Math Mysteries

Like many homeschoolers, I started the journey envisioning me as the teacher, teaching the things and ways actual school teachers taught to my students, or well behaved children, who would learn everything I "taught" as eagerly as they listened to stories. After all, I was their mother, so I could love them and teach them at the same time, and I knew what eager learning looked like for each of them. School would be school, but a simple extension of our lives and relationships.

As it turned out, my son was not all that eager to sing the ABC song while I pointed to the alphabet I had so faithfully posted in our "school room." When, one day his younger cousin sang the Leap Frog Letter Factory song and knew all the letters AND their sounds - a feat my faithful drilling with my boy had not accomplished - I decided short cuts were acceptable. We ditched my school methods, bought Letter Factory, and after a few times of watching, without quizzing or prodding, my son knew his letters and their sounds too.

Check. Our kindergarten instruction was coming right along. Now for math.

Again, I dutifully purchased flash cards with the numbers AND illustration of how many the numbers were. I found flash cards I thought might seem exciting to him - ones with Super Heroes and Sesame Street characters on them. But he wasn't engaged. He was wiggly. He didn't want to sit in our school room and do flash cards with his mom. To my shame, this annoyed me and I probably communicated that annoyance. "C'mon!" I'm sure I said to him, "We are only working on 5 numbers. This was the same as it was the last time we went through it. Can't you remember 5 numbers?"

Well, it didn't seem that he could, and I noticed that I wasn't acting towards him like the loving mother I wanted to be. So I gave myself permission to wait a bit, and told myself we'd try again later.

We did. He had made some progress without instruction from me. Somewhere he picked up which numbers were which, so we advanced to addition. And hit a wall, again. Why could he not remember that 2 + 2 = 4. Every time. Without counting. It just was what it was. And WAS it so hard to remember? It seemed to be.

By this time, and as a blessing to my ego, he was reading a bit ahead of grade level, so again, I told myself math could wait. I read somewhere kids struggled with abstraction 'til they were about 8 years old. I told myself maybe 2 + 2 was an abstraction (despite my attempts to teach it first in the real world) and we'd try again later.

When he was 8 (or 9) we got around to math again. At that time, a friend had told me about Khan Academy, so I pulled it up and sat him down in front of the computer for some instruction on addition. He was pretty excited about having work to do on the computer. He liked the smiley faces he got when he got an answer right. He seemed happy enough that I thought I'd just leave him to his work. He learned how to pull up Khan on his own and did a bit of "math" everyday. When I checked back in with him, he'd moved from addition, through subtraction, and onto addition and subtraction of bigger numbers. This was a few days, maybe a few weeks later.

Whoa! We'd begun math at kindergarten level. For some reason I assumed it would take him the equivalent of one year to master what the kindergarteners learn. Not only had he learned it in less than a month, but he'd learned it almost entirely on his own AND was enjoying his newly acquired skill.

This experience taught me a few things. First, what and how they teach in schools is not always the best or most important approach for each child. It taught me that much of what kids learn in school when they are young, they might learn OUT of school if given the time and space and freedom. And I learned that so much of the rote repetition in math, but also in English, can be skipped if kids can start later and learn what interests them or when they find a use for it.

Recently, a friend shared the following link about these phenomena in math studies. I want to share it on my blog because it's what I've come to believe from my own experience. I don't plan to do a two month cram session of math (what the article suggests is all it can take) in the future and not touch it 'til my kids beg. In part because my children, in fact, already NEED math in their lives, and beginning now, I can help them master the tools they'd like to use. And partly because I, myself, can never focus on any one thing much past 3 hours, so any plan that requires 6 hours of focus a day on one things sounds like too much... for ME. So we do math, now. For fun. For practice.

But if you or yours are struggling with math, NOT feeling like it IS fun or enjoying the practice, consider waiting. Waiting might not only bless your relationship with your child, but it also may bless his or her relationship with math!