SCARY MATH! Keep out!

I don’t know why we don’t just cover math books and programs with zombies, skulls and crossbones, and Keep Out signs.

Forget all the COVID laments about learning loss and plunging math scores. Let’s stop blaming the kids for low math scores. Blame the way we hurry through the school year to cover all the standards. So we can get all the kids to the high stakes assessments that have little to do with what is taught. (Don’t get me started.) We use the assessments— and then pretend we don’t know how it happened — to segregate kids into groups. And these groups stick and follow kids into adulthood.

From a very early age, we teach kids that some of us are good at math but that most of us not. This is ludicrous — all of us live in the lovely world of mathematics and its observational and imaginative perspectives on our world — sunrise and sunset, the night sky, infinity, calendars, ant farms, currency, baking, ocean waves, sorting, snow flake patterns, video games, labyrinths, sports, astrology, langauges.

Read what Jo Boaler writes about math. (She’s a Brit so she says “maths.”)

“Do you remember how excited your children were about maths* when they were young? How they were excited by patterns in nature? How they rearranged a set of objects and found, with delight, that they had the same number? Before children start school they often talk about maths with curiosity and wonder, but soon after they start school many children decide that maths is confusing and scary and they are not a “math person”. This is because maths in many schools is all about procedures, memorization and deciding which children can and which cannot. Maths has become a performance subject and students of all ages are more likely to tell you that maths is all about answering questions correctly than tell you about the beauty of the subject or the way it piques their interest.”

I tutor kids in math and I know that usually in school math = worksheets. Many kids learn early on to say they’re not good in math. Even really young kids are embarrassed to use their fingers for adding and subtracting. Like it’s similar to picking your nose. Something you don’t do in public. In the same way that we become readers and writers and creators through play, we become mathematicians through play.

I’ve been thinking about this all day while making some math games where little kids learn math play, concrete and abstract. I used an example from Teachable Math for one interaction: kids have to figure out how to add 11 and 7 by breaking 11 into 10 and 1 and then adding 1 and 7 and 10 to get 18. The stats show that high achievers learn this kind of fluency and low achievers learn only how to count. Dr. Boaler’s research points to this fact — when we fail our kids by not making math live and vital and accessible — “they are learning a different mathematics” and “the mathematics that they are learning is a more difficult subject.”

Think about it.