Rules and tools

I was helping an 8 year-old with a math problem the other day.  It looked like this: She pointed to Luke’s pencil and said “Well, it’s not this one because you aren’t supposed to start in the middle of the ruler.” She then proceeded to try to convince herself in various ways that one of [...]

Room to grow

One summer I worked with a 10 year-old who’d been attending a small private school where her mother worked and was headed for public middle school in the fall.  Her parents were concerned that she wasn’t prepared. This 10 year-old has an older sister, so she had an idea of what would be expected of [...]

Will it get in the way?

I have an acquaintance who’s a published author but never quite got the hang of spelling.  And a friend who’s a research scientist with a PhD who has never been able to add or subtract very well. Spelling and quick mental computation can be helpful, without a doubt.  But even for their highest-order relatives (like [...]

Refusing to fake it

Yesterday a 10 year-old said this to me about her experience with math: “It’s like I’ve been doing it, but I haven’t been learning it. People keep saying ‘well if you’re doing it you must be learning it,’ but I don’t think I am.” What she meant by doing it was that she was performing [...]

Navigating that pre-mathless world…

My last post prompted this question from a reader: …I am half way through the Mathematician’s Lament and am totally, utterly passionately sold. But…now what? I’m not a mathematician and fall into the “duh” populace of math paralysis. Who has a curriculum, a study guide, activities prepared to those of us who want to give [...]

Mathless world

I had a little deck of fraction cards sitting on the table when one of my young writing friends was visiting last week. “What are those?” he asked. “Fraction cards for a math game,” I said.  ”Do you like math?” He shrugged.  ”I don’t know. I don’t really get it.” What he meant, actually, was [...]

Assortment

The backlog of things to post/comment on is looming large, so here are a bunch of posts in one with not much comment.  Otherwise, stuff gets away from me… From McSweeney’s, a piece about how kids are reading more than before.  Yes, MORE! I’ve been meaning to read Blake Boles’ College Without High School, but [...]

Word art

One of my favorite publishers of math materials (Key Press) has been clearing out their warehouse and in so doing reminded me of Scott Kim’s book Inversions. They’ve apparently run out of their copies, but you can get it from amazon.  Scott’s work is very cool; the inversions are word designs that flip around a [...]

Base ten ziggurat

While I’m not as crazy about base ten blocks as I am about fraction tiles, they’re a great tool for de-mystifying ones and tens and hundreds.  And if you play your blocks right, you can also use them for illustrating tenths, hundredths, and thousandths (the flat that looks like a hundred gets used as a [...]

What if resistance is not as it seems?

What if, when confronted with kids’ resistance to things we want them to learn, we stopped asking questions like these: Why does she have to be so oppositional?  Why doesn’t he just do it and get it over with?  Why hasn’t she learned the value of education we’ve tried to instill?  Why is he so [...]