Glendale, August 10, 2015 - It's back to school week in Glendale, and the collective groan of returning students is met with the plangent sighs of their mothers. They grow up so fast, don't they? How did this happen? But more importantly: where did summer go?
The start of a new school year is like hitting a reset button in many ways—but not so in math. There's always a couple weeks of review in whatever math level a student is taking, and that's because the concepts build on top of each other, getting incrementally more complicated and, yes, more challenging. The good news is the student is getting more and more knowledgeable!
But what about the students who have decided that math just isn't for them? They always seem to be playing catch-up, they find the homework tedious, and they just plain don't like it. Oh, and they probably also don't like their math teacher very much either.
Most of the time, not liking math is simply a reaction to not understanding it. You ever notice that the things we like to do, we just so happen to be good at? It's our little way of self-generating little ego boosts even when no one's around to see it. I mean, we're basically golden retrievers—the dog will fetch the tennis ball for you for as long as you want to throw it. Retrievers are really good at fetching tennis balls, and their tails are at their waggiest when they get to do it. Hey, we're not so different. And conversely, we're not going to enjoy the minor sting of defeat while doing something we're not so great at. So for a lot of kids, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: they decide they are not good at math, so they don't like it, and not liking it makes them not so good.
If a student thinks they're not good at math, chances are they never learned it the right way. They reduce a math problem to a mechanical algorithm without fully understanding what they're doing. They are merely following step-by-step instructions in figuring out a problem, and when math is approached this way, it's no fun! It would be like reading an instruction manual all year and then having to memorize it for the final! But when a student can see the relationship between numbers and how the numbers actually work, they can become fluent in math: they can speak the language, not just say certain phrases they picked up in class (donde estan mis zapatos? doesn't help in most situations). And once a solid math foundation has been established, that's where the fun starts, and class won't be so tough anymore. And maybe your child may actually start to like math. And that math teacher? Maybe they're not so bad after all.
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