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Teaching Kids to Love Math

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Re: Teaching Kids to Love Math

#21

Post by lifeisstillgood »

tokenadult wrote: post #4

An interesting article, pointing out that mathematics anxiety on the part of adults sometimes limits engagement with mathematics learning opportunities among children. Mathematician W. W. Sawyer wrote about this quite a while ago: "The proper thing for a parent to say is, 'I did badly at mathematics, but I had a very bad teacher. I wish I had had a good one.'" W. W. Sawyer, Vision in Elementary Mathematics (1964), pa…

As a father of two (both under 3) I want to (obviously) supplement my childrens official education with home encouragement - but resources and kicking off points like that above are - well I am sure they are around, I just don't know where.

I am half considering starting the Concerned Parent (tm) github repo

Is there any value in a github repo on recommended books and practises to help polyfilla in the cracks in the school system?- different approaches could have their own branches, commits could be discussed (Did you like that book The Teaching Gap? Should it be recommended? etc)

No I am not trying to recreate mumsnet. How crazy is this?

Re: Teaching Kids to Love Math

#22

Post by lutusp »

debacle wrote: post #13
GFKjunior wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend Calculus Made Easy by Thompson. This book is short but complete. I read it at 22. I gave up on mathematics after my first college course but found that for everything I wanted to get into, Machine Learning & Bayesian stats, it was essential . A year later I know math better than ever before even though I haven't stepped inside a classroom in years. You're probably getting bored because most math books are…

You can't justify a $200 price tag for a 100 page text book.

That might sometimes be true, but the textbook the OP referred to is less than $16.00:

http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Made-Easy-Silvanus-Thompson/d...

Re: Teaching Kids to Love Math

#23

Post by 001sky »

orangethirty wrote: post #17

They dont need to learn how to love math, they already do. What you cant teach them is to love a system designed two hundred years ago to teach very ignorant people about math. Most of the people who "hate" math do so because they were forced to "learn" it through an antiquated system. I hated my math classes, yet was always the top score on the annual standarized tests. Its not about math, but about how they teach i…

Best way to teach math? Same way as with other science. Use it.

- Agree with this. "By doing, we Become"

Re: Teaching Kids to Love Math

#24

Post by [deleted] »

lutusp wrote: post #20
stephengillie wrote: post #9

The only people who love math are math majors. Most humans don't love math. Teaching kids to love math is pointless. Math is a tool, like a hammer or a DLL. Do you love your screwdrivers and methods? Let's teach kids about how math is useful to them in their lives, and let them take it from there. Ongoing research is shedding new light on the importance of math to children's success. Math skill at kindergarten entry…

> The only people who love math are math majors. Most humans don't love math. Oh, this is so wrong. Did you like Avatar? Then you like math. Avatar is one long, beautiful mathematical expression, from beginning to end. > This is like trying to become smarter by listening to classical music. Granted the problem with the basic idea, this has it all over trying to become smarter by listening to Country & Western music.…

[deleted]

Re: Teaching Kids to Love Math

#25

Post by oob205 »

Worth noting that a way NOT to teach kids to love math is to inundate them with arithmetic. My math education, like many in the US, was an endless barrage of memorizing facts, solving equations, then memorizing some more facts. It was not until college that I began to see the essence of math is creativity. Kids are naturally creative and inquisitive and we should use this to our advantage in early education. We should explore topics like topology and infinity, topics that still blow my adult, math-major mind. We also need to encourage students to be creators in math. One of the ways we learn to love reading is by writing and making up our own stories. We can have students make puzzles, write computer programs, and see that they can invent things with math.

For a more informed perspective on how we teach math all wrong, I recommend Lockhart's Lament: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

Re: Teaching Kids to Love Math

#26

Post by marcpaul22 »

I loved "Prof. E. McSquared's Calculus Primer" when I was learning Calculus (look for used prices):

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0913232475/ref=olp_product_...

Home page here: http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~swann/mcsqrd.html

Fun and funny, written in a comic book format. It illustrates the concepts in such an entertaining style, but makes the point better than many textbooks.

Re: Teaching Kids to Love Math

#27

Post by walrus »

lutusp wrote: post #20
stephengillie wrote: post #9

The only people who love math are math majors. Most humans don't love math. Teaching kids to love math is pointless. Math is a tool, like a hammer or a DLL. Do you love your screwdrivers and methods? Let's teach kids about how math is useful to them in their lives, and let them take it from there. Ongoing research is shedding new light on the importance of math to children's success. Math skill at kindergarten entry…

> The only people who love math are math majors. Most humans don't love math. Oh, this is so wrong. Did you like Avatar? Then you like math. Avatar is one long, beautiful mathematical expression, from beginning to end. > This is like trying to become smarter by listening to classical music. Granted the problem with the basic idea, this has it all over trying to become smarter by listening to Country & Western music.…

> Oh, this is so wrong. Did you like Avatar? Then you like math. Avatar is one long, beautiful mathematical expression, from beginning to end.

Can you elaborate? To me, the interesting part of mathematics is the process of manipulating expressions, not the expressions themselves. For example, the number pi would be pretty boring if it weren't for the theorems related to it.

Re: Teaching Kids to Love Math

#28

Post by joezydeco »

oob205 wrote: post #25

Worth noting that a way NOT to teach kids to love math is to inundate them with arithmetic. My math education, like many in the US, was an endless barrage of memorizing facts, solving equations, then memorizing some more facts. It was not until college that I began to see the essence of math is creativity. Kids are naturally creative and inquisitive and we should use this to our advantage in early education. We shoul…

I spent an hour last night working on a math homework assignment with my second-grader. The practice was adding up single digits to sums greater than 10.

The idea behind the problem (say 9+5) is to "make a 10" and then figure out the sum from the remainder. So 9+5 -> 10+4 = 14. But he didn't know which numbers routinely added up to 10. That was never memorized. The assignment was so focused on strategy and technique that it neglected the fact that the basic tools aren't there.

There's a point where you need to memorize something to make the strategy and discovery easier.

Re: Teaching Kids to Love Math

#29

Post by walrus »

diggan wrote: post #5

That's great. Can you now teach me how I (~20 year old) can be interested in math? I deeply want to understand it but it gets so boring after a while... Is there any help for me out there?

I liked Concrete Mathematics by Ron Graham, Donald Knuth, and Oren Patashnik. Get it from the library of a nearby university, read the first chapter, do the warm-up problems, then decide if you like it enough to read the rest.

The authors have a way of digging deeper into problems than you might expect. It's not a book where you learn some theorems, then apply them in the problems.

Re: Teaching Kids to Love Math

#30

Post by calibraxis »

marcpaul22 wrote: post #26

I loved "Prof. E. McSquared's Calculus Primer" when I was learning Calculus (look for used prices): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0913232475/ref=olp_product_... Home page here: http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~swann/mcsqrd.html Fun and funny, written in a comic book format. It illustrates the concepts in such an entertaining style, but makes the point better than many textbooks.

Along those lines, you might enjoy _Thinking Physics_. (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Physics-Understandable-Practi...)
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