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Don't force your kids to do math

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Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#21

Post by matthewaveryusa »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #14
codemac wrote: post #8

It's not about forcing your kids to "do math", but to excel at important skills far before the benefits of being good at that skill matter. The amount of homework/study per day that maximizes math scores on tests is significant, 1+ hours/school day by the time they're in middle school, with it helping even more for those who are starting out poor at math[0]. You'll note the referenced study doesn't even max out progr…

Me being forced to do tons of horrible math by my abusive grandfather at a young age for literally 4+ hours at a time gave me a few things. 1. A true hatred of work, make work, and a strong desire to defend laziness as a concept (note that Bertrand Russel agrees hard with me here!) - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Ot... 2. A love of subversives and cheating the system. Basically, the guys w…

I had similar conclusions, but the other way around: absolutely no guidance. Fortunately by the time I programmed and sold the basic ti math exam solvers to by classmates for 2 euros a pop I had everything memorized.

Nothing like cheating the system to know the system

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#22

Post by mathattack »

twodave wrote: post #15

Another article where someone thinks being a parent means they understand all children. I have 4 kids, and 2 of them definitely would never do math, even basic math, for fun, ever. Their brains lack whatever pathways most people utilize to learn math, so I now have a 15 year old who has to work nearly as hard at arithmetic as she did when she first learned it. No amount of drilling, change of curriculum, buckling dow…

Yes. And it's the same when the kids come from the same parents too. We have one kid that's willing to go very deep on math. The only does what can be figured out in 3 seconds or less. Same genetic parents, same school system.

The original concept in the article of exploration is great. Some kids want to explore math, some science, some music, and some Starcraft.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#24

Post by le-mark »

jerkstate wrote: post #11

ChatGPT makes it so easy to build a lesson/workbook for something your kid is interested in. I've used it to build workbooks on special relativity, tsolkovsky's rocket equation (including euler integration to build a scratch program), triangulation, logic gates, probabilities of simple dice games, etc. My pro-tip is to tell the LLM to format the document in LaTeX, so you get beautiful math typesetting. You don't even…

Where can one learn more about this? I want to get some activities for my kids this summer…

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#25

Post by -__---____-ZXyw »

twodave wrote: post #15

Another article where someone thinks being a parent means they understand all children. I have 4 kids, and 2 of them definitely would never do math, even basic math, for fun, ever. Their brains lack whatever pathways most people utilize to learn math, so I now have a 15 year old who has to work nearly as hard at arithmetic as she did when she first learned it. No amount of drilling, change of curriculum, buckling dow…

Have you come across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Teenage_Liberation_Handboo...

I read it (as a non-child), and a lot of my certainties about what young brains are and are not capable of got joyfully exploded. I'm not linking it to you proscriptively, or with a specific suggestion or riposte in mind whatsoever - you just might be interested in it.

School is very successful at convincing kids (and former kids) of two things: firstly, that the academic subjects they purport to teach are actually delineated by the school textbooks and curricula. And secondly, that the reaction people have to specific subjects within these school structures are the actual unchangeable nature of the person's relationship with the subject.

I hope one day our societies move past these two egregious and immeasurably damaging beliefs.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#26

Post by confidantlake »

lanna wrote: post #9

I'm fortunate enough that my daughter has an admirable interest (and talent) for Math since very early age. She even won a medal at a renowned nationwide Math competition when she was in Grade 5... competing in the Grade 10 category.

That kid's name? Alberta Einstein.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#27

Post by PostOnce »

twodave wrote: post #15

Another article where someone thinks being a parent means they understand all children. I have 4 kids, and 2 of them definitely would never do math, even basic math, for fun, ever. Their brains lack whatever pathways most people utilize to learn math, so I now have a 15 year old who has to work nearly as hard at arithmetic as she did when she first learned it. No amount of drilling, change of curriculum, buckling dow…

I as a child, a teen, and a young adult thought I hated math, I got bad grades and it bored me. I dropped out of school. I later went to college and took remedial algebra twice.

Math in school was purposeless and rigid, a rote procedure to be followed by command because that's what kids have to do.

Now, I have grown older, and my curiosity drove me to learn because I wanted to make things, machines and software and probabilistic strategies. Things that necessitate math. If you can't rotate a vector, your guy walks faster diagonally. If you can't think mathematically and you want to lift a 2 jointed robot arm that weighs several tons, you're going to tip it over, and possibly die in the process. You can do it without trig but you can't do it without thinking about math.

Once I found purpose, I began to appreciate the beauty of the more elegant solutions. I kind of fell in love with math as an adult. Now I watch numberphile with my kids and make complicated machinery and software at work.

I think a lot more people love math than realize it, because they're conflating math itself and what school calls math, which is worksheets and demands, not beauty and creation.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#28

Post by XorNot »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #20

Something we don't pay enough attention to is that while calculators have solved everyday math to the point we downplay it as a required skill, people are not pulling out their calculator at the grocery store to make better purchase decisions, even though we all have one in our pocket now. So we handwave the importance of being able to do everyday math in our heads, while also not taking advantage of the tool that's…

But the reality is that's usually almost a false trade - I'm not buying one item in the grocery store I'm buying easily a dozen or more. The best way to do this would be toss the online inventory into a solver to calculate "best value" for me, but in reality it would be a waste of time because if they're out of something, or the quality looks suspect, then that blows that calculation completely. And then am I going to do this for every single item, where every minute in the store is multiplying through the rest of my day? How much is the time shopping trading off against extremely sparse leisure time?

And then there's intangibles - something being slightly cheaper doesn't necessarily mean I'm making a good trade off by buying it for my overall quality of life.

In Australia at least this whole problem was perfectly adequately solved by mandating bulk price labeling on all items in the supermarket. Products in comparable categories have per volume/weight prices listed alongside item prices.

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#29

Post by rayiner »

twodave wrote: post #15

Another article where someone thinks being a parent means they understand all children. I have 4 kids, and 2 of them definitely would never do math, even basic math, for fun, ever. Their brains lack whatever pathways most people utilize to learn math, so I now have a 15 year old who has to work nearly as hard at arithmetic as she did when she first learned it. No amount of drilling, change of curriculum, buckling dow…

[flagged]

Re: Don't force your kids to do math

#30

Post by jvanderbot »

jerkstate wrote: post #12
jvanderbot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids do not understand the concept of "importance". At least no kid I've met. That part of their brain doesn't work. They'll trade effort for privileges or toys tho, and are little mimicry machines so they follow you if you use it.

yeah, I recoiled when the author of the post says "no bribing" - bribery is one of the most useful tools a parent has. I guess you could call it "incentive" or something, but really, it's quid pro quo.

Honestly it's so close to how the world works I can't believe 1. Avoiding loss of privilege and 2. Gaining new things as reward isn't the top two parenting tips.

But probably zeroth, most important, is modelling good behavior. Kids are mirrors.

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