Math as a habit
kidswholovemath.substack.com
kidswholovemath.substack.com
My kid loves Roblox. Math not so much. She’ll gladly play Roblox every day with no assistance or structure from me. Math? That’s about as easy to form a habit with as running 5 miles. How do I get her to love math (or other good things) in the first place?
The hard part isn’t getting by kids to do things they love, it’s getting them to do things they DON’T love.
I was able to get her hooked on reading actual paper books but only when she messed up in school and lost access to devices for 9 days. Boredom took over and books were the answer. Now she loves them, thank god.
My suggestion; Kids learn by mimicking and playing. Our Education System beats this out of us in favour of formalism/competition/goals/etc. So if you sit and "play" with her using objects/manipulations of objects (set theory/abstract algebra/formal systems), measurements (quantities/units/coordinate systems), walking across the room with even speed vs. sudden acceleration/de-acceleration (calculus) you can teach Abstractions/Mathematics/etc. This will build up their intuition and hook their interest. Then you can teach them the necessary "formal notation" using paper/pencil and textbooks. You always go from concrete to abstract with enthusiasm and a playful attitude i.e. no right/wrong answers but exploring ideas/concepts.
PS: You might find the videos of the famed educationalist Sir Ken Robinson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Robinson_(educationalist)) useful in this regard - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ken+robinson
But it is important to actually give the formalism and abstract algebra at this point. Unless your child is an age defining genius, they will benefit from some handholding, and theres not much of that that can be done without having access to it yourself.
Not necessarily.
Intuition (borne out of Imagination) is for understanding the domain concepts even before there is a problem to solve.
This is the reason i am against the oft repeated advice "solve a lot of problems to learn Mathematics" which merely leads to mechanical "plug and chug problem-solving" with no real understanding. Instead one should spend a lot of time trying to grasp the concepts well, map them to the appropriate notations used and then study a few fully-worked out problems to grasp the "applications".
It's like someone shoveling a big empty hole for years and years
On the contrary. They're all properly configured. It's just that, their goals are not the same as our mental health goals.
I used to be a deadbeat 30-something who got his reward of progression and a sense of achievement from winning online arguments and grinding ranks in online games. Just like our brains cannot tell the difference between a picture of a girl that doesn't exist and a girl that does and both evoke some feelings of attraction, or an image of a wild animal that couldn't possible exist and one who does and both evoke some feelings of fear, the same happens when we get upvotes on reddit or platinum rank in Call of Duty.
In healthy and balanced scenarios both are distractions in our free time. For people whose life situation is less than ideal those same tools exploit their need to be appreciated and rewarded, in return for profits from sales or/and advertisements.
And we're all pretending that these people just lack willpower, and if only they had willpower they could break away from the software whose parts are deliberately designed after consultation with psychologists specialized in behavioral addiction.
It sounds cliche, but it has worked exactly that way for me. A little more good habits, a little less bad habits, repeat x1000 and you're a whole new person in a whole new place.
I stay mindful of what it is I want, and am certain I want, and create reminders for myself to prevent my auto-pilot from going off track.
If you start with easy math problems (but not labelling them as "math problems", but as logic, smart puzzles) you can build up from there.
Consistency and frugality of options is important.
On the other hand if the approach of the author gives a slight competitive edge, this might snowball for the reason you've given.
But this could extend to many things, e.g. the kid who likes Minecraft may get into "logic puzzles" through red stone while the kid who likes Roblox may get into creating roblox games.
Then, they will get into math once they actually need math as something useful for their "logic based hobby" as I will call it. Of course it is very hard when a kid is just hit with theoretical math and there is no real association with something they are already interested in. But there are actually countless associations, now you just need to find them and bridge your kids interests with math through them.
Probably a few months later, I was watching The Screensavers (remember that?), and they mentioned that users on the TechTV forums were drawing free art requests. The guy who took mine mentioned that he was posting it to deviantArt. "What's that?" I thought. Long story short, I hold a BFA instead of a BS now.
Community takes most people from hobby to passion. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to go it alone.
I'm sorry to hear that you had this experience. I'm sure your Pokemon battle simulator was cool!
They like to run a voice chat in the background while they play, so it's not just a silent in-game chat interaction.
If removing this I don't know how we would replace the social aspect. Would probably need to find an in-person after-school program which would have its own problems.
This is such sad commentary on modern life. Why is this acceptable at all?
And while there are people who might have grown up to do great things after playing video games, or reading comic books or watching television, or whatever thing has horrified any given generation, I'm convinced that knowing to play an instrument, have the patience to read to a book or walk in nature, know how to approach a science paper, or dance, give much more chances to live a fulfilling life.
And if you have those things the day you become an adult, you can still choose to play video games with all your free time. But if you have spent your childhood and adolescence playing video games, it is really hard to get started with any of all those other things that life offers.
It was a very different internet and world though. The thought of giving a child access to YouTube terrifies me. Content is engineered extremely well to prey on children (and adults who are still children), what if they find and get tricked by this? Absolutely terrifies me.
Not allowing access is obviously wrong, they will just resent you and watch even more of it at school, a friends house, etc. So you have to allow access but teach them enough to not fall for it. It’s your parenting vs their extremely well rehearsed, metrics backed, full-time, for-profit, well disguised content, which can either be completely harmless or fuck them up for life.
So, I get it.
Oh yeah, it's because we want them to get jobs. But trust me, if you make a child do a lot of something they don't love, they might get a job with it and then just quit because they hate it.
I find that people who do this to their children regret it later, life is short and the time we have to help our children forge a good foundation is even shorter.
You can very well give them a balance between a carefree, happy childhood full of love, while at the same time forcing them to discover lots of things they don't like at first sight.
It's better to fail at raising children by trying to pass something on to them than to let others do it all for you.
I don't disagree with a little pushing, but some children will just never be good at math....
Because she pushed through my complaints and bore my abuse, I now have deeply embedded musical skills that have changed the trajectory of my life experience for the better.
As an adult, I try to thank her for this whenever I can. I don’t know if I’ll be strong enough to give my own future children this gift.
Interesting, I thought we're doing it because we don't want them to be stupid.
Its a work in process...
I'd memorize the formulas we were being tested on right before the tests were handed out. Then I'd write them in the top of the test immediately and before I forgot them. Then I'd ace the test. Lol.
Roblox and reading seem different from this perspective.
> The hard part isn’t getting by kids to do things they love, it’s getting them to do things they DON’T love.
Step 1 is defining your goal. Assume you will not change the fact that your daughter doesn't like math. What capabilities do you want her to have that will come from studying it?
Focus on those, not on trying to build a habit of math-for-its-own-sake.
(If you don't think there are any particular capabilities that she will need, then I would suggest having her study math is probably not a good use of her time.)
Easy. Give her access to Roblox only after she does her math for the day.
I count stuff(so "do math") as a habit and it's like that because my mother was slipping it into daily activities in an unstructured way.
Some examples:
When we were back from doing groceries we would sometimes weigh the bags and see how heavy they were. We would also keep track of our own weights and heights.
I could play with things like measuring tape.
She would give me and my sister coins and ask what can be bought with them, so that we could get the thing.
If I wanted a learning toy that taught me about numbers, I could have it.
I was allowed to set the time on the microwave when I was like four.
After some pestering she crafted a "counter" for me out of plastic caps, carboard and one of those sticks that you use to check if whatever is in the oven is done.
We also read every number we saw.
This is all stuff that happened before I went to school, at which point I was already ahead of most of the class without even seeing it as much of an effort.
This sounds strange to me. I used the streak method for several physical activities. At first I was worried I would not keep it up, so it was very important to not miss any single day. But after 100 days? A miss does nothing. I have proof I can keep it up, and that motivates me to continue. Besides, life happens, it's impossible to _never_ miss a day of anything.
The first weeks are harder, but after that, I look more for a moving average. If I have 95 of the last 100 days, I'm doing great.
This is pervasive. At both school and work, we tend to incentivise good outcomes rather than the sort of behaviour that leads to good outcomes. The result is less than optimal.
I find this super interesting, a fantastic example of how weird our brains are and how good they are at tricking us out of effort. I always liked the idea of the Seinfeld chain for habit forming, but never tried it long enough to experience the breaking of a super long chain. I bet a lot of people who try it have a similar experience to the author, which is really funny in a way because it totally worked amazingly well for a long time. The chain isn’t supposed to be the ultimate reward, except that if the mental hack for doing it every day is make a chain, it’s easy to see why this happens. But still funny that our brains will let one tiny slip become more important than months and months of progress, even when it’s not. Clearly a way to handle inevitable breaks should be built in and provide motivation to start again, maybe an anti-chain for misses, or a progress meter, or something else. Maybe if I try this I’ll force myself to have some breaks early on, to practice restarting. This kind of subconscious battle with ourselves is what makes diets and exercise hard… all habits we wish we had but don’t, and it’s fascinating what different mental tricks work for different people.
Of course, this is completely arbitrary and silly, but it does take the sting out of losing a super-long streak. A new goal of seven consecutive days feels reasonable; a new goal of 300 consecutive days feels impossible.
This completely broke down with highschool and university math. The teachers, for the love of God, simply could not teach and were indulging themselves on a whiteboard. I felt helpless and at some point merely looking at equations caused anxiety.
Basic arithmetic is not math.
At the university level, I found math professors to be the worst instructors I encountered, without a doubt. Was your experience the same?
The first time I took Calc 3, the professor would say "Now anyone can look at the example in the book on their own and work through it. I'm going to put a little twist on it to show you another concept."
The premise of this is fine, but execution was awful. He would then on-the-fly decide what variables he was going to change and start writing on the chalkboard. After filling all 3 sections, he'd erase and fill the first and second sections. That was ~40 minutes into the 50 minute class. Then something wouldn't look right as he studied the 3/5 of the problem still on the board. The class would finish, and sometimes he'd spend the first 5-10 minutes of the next class showing where he messed up and completing the example. My 5 pages of notes were of no value because somewhere they were very wrong.
Had he taken 15 minutes to work it out on his own ahead of class, I might not have dropped the class. The next time I took it, I had a lecturer who was really amazing and I earned a A. That was the only A from the math department I earned in college across 4 difference classes and 5 instructors.
Same. If this weren't common I think memes like "this is left as exercise to the reader" wouldn't exist.
I'm convinced most of them find math intuitive to a point where they can't indentify at all with people who struggle with it and have no idea where to even start explaining things. And it also takes patience to try and bridge that gap. Not to mention a lot of maths concepts depend on understanding other ones and education in general just assumes that each person is proficient in everything from previous classes.
It's similar with technology as well, some people know immediately how to rule out problems or google a solution while others struggle to come up with the right question.
Teaching is a really difficult skill that most people are not born with. If you can easily understand high level math, you usually aren't going to decide to spend your life teaching, rather than making good money.
The best math professor I ever had in college was an adjunct from the local community college, because they were a teacher first, and a mathematician second.
once you are off the train it is hard to self-motivate to get back on. the university lecturers i learnt from do not seem to have any incentive to help you get back up to speed.
Teachers need to sparkle and be protective of their students curiosity. Amazing things happen when a student is eager to learn. It is also true that deliberate practice and spaced repetition are very effective at building competence and then confidence. Confidence drives further interest.
The "cues" the author talks about, even the one that's claimed as successful (habit stacking), seem like that. Children need structure of course, but they also need variety and free time. "Stacking" anything seems counter to that.
My approach as a kid, and as an adult, which I hope to instill in my daughter, was just to use mathematics as a lens to examine the world - using the equations of motion to derive how deep a well is or how high a cliff is from dropping a stone, calculating the mass of water in a swimming pool and therefore the force on each support column underneath it, the number of candies in a jar (man, I won so much candy as a kid), estimating the number of people in a crowd from a sample (that got me backstage at Glastonbury!), how much longer will I need to read this book based on my current pace, what my basal metabolic rate is based on the curve I see in my weight loss on a fixed diet, etc. etc. - nothing overly taxing, but plenty of things which answer small “I wonder…” questions, and keep the habit of doing mental arithmetic alive, and various equations and tools alive in my mind.
It also ends up giving insight, and therefore an incentive to keep honing those mental tools.
I generally find the best way to get myself or anyone else to do something is to make it useful and interesting, and to make it not feel like work.
Atomic habits is way better, and approachable if you're trying to actually change your behavior
Like all self-help, buying a book and reading it is the easy part.
What matters is actually _applying_ what you learn. The snippet about building habits at the end of the article represents the core techniques of forming habits.
I feel like given the broad nature of math, another approach might be to just integrate the math concepts and learning into already things that kids enjoy doing. Whether it's tying it into video games, sports, etc.