Comment by lucasjung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucasjung | Hacker News Reader

The author provides some system solutions that I agree with, but which I doubt would be implemented any time soon on a large scale. That leaves me asking other questions:

What can I do, as a parent, if I see that my children are not being taught math at the proper pace? I could tutor my children at home to a certain extent, but that just raises all sorts of other questions:

I've got a solid math background, but no education background, so what kinds of resources are available to me to establish an effective home tutoring program?

How can I tell if the pace I am setting is too fast, too slow, or just right?

In the unlikely event that one of my children is a "math outlier," my knowledge of math, although in the 90th (95th? 99th?) percentile, would prove woefully inadequate: where would I find an (affordable) math tutor with comprehensive knowledge of math?

This last question is the only one I think I have a decent answer for: find a mathematics graduate student looking to earn some money on the side.

I tutor my 4 year old daughter in math using Singapore Math texts (http://www.singaporemath.com/). We are working with the kindergarten books and I think my daughter is doing OK. I think that everybody who values math education should do something like that with their children. The gain is just too big to ignore. My daughter is already thinking about addition and while she doesn't yet remember the addition facts she has no difficulty posing word problems as addition problems.

The books are not very difficult for parents to understand and give you a baseline that you can follow very closely. Also, I hope that since it is unlikely that my child will do the same book in school I do not run the risk that the she will refuse to do math in school since she has already done the book.

Since you have the book you can set the pace based on how difficult the lesson of the day seems for the child. You can do one page per week or 10 pages per day (both these things have happened to me). Of course there can be several levels of understandings of the same lesson and in my case I usually am happy with the lowest level. To correct for that I do sequentially 2 different books that have the same material (Singapore Math provides multiple books for the same level). I skipped some chapters about weights and volumes since these seemed too involved for my daughter (3 at the time), but I have done everything else that is on these books.

I must say that until now this has been a wonderful experience for me. I have never needed to ask my daughter to do math, anytime she sees me free she asks for it herself. And almost always I am the one who tries to cut the lesson short, making sure that next day she will want to come back wanting more.

I just found this website that was from a NYTimes article

http://www.khanacademy.org/#browse

I bookmarked it because I plan on going through all of the lessons so I can refresh myself. I've only watched a few clip but they seem helpful.

Here is the NYTimes article

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/technology/khan-academy-b...

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