HOW TO MAKE CHILDREN FALL IN LOVE WITH MATH-Part 1
I recently worked with an educational program designer on the development of an early childhood education program that involved skills development in math. With this program, I have been able to incorporate a lot of insights and perspectives I developed over the years…
Math has always been my favorite subject and while still at school myself I always helped my friends to solve their math problems. Initially, I thought that my friends couldn’t understand a math problem because of the language used by our teachers, so I tried to frame the problems in words they could more easily grasp, but I realized very quickly that language wasn’t the issue; it was something deeper. So I started using visual aids to help clarify the math problem, using items as simple as chick peas, cut paper, coins, etc. These visual aids helped in solving a particular math problem, but I found that these aids couldn’t be applied to all problems – visual aids had to be developed for each individual problem. So I developed these visual aids over and over again, for each individual math problem.
I came to realize that my friends felt comfortable telling me that they didn’t understand a particular math problem, but they hardly ever asked these questions in class. I think that’s because they felt intimidated, and thought they would be seen as a fool for not understanding a math problem or being unable to phrase the problem in the right terms. I realized it’s easy to say ‘I don’t understand this math problem’, but it’s much more difficult to explain what it is exactly that you don’t understand about the problem. In fact, when a student can explain what it is she doesn’t understand she has already solved half the problem. In more advanced math this is a relevant concept – the ability to isolate the issue that’s not understood in a particular problem.
When it comes to teaching math in an early childhood environment, it’s more of an ‘all or nothing’ equation; a child can either grasp the whole math problem or resolve it, or he doesn’t understand any of it. Children can develop math skills by breaking the problem up into discrete elements, visualize them, and make sure that they understand that specific element before you move on.
When still a student myself, I intuitively grasped these issues and how to resolve them and started tutoring kids when I was in ninth grade. I also began to understand that math shouldn’t always be about problems; it could also address issues that could first of all be discussed. I started to encourage my students to not always focus on resolving problems, but on defining them; once they could do that, they could much more easily come up with the solution. Math cannot just be seen as a pure theory; we should teach children that math is a tool that can resolve problems in the world, and can be an aid in understanding that world. Once I was driving with my son across one of the Bay Area bridges near San Francisco, and he was complaining about trigonometry and questioning the use of it. Now, this particular bridge we were driving on suddenly makes a sharp turn before reaching land again, and I joked that the engineers might have made a mistake of possibly just one degree, but on the scale of a bridge it would have had a substantial impact. We started laughing, but now in his mind, a connection was made between math and the real world (and, by the way, the turn in this bridge wasn’t caused by an engineering mistake, but is related to the widening of it).
In math, very often a specific mathematical theory is taught without providing a reference to the issue it is addressing; for example, a math teacher might say ‘today we are going to learn about integral calculus’ but instead it would be more insightful to say ‘what we want to do is calculate the size of an area which is irregularly shaped’. That provides more context to the students. In this way, a math theory can be more easily applied to a real-life problem, and how math can provide insights in how to resolve it.
Math fundamentally deals with abstract concepts, but in early childhood education we make a beginning with teaching these concepts in a fundamentally flawed way; we teach children numbers in a way similar to letters; there is no difference identified between, say, the letter ‘a’ and the number ‘2’. Both have a name and a corresponding shape; in a young mind, there is no difference between them. How can we teach a child the fundamental difference between a letter which can combine with words, and be used to describe the world and a number which can be used to develop a model to understand the world?
It is best to start teaching numbers with a game, but never teach children the use of numbers with a song. Start with a tangible material that increases incrementally, for example, using beads, spoons, or any items that are identical to each other. The items could be connected to the senses; for example, blueberries could be used which could be eaten as part of the game.
As children play games such as this, they will experience a sense of success and encourage them to delve deeper into other games which address ever more complex concepts – as opposed to current educational math models in which children typically cannot succeed early on, and math is associated with failure.
This doesn’t mean that children couldn’t fail in solving basic math, but if they do give them a chance to correct themselves and thereby encourage them to continue and explore more deeply.
These are some of the concepts I incorporated into the early childhood math education program I developed recently. There are others, which I will explain in more detail in subsequent articles and posts…