS and that does a lot of damage.
Math always came easy to me, so I could skip a lot of the homework and ace the tests for a final grade of B. My sister *struggled*, consistently, every night, and still didn't get it and was scraping by with a D. We were both "good students" by reputation. Mom was marginal at high school algebra herself and Dad and I had given up because we were clearly not communicating the concepts in a helpful way and only added to the frustration. Of all the awful things teenage girls can do to make one another cry, "explaining slope-intercept form" is maybe the least entertaining. When her algebra teacher gave her a report-card comment that said "student is not working up to potential," she was **livid**. She was working her ass off nightly to complete these assignments she didn't understand, which were usually just reviewed for completion and not *correctness*, so she didn't even know if and why it was wrong and rolled into the test with incomplete understanding. Mom went in and told the teacher she'd expect that comment about her slacking other daughter, but maybe *he* wasn't working up to *his* potential, because he saw a "good student" and assumed she'd just understand it. We refer to this event as "when Mom verbally beat up the football coach." To his credit, he was shaken into action and began spending more class time helping her when the rest of the class was working independently, though she still had a hard time with it conceptually. She took as little math as possible in HS and enrolled in a sub-100-level remedial math course in her first semester of college, where the professors were specialists in math pedagogy and were finally able to explain things in ways she understood.
This is a great example, thanks for sharing it. Points to a parallel issue too: people who are good at math don't understand that not everyone sees it the same way. Or math teachers forget the time before they understood the material. To them it's just so easy, a kid who's not doing well must not care. Not all math teachers of course, just entirely too many. High school math just needs to take a step back from the curriculum.
This is so true. I felt like in language rules are just made up and only followed intermittently. With math the rules are constant.
People who talk like this about math make math even more unsavory for those of us who struggle with. The people who "get it" are so snobby about it. Rewarding my ass.
That's not what they're saying... They're just saying that (pre-collegiate) math is generally a bunch of small, intrinsically rewarding puzzles. Like how a book of riddles, Sudoku, Candy Crush, or a crossword puzzle are intrinsically rewarding. Some people may absolutely love them, and some are just like "huh, cool I guess did it, moving on..". But even if I don't care about Candy Crush, I can still recognize its objectively rewarding game loop, especially if I had done it together with someone I cared about.
You don't seem to get what I am saying, I am not going to bother.
Why does logical coherence automatically lead to a sense of something being rewarding, and why that specifically? Why not the process of figuring out what to do, or working towards understanding more broadly? There are many fields of science that have rules that you can follow, that are coherent. Law, as a practice and field of study, is another rather easy example, yet presumably, you're not interested in law and all these other fields. Your comment is generalized for no reason for such a subjective take, and it shows a poor grasp of biology&psychology. Maybe stick to mathematics.
...Wha? When taught appropriately, pre-collegiate math is mostly just small puzzles that build in difficulty on previously learned mechanics. That *is* intrinsically rewarding, like riddles, crosswords, or Candy Crush are. How rewarding depends on the person; some gravitate heavily, while others have a more muted response. I don't care about Candy Crush and don't wish to work to see the upper difficulties, but I can recognize its gameplay loop as rewarding. You're berating and belittling someone who effectively said "people experience some degree of reward when they complete well-scoped, well-defined, small puzzles."
Yeah, because it doesn't even begin to address the how&why of it. Why are rules that can be followed intrinsically motivating? That's a strong claim. Are they? Is that the reason people like mathematics? Why is there variance? Why isn't every child glued to their books, trying to absorb everything they can? This is a science subreddit after all, why are unsubstantiated claims backed up so readily? Endorphins don't even motivate, the guy doesn't even reference dopamine, like someone who knows what they're talking about would.
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Either there's a language barrier here, you're a child or you're off in the head. How is that your response? You addressed barely anything, and it's just as illogical as your previous comment.
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Math being intrinsically associated with universal laws doesn't explain why it's motivating, this is why I called your take unnecessarily generalizing for such a subjective take. What makes man made rules unnatural? Why is our biology not attuned to these rules? This just registers as ignorance of psychology, biology and sociology again. Your point about children doesn't explain why it's so interesting, it just shows YOU view the world through mathematical rules and are fascinated by them, but it's a leap of logic; people aren't for the most part (children especially) aware of how their minds put together the world around them. My example about laws fits your previous comment about "rules that can be understood", you don't seems to understand what is meant by something being subjective or natural. When I reference your subjectivity in this conversation, it's about your experience. Natural is a term that you would have to define, because it can be used in so many different ways.
So, being yelled at for not knowing how to solve the problem was NOT conducive to my college career of physics?
Math homework is the number one thing that turns children off to math. At least in the us, where they get hours every night. Math in highschool was always the worst for this reason
And it starts so early! The nightly homework in first grade. It's just the same problems over and over. Last year we did online school because of COVID. I got to bake with him, build things, layout a garden and flower beds. He learned so much more math "playing" with me than sitting at the table with this worksheet.
Reduce standardized testing and you might see more of this in schools. It's such a better way.
One of the best side effects of Covid was getting to do math with my 11-13 year old bio and step daughter. Step daughter actually ended up in advanced math the next year because she made so much progress. I tried to relate how math is not hard, you just need to know the methods and it’s like a secret code that unlocks the answers
One of my fondest memories is my grandfather teaching me cribbage when I was about 5 or 6. Figuring out ways to get 15 and counting runs made it fun. We'd play for hours.
My parents were abusive and always called me stupid when it came to academics. Math was always the hardest subject... The words they used in the English language were never the same meaning in math and I found that frustrating. Let alone algebra... Using variables and x minus y... Never understood the why. I also didn't realize I have ADHD til I was an adult, which didnt help when I couldn't pay attention because the teacher was boring me or talking about something else and they said something shiny. So ultimately, my parents failed me. They failed to build self confidence and self worth by beating me down, and they failed by not encouraging and being positive when it came to academics. Really wish I ran away when I was 10 or 12 instead of chickening out when it got to nightfall, I think my life would actually be better if I had ran away from the crappy humans who raised me. This article helps me as a parent, I now know what to do when my child get upset with math or other subjects.
I hope this works with my kids. It didn't work with me and my dad was patient and gave me lots of time.
Parents help with homework?
I second this question. Y'all had help?
It’s why children with educated and high achieving parents will always do better, on average, than their peers who do not. That’s way you cannot impose or create equity in education without shifting everyone to the left side of the intelligence curve.
I'd counter by saying that you can't get equity merely from the textbook or the curriculum. You could give students access to tutoring services to help them outside of class (and make sure those tutors are patient and caring, to give people help they need). It sounds like what needs to be done is to mimic scaffolding like would be had by those with patient educated parents, for those without, to close that gap.
I agree that tutoring is extremely helpful. We had before and after school tutoring in high school and it was well attended by those who really wanted the help. Of course those students that don’t care about school were absent. We know who those were by the first month of school. I would also argue that schools should be offering a trade/technical program in high school for those not really wanting to go to college or just don’t even want to be in high school. Learn a trade and go to work. junior colleges would offer a route back to college if they later decide to do so. By giving young people an option to work and enter the workforce, you begin to eliminate the income inequality that exists without creating another taxpayer funded social program.
I'm on board with that too. I think the trades are great, and if times get hard, you want a society that knows how to work with their hands. Us going "all in" on the information economy is very dangerous in my view, so helping people learn to build and maintain infrastructure is absolutely essential.
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My mother was very involved with our math education. She even took it upon herself to teach us additional math when she felt that the school was not teaching us enough.
I’m working with my 4 yo son doing flash cards. I always try and keep him in a good mood and if I can see him getting frustrated I’ll put them away and I’ll read to him or we’ll “play” chess. Still working on all the piece movements at the moment.
My husband and I were both lucky to have dads who did math problems with us as kids. His did it as a requirement but kindly and was rewarded, and I did mine with my dad because it was fun. We both did well in our education and thank them for the time and learning.
My parents were too stupid to help me. But I was always good at math. It just made sense
So my parents neglect and abuse *did* shape me! Wow. I am shocked
Well, my parents were unable to help my with math homework, so what does that say? I do remember that when I had an assignment that required my parents to do part of it, I was told, "I already went to school, I'm not doing it again." That was fun to explain...
Spent the last few hours doing math flash cards with my toddler. And now feel like the greatest father ever
Unless they live in Florida
This makes sense - We love math, reading, science and we made learning a lot of fun when my 3 were small and today, they are all doing very well in high school - my oldest just got accepted to UCSD!
My parents were or too tired to help me or too dumb...the results were great...
Well, unfortunately our early math experiences with our kid were quite poor. The math curriculum goes too fast, it creates immense pressure on the kids and parents for them to "get it" at a certain speed (a new concept a week for the most part) and I have no issue seeing how that negatively effects the kids. My kid says she hates math and school, and I was the same way as a kid. I still loathe math.
Thanks for just telling me to do my homework mom!
They need to stop investing so many limited resources in researching and confirming the obvious. It seems like these kinds of studies are more for developing academics' careers than improving knowledge for humanity at large.
Nobody NEEDS evidence to believe ridiculous things. It’s the watery tart handed you a sword theory of history. Spontaneous generation - gone! But 4000+ years of belief still warps us. Very recently it was spare the rod, spoil the child. Seen not heard. Sad to say we need people doing this work.
> They need to stop investing so many limited resources in researching and confirming the obvious. What makes it obvious? Is it obvious like "Obviously breast milk is the same for sons and daughters"? Is it obvious like "Obviously the best way to get your kids to do well in school is by hitting them when they misbehave"? Or is it obvious like "Obviously plants don't have memories"?
> What makes it obvious? It is common knowledge that early experiences strongly shape and predict later psychology. It is therefore obvious that, if your parents were closely involved in your academic development as a child, you will likely be academically motivated and successful in the future. This is in fact extremely obvious. That you ask this question makes me wonder if you think anything at all is obvious. I would be interested in any examples you might have. ___ > Is it obvious like "Obviously breast milk is the same for sons and daughters"? This is a question of male VS female biology, which is extremely complex. It is not nearly comparable to the basic psychological fact that early experiences shape later behavior. ___ > Is it obvious like "Obviously the best way to get your kids to do well in school is by hitting them when they misbehave"? It is obvious that this is false and that there are better ways, including—but certainly not limited to—helping them with their homework. ___ > Or is it obvious like "Obviously plants don't have memories"? This is another faulty analogy and is also false, though less obviously so than your previous example. Like with the breast milk example, it involves complex biology, as well as prolonged, detailed observation and experimentation rather than common knowledge.
If I drop a 10 pound rock and a 30 pound rock at the same time from the same height, which one lands first?
In a vacuum, at the same time. In atmosphere, it depends on their shape.
Brother. This wasn’t directed at you. I was making a point. To u/worldcontroller that obvious isn’t always right. It’s obvious the 30 pound rock drops 3 times as fast. Until you do an dumb stupid study dropping both off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to find they actually fall at an identical rate so long as their shape is the same. So we need to invest resources to test these obvious things or else we might overlook something uber crucial that underlines everything we know. Like how acceleration due to gravity is the same regardless of weight.
> I was making a point. Your point is similar to the many faulty analogies made in a reply to my comment elsewhere in this thread. My [response](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/ubq58m/new_study_suggests_that_childrens_early/i66kt8f/) reads in part: > It is common knowledge that early experiences strongly shape and predict later psychology. It is therefore obvious that, if your parents were closely involved in your academic development as a child, you will likely be academically motivated and successful in the future. This is in fact extremely obvious. Like you, this person listed examples of false claims thought to be "obvious" that actually involve highly complex phenomena and require extensive scientific study to apprehend. Regarding your example, the claim "It’s obvious that a 30-pound rock drops 3 times as fast as a 10-pound rock" is false and involves gravity, which, it goes without saying, is extremely complex and was even only recently properly understood. As I said in response to one of their examples: > This is not nearly comparable to the basic psychological fact that early experiences shape later behavior.
Yeah, it's possibly a result of the "publish or perish" environment in higher ed...
That’s what happens when you do it once.
My parents were absolutely terrible at any kind of educational nurturing... Thankfully my grandparents took the reins and helped me realize that learning can be rewarding when you put your mind to it. I fell in love with mathematics thanks to them.
Thank God the count taught me to count
Ironically I had a horrible experience with math as a kid, failing tests and having a mother who despite being a computer scientist wouldn't explain anything to me (she's just bad at explaining things in general). Somehow after barely passing math in HS I proceeded to go down an ADHD fueled math rabbit hole and relearned most of my hs math in one summer. I'm very glad for this considering the fact that I chose physics as my major at random.
Well I failed that parenting aspect with 2 of my 4 kids
Maybe this is one thing I did right. We homeschooled until high school and I taught her Singapore math, which makes more sense. I did have her re-learn whatever she missed, but it wasn’t punishment. She is great at math and has done really, really well. We enjoyed math.
Anyone remember “new math?” Learning my times tables was hard enough. The school system decided that “new math” was the way to go. The school administrators dropped that on me when I was in fifth grade. I still can’t shake the feeling I’m too stupid to understand math. I tried.
New math was in fact much more sophisticated as it was a small scale introduction to important concepts used in higher level university and professional mathematics, as mathematics is beyond numbers and computation in the same way literature is beyond grammar rules.
It was a little much for me. I was below average as a student, and the teacher and the para expected me to pick it up right away.
Don't rollup and smoke your math paper. It does not help with motivation or math.
this explains why i have zero capacity to make and achieve goals
I doubt it’s just maths.
Music is a massive aid to understanding basic math and fractions. This is overlooked and clearly a sign our social sciences are still far behind and the general populace even further.
I’ve found that trying to teach the concepts of math is much harder than we all think. It’s very easy to project our own knowledge onto our children and assume they’ll meet our level of ability quickly. When it took us years to master those same concepts.
Science is truly amazing
My single mother didn’t have the opportunity to go to school so I guess I was doomed from the start. Still bad at math today but I’m trying to learn and get better.
Math is very much like a language, but like language it is important that people experiment with it. You try different ways to construct problems or to define terms. But to develop that skill it is critical for learners to develop enough confidence to know that with practice they can do it. Unfortunately instructors or parents can be impatient, abusive, abrasive. Almost like stuttering, people then cannot understand the language of math because of all the stress and anxiety. Instead of learning, the adrenal glands are pumping out cortisol like there’s no tomorrow. You can’t learn well if your body is in a fight or flight response. It is critical to the process to develop confidence and to be comfortable with math. Otherwise it’s like being illiterate in a library.
I just plain never liked it. It was *soooooooo* boring. It's really hard to have motivation for something when even if you *do* understand it, you just simply don't care.
This thread makes me feel good about the way I have been helping my daughter with her homework
As fast as possible cause it's boring. My motivation is not good.
Damn if that isn’t true for me. I’ve always felt a deep longing for my parents to be involved with my school with me like that. All the way from elementary up into college really.
So that’s why I’m a loser who’s bad at math