Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

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I've spent much of the last twenty years teaching math to middle and high school students who had previously been burned out on math. I teach in an environment where I get to let students progress at their own pace. Everyone gets a clear set of math milestones laid out, and they earn their credit when they reach those milestones. Students see me mostly as someone who helps them reach objective milestones, not as someone who tells them they can't do math again.

One of the most significant issues I see is there's often no way back into math if a student gets off track early on. My students typically got confused in 2nd-5th grade, and then math never made sense again. When given the space to work independently, with support, at their own pace, they get to clear up old confusions and realize how much they're capable of when they're not under pressure to keep up with everyone else.

One of the things I enjoy most is taking students who haven't understood math since 3rd grade, and bringing them to a place where they can start to use algebra to solve problems they care about. From then on, they are set up to make good use of math the rest of their lives.

I have a 3 1/2 year old son now, and it's fascinating to watch his development after having been a teacher for so long. He's in that wonderful stage now where "22" is just as big as "a million", and when he wants to describe a large number of things he just strings random numbers together: "Dad, there's 23 45 8 17 100 stars in the sky tonight!" Just the other night he asked, "What do you get when you add 3 and 3?" It's fascinating to watch that understanding develop, and to just keep answering his questions honestly, with the mindset of giving him a strong foundation for more advanced concepts later on.

Do you have any tips as to how to get kids to sit down and work on math stuff again?

I teach high school right now. I ask students in each class what their math experiences have been; I give them space to vent, and make it okay to say, "I hate math." In every class I've had, there's also been someone who says, "I love math." We then talk about what has worked for people and what hasn't. I explain much of what I wrote in the comment above; many students have been blaming themselves for years of failure, and have never realized that weren't offered a way back into math. On the other hand, some students have blamed everyone but themselves and they need to start taking responsibility for themselves, and we have that honest conversation.

Everyone needs motivation to learn anything meaningful. Motivation for students can come from a desire to earn credit and graduate, a desire to be able to do a certain job, or a desire to catch up on things they haven't understood for a long time.

I connect each student's math learning plan with their job and career goals. Most of my students are at an age where that can work, if they can see the connection. This isn't just a utilitarian approach; we also talk on a regular basis about the wonders of math, and how there are efficient strategies but there are no math "tricks". I break their work into the smallest possible chunks they can earn credit for, so they get to see academic success as soon as possible.

I'm happy to share more specific thoughts here or through email, if you have a particular situation you're trying to sort out.

That's great and major props for helping those who fell behind. I remember taking classes at the maritime college and watching all these people (who were probably way better at ships or engines than I was) struggle mightily with speed-distance-time calculations, batteries in series/parallel or Ohm's law. It was really depressing - how can our education systems fail so many people?

It should always be okay to say "I hate math." I'm a mathematician and some days I also hate math. Math is an emotional roller-coaster at all levels.

Why require the "sit down" part? As the article states, you can do math without sitting down, too.

Let them estimate how many steps a walk from A to B takes, or what distance is larger and check it by walking, ask them to count how many tiles cover a square (multiplication as a fast way of counting every tile), to estimate the number of beans in a jar and from it the weight of a single bean (combine that with Archimedes' law and let them predict whether it floats), the height of buildings (3 to 3.5 meters per floor, but also a trigonometry exercise when combined with measuring the length of its shade) etc.

You don't need to. I remember when I was a child, our family have this tradition of walking around the park after dinner. My parents would talk about work and ask about my day. And sometimes my father would throw questions like "why do you think there are 60 minutes in an hour instead of say 57" "why is 1/3 = 0.33333... is there a possibility there's a digit of 4 down the road?". I'm not sure if he come up with these question randomly or he has a system, but I still remembers a lot of them today.

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