The first step is to focus on parents’ attitudes toward math, because a parent who brings negativity to the subject will color a child’s perception. I know from first-hand experience what it’s like to leave school with the feeling that I wasn’t good at math. It wasn’t until much later that I discovered that math could be interesting for its own sake, not to mention a useful tool in life!

So we encourage parents to ask themselves: What is my attitude toward mathematics? Do I find it interesting? Do I encourage early math learning in the same way that I support early reading? A parent would never say, “I’m not good at reading” because it sends such a negative message. Your feelings—positive or negative—can influence your child’s.

What can parents do to encourage a positive attitude towards math?
Parents can model how a learner behaves. A learner asks questions, is able to revise his thinking, and recognizes that some problems may have more than one answer and may be solved in more than one way.

You can also look for math opportunities in everyday family activities that can make math interesting and challenging for kids. For example, asking “How tall is that building?” presents an interesting problem because it is too tall to measure. But there are ways of reasoning about the height of the building that can be explored. In this situation, helping your child think about what she already knows and how she might use this, develops resourcefulness. Don’t hesitate to share your own ways of thinking about the problem: “You know, I’m six feet tall. How does that information help us think about the height of the building?” You may not get an answer immediately, but you’ve found a way to provoke reasoning!

You can turn this conversation into a game, combining recall of basic facts (What’s 2×6 feet?) with the reasoning ability (How tall is 1 story? And how many stories are there in the building?) to consider different ways to solve the problem. As your child explores problem solving with you, knowing that you’re listening to him, that his ideas are important, and that you’re willing to explore his ideas, you will help him gain confidence and learn to enjoy math.

courtesy of Barnes & Noble

In my other life, I am a graduate student which means that I am constantly searching and reading research and books regarding mathematics education. In the midst of one of these recent searches, I ran across a book by Jo Boaler (a former professor of mathematics education at Stanford University) that is scheduled for release on June 30, 2009–What’s Math Got to Do With It?: How Parents and Teachers Can Help Children Learn to Love Their Least Favorite Subject. While it appears that this book may be the paperback version of Boaler’s book that was released in August 2008 (What’s Math Got to Do With It?: Helping Children Learn to Love Their Most Hated Subject–and Why It’s Important for America), the sub-title is different and that caught my attention. It’s not often that a book is intended for both teachers AND parents (which may be the reason for the change); more often, it’s either-or. Stay tuned for a review later this summer! But in the mean time it may be just the book that is needed to encourage parents and teachers to enter a dialogue about the mathematical learning opportunities for students.

Show Your Child that Learning Math can be Fun

• Answer a question with a question. Child: “What am I supposed to do here?” Parent: “What do you think you should do here?” or “Is there anything here that will give you help?” When your child is able to answer a question on her own, let her know. “Wow! I’m impressed. Did you know you already knew the answer?” (Note: In DreamBox, we provide different levels of instructions in most games. Click Help once to receive a quick recap of the instructions. Click Help again and you’ll receive more detailed, explicit directions. Teach your child about this feature.)
• Latency – wait for your child to respond. Often we (parents and teachers) start answering our own questions before a child has had an adequate amount of think time. Give your child the think time she needs. If you don’t, your child learns that by waiting a little while, you’ll answer the question and provide more help, whether she needs it or not. When teaching, I taught myself to wait for over a minute for some responses. This feels like an incredible amount of time, but it’s the amount of time that some kids need to consider a problem and respond to it.
• Don’t hover. Are you a “helicopter” parent? Do you swoop in and rescue your child at the first sign of a struggle? If this sounds like you, put some distance between your child and her struggles. I’d also suggest reading one of the books in the Love & Logic series.
• Be present, but not attentive. Some kids are comforted just knowing a helping hand is available. Sit nearby with a book. Eventually walk away for 2 minutes, then 5. Whenever I introduce a new computer game to my daughter, I’m always nearby for the initial experience. As she gets familiar with the game, I decrease my attention and proximity to her.
• Don’t be present. Some kids are willing to experiment more and make mistakes when a parent or sibling isn’t around. Basically, they don’t want to make mistakes in front of anyone. Let them. Provide earphones so you don’t hear every wrong answer.
• Model behavior by sharing your struggles. Let your child know that you have to solve hard problems too. Talk about this. Let her know how good it feels when you’ve finally completed a difficult task through hard work and perseverance. Also, let her know when you almost gave up but didn’t.
• Limit the time spent on one activity. Some kids have a hard time self-regulating how much is too much. They start to break down when an activity has lasted too hard. Stop the activity and refocus your child’s attention.
• Think out loud. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t help your child. Of course you should. Just make sure you’re giving the right kind of help. Try to verbally express what you’re thinking as you help your child. Share even the smallest details. Two fabulous books are this are Comprehending Math: Adapting Reading Strategies to Teach Mathematics, K-6 by Arthur Hyde and Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis.

Have you figured out that this isn’t just a problem in math? It’s a problem that must be addressed in every subject, including social time. Use these same strategies to help your child solve problems with a playmate, when reading a new book or putting together a new Lego set.

My son struggled mightily to memorize the basic single digit addition facts and later the multiplication table. And yet, now as a 10th grader he has no problem with Algebra II. I still am not sure he ever really memorized the multiplication table, but instead it seems he quickly recalculates each time. When he was younger, I wish I would have had more faith that there were many, many different paths to success, and that he would find his.

Identifying a Child’s Path to Math Success

One of the things that attracted me to DreamBox and got me involved, was DreamBox’s core belief in the idea that every child is different, and every child will find a different path to success.For more on this, look at Why is DreamBox better? Also, in the FAQ there are a couple useful questions and answers about what to do when your child hits a speed bump with DreamBox.  See: Should I help my child with a problem?

And apples and oranges? I wish I could give credit to where I read this, but it is an image that has stuck with me since before I became a parent: Being a parent is like being a gardener. You are given a seed and not told what type of seed it is – maybe it is an apple seed, maybe an orange seed, maybe something else. You have no control over what it is. Your only job is to make sure it grows up healthy, happy, and strong.

I’ve written in this blog before about my own math education – although my father was an engineer I didn’t do well in math in school, and there have been times I’ve struggled to help my son with math homework because I had to first figure out the way it was being taught. It took me longer to see that math is problem solving, and to believe that I could be good at it.

So I wanted to pass along a link to a site, published by a math teacher named Mark Karadimos, called MathGuide—and in particular the page on “Why Must I Learn Math?” For parents who bring the same kind of baggage to the subject that I do, this is a very educational read. Because today, it’s not just the traditional math and science careers that require mathematics—not just astronauts and scientists and engineers—every profession needs math.

Kids Need to Build Math Skills for All Professions

I’m more aware of this than ever because I’m working on a short documentary-style video for DreamBox where we interviewed more than 50 children, asking them what they want to be when they grow up. As part of this project I’ve been researching how an amazing range of careers—from beauticians to farmers to paleontologists, rock stars, and zoologists—all need math in their jobs!

And if you still have any doubt about why it’s important to overcome our own negative math education experiences, read the National Math Panel report to learn more about the importance of math in terms of access to college, career choices, and earning potential! You’ll find it, along with other parent resources, at the U.S. Dept. of Education site.

When I was in 9th grade I developed a kind of phobia about math – I had one of those algebra teacher experiences that just took the wind out of my sails. To put it nicely, she made learning not fun. It was so bad I’d sit in the back of the classroom trying to hide, trying to avoid getting called on, with a growing pit in my stomach. As my stress level went up my grades went down. Except for geometry which I enjoyed, I avoided any non-required math classes after that. And for years I told myself I hated math and I wasn’t good at it. As an adult I was surprised to discover that math can be pretty cool.

Actually, I’m not alone – the National Mathematics Advisory Panel report (pdf format) said the U.S. needs to change its attitudes about math!

Recognizing and Reducing Math Anxiety in Kids

Fortunately, math anxiety can be overcome and you can set yourself (or your child) up to succeed in mathematics by having positive learning experiences. As a parent who had to struggle to build a positive math attitude, I thought some of you might find these useful.

Math Power, a cool site authored by Ellen Freedman, has a bunch of useful pages:

• The Student’s Math Anxiety Bill of Rights
• A math anxiety self test to gauge your experience math anxiety.
• Ten ways to reduce math anxiety
• Her site also includes some study skills tips and a few fun math games – check out the Rubik’s cube!

Math.com has some tips for recognizing and dealing with math anxiety.

You can also read more about math anxiety in our upcoming November parent newsletter and you’ll find links to more resources and research there. (And if you’d like you can also sign up to receive our monthly parent newsletter.)

As early as late elementary school or middle school, kids who used to love math all of a sudden realize that it’s not “cool”, and/or that “math is really hard and I’m not good at it so I won’t try very hard”. Talk about pre-ordaining failure!

The article reports on a new study published in an academic journal last week that took a new approach to the question of whether boys are genetically more likely to be gifted in math than girls. Are genetics the reason that there are so few women mathematicians among university faculty or the top researchers? This study suggests not, but rather it is our education system and culture. There are many more kids with the POTENTIAL to be ‘gifted’ in math than kids who are actually being found, nurtured, and coached as very gifted in math, and this is a societal problem.

The Culture of Fostering Math Learning Skills

The US has a culture that tends to be anti-math, and in particular, associates being good at math with being nerdy. So in the US we’ve identified very few girls who we deem ‘talented in math’, even though many girls have the potential. And a disproportionate number of the identified highly gifted math students in the US are Asians or immigrants from a country that values math. Since some other countries – such as Bulgaria and Romania – have many more women who are very gifted in math (even though these countries are so much smaller than the US) , it is clearly a result of better math education plus a culture that expects and values it.

So, as parents and educators, let’s all do our part to change this. Our kids are picking up our societal bias against math. When an adult says “Can someone else please figure out the tip for this restaurant bill? I’m not good at math!” or “I always struggled at math, so I’m not surprised my child isn’t doing well”, you can be sure that some little ears are listening!

A woman enters the classroom, greets us with a simple “Buongiorno”, and writes her name on the blackboard. She looks unhappy and unfriendly. She announces that she is the math teacher, and that she is going to start immediately by assessing where we are at in our math skills. Her concept of “assessing” is giving us a nasty inquisitive look and stating: “You are assumed to know additions and subtractions and multiplications. If you don’t know, it is a problem because we won’t review these. Now, let’s see: who can’t do division?”

Panic! Everybody is paralyzed in fear. The excitement sinks in every heart. All of a sudden I could swear that looking out the window the sky appears cloudy and gray. Nobody moves. Why would anybody in their right mind denounce themselves as ignorant to this woman on their first day of school? The woman continues “OK, so everybody appears to know how to do division. Very good.” She smiles sarcastically and stares at the list of names on the desk. She lifts up her head and points her finger toward a student in the middle row. “You, in the red shirt. Yes, you! What is your name?” A boy in his new red shiny shirt announces his name with a trembling voice. You can almost hear his thoughts “Darn! I knew this shirt was too bright!” The teacher points at the blackboard and says, “Come here at the board please, and write this division: 132 divided by 15, let’s see how you do.” The rest is a blur. I wasn’t the kid in a red shirt, and I could have probably done that division, but that didn’t matter at all. The only thing that was clear was that math was bad news.

What a great way to teach kids to hate math. Math all of a sudden became cold, dry, and unforgiving. Something to fear; something to be afraid of!

Math Learning Doesn’t Have to Be Scary

That was one of the worst math teachers I ever had. Not because she didn’t know math – she had a degree in it – but because she couldn’t teach it. She just terrorized us with her ways, making us feel like we were always supposed to know something that we didn’t know. I hated math during middle school and I didn’t do too well at it. Only a few kids did. At that time, I would have never believed that a few years later, in high school, I would have passed my math graduation exam with flying colors, achieving the highest possible score in the state exams and that I would have been in love with math so much that I chose a major in Computer Science.

The only difference between middle school and high school was the teacher I had. In high school I found a fantastic teacher. He taught us to see math as a set of tools – “a collection of screwdrivers” as he used to call it – that helps us solve real, practical and material problems of everyday life. He helped me understand the concept of “number” in a way that became a natural way of thinking. It wasn’t an abstruse concept to memorize as-is, a confusing story to repeat when asked by a teacher, a table of faceless relationships between numbers, or a set of rules to apply to pass a test. It came alive. I could see numbers in everyday things, and their relationships and properties were clear and fascinating. Even the most complex parts of the high school curriculum such as limits, integrals, mathematical analysis, complex numbers, and linear programming became a set of practical tools to understand and resolve real world problems.

This teacher made a significant difference in my life, and today I am hoping to use the “set of screwdrivers” he gave me to build programs that help kids master, deeply understand, and love these very fundamental concepts that helped me so much in life.