Why It's Important to Get Math Help Early

By Chloe, Instructor

A lot of times, people think of math tutors and other types of remedial math education as something for kids who are in high school—something to help them understand those complicated math topics that arise in the later subjects. But if you’re waiting until the problems are so big that a math tutor is the only option you have left, it may already be too late to turn things around.

Below, I’ve listed a few reasons it’s important to make sure your kids are getting math help early, when there’s still time to correct the errors in learning that naturally arise as children develop their skills. (To find out how Mathnasium can help your child combat learning loss and fill in skill gaps, click here.)

1. Math Knowledge Builds on Itself

   The most common place kids make mistakes isn’t the complex formulas that arise later on in their learning. The mistakes often happen in the small moments, the rules that were locked in place early on in math learning. This is because the skills that you learn when you’re first beginning to understand arithmetic are carried forward and used for the rest of math, whether it’s algebra, calculus, or geometry. The skills that you hone while learning math in first grade are the same skills you’ll be using to solve those complicated equations, and you’ll be doing it more frequently and in shorter periods of time. Because every piece of knowledge you acquire in math will be used again in the future, it is so important to make sure that the fundamental skills are ingrained in your child’s memory. If not, future math will be frustrating, confusing, and may feel nearly impossible. Learn more about how math knowledge builds on itself.

2. Learning Gaps Become More Difficult to Address

   Because each skill acquired in math learning grows to be more complex as time goes on, if something wasn’t correctly learned in first grade, it will be more difficult to correct in second grade. And then even more difficult to correct in third grade. When an incorrect method is reinforced over and over, potentially for years, it becomes harder and harder to unlearn the incorrect information. Correcting the gap in knowledge can take time, often the same amount of time that has passed since learning the wrong information, so the longer it’s been, the longer (and harder) it will be to remedy this.

3. Confidence is Easy to Lose and Difficult to Rebuild

   When it comes to math, sometimes our confidence in our own abilities can be easily shaken. When you’re absolutely sure you’re doing something correctly, and then a teacher or parent marks your answer as incorrect, it can feel like you didn’t just get the problem wrong, but that your own belief in your ability to solve the problem is under attack. How can it be possible to feel certain that you’re doing everything right, only to find out your answer is wrong? This usually happens because of a concept that wasn’t fully mastered earlier in math learning, but that can be a hard truth to accept. Correcting these mistakes early will go a long way in making sure that confidence isn’t destroyed. 

4. Math is Part of Our Daily Lives

   We don’t always think about it, but math knowledge is essential to survive in our world. The only way to understand how to build a budget, make wise investments, and ensure that enough money is coming in to cover everything is with an understanding of math concepts. Knowing that some costs are fixed and some costs are variable is also an important piece of the survival equation that we’re all born into. Without math knowledge, it can be impossible to keep your life organized well enough to begin planning for a better future. By the time your child is old enough to start thinking about money and their future plans, their confidence or interest in math may have already been beaten out of them. It’s important to make sure the fundamentals are in place before they get old enough to give up on the subject altogether.

These are just a few of the reasons it’s important to get your kids math help as early as possible. It may feel easy to put off, like it can wait until there’s a “real” problem, but those real problems will only arise if you fail to act, and by then, it may be too late. If you’ve decided that you want to get extra math help, a good place to start is with a free 1-on-1 math skills assessment. (The assessment and instructional sessions can be done either online or in person.)

Best of luck to you and your kids in all of their future learning!