Door-2-Math Blog

My engineer husband recently picked up woodworking as a hobby.  By default, I then became one of the wives who’s been literally dragged across town, week after week, to see the ‘tool I must have to make that bunk bed you wanted’.  Did you know that a radial arm saw is different from a scroll saw, which is different from a table saw, which is different from a jig saw?  And a planer smoothes the top and jointer smoothes the sides of a 2×4? Or a dovetail joint is superior to a finger-joint.  Anyway, if you have no interest in those terminologies, I don’t blame you a bit!  To make a long story short and to get back to math and raising kids, I notice one day how my husband’s praise to Byron, our 5-year old son, shaped Byron’s tool choice of the day even when the tool did not fit the job.  That day, using his little hammer, Bryon fit a mortise into a tenor, upon which he received a ‘Wow, Bryon!  Good job!’ from his enthusiastic father eager to share his wood working with his boy.  Soon, the little guy would pick up the hammer to whack a nail into a bedpost, and before long, he even tried to take a screw OUT with the same hammer!

That got me thinking: if a simple praise from us can alter a child’s choice of tools for the day, even to the point of attempting to take a screw out with a hammer, won’t it be true that how we praise our children overall will alter who they become?  I know from my own upbringing, being smart (book smart that is) was THE ticket to get a nod from my own folks, so what did I do?  I went out and got 3 advanced degrees.  Was it worth it?  Well, on my last visit to my parents, they asked me ‘when are you going to get a real job and accept a professorship?’  So you see, right then and there, I realized that all I have in my ‘toolbox’ were ‘hammers’: small ones, big ones, rubber ones, shiny ones, 6-inch ones you can take nails out, 12-inch you can hammer the nails in. Nothing but hammers!

Don’t get me wrong, degrees do offer choices – choices in career, choices in occupation, choices in lifestyle.  But one day I woke up and realized ‘hammers’ were all I have!

Sure I maybe cumbersome in using a, say, hacksaw or a needle-nose pliers or a adjustable wrench, but won’t it be nice to have them?  See, back then, my parents said ‘writing is sissy’, ‘medicine has to deal with too many bugs’, ‘painters starve’, ‘psychology is voodoo’, before long, the only path left is ‘engineering and science’.

So how do you get away from not influence ‘tool choice of the day’ and yet still show your genuine delight?  I stumbled on it one the other day trying to tell my 9-year old that the color choice she made on that day was pleasant:  ‘Alexa,’ I said, ‘that pale purple does look soothing with the pale yellow skirt.”  Gratified that she didn’t wear all purple all that week and that next time, she paired the yellow skirt with a dark green Nike shirt, I knew her ‘color choice of day’ didn’t get altered because I liked ‘how purple went well with yellow.’  The rule I now stick to is this: take the ‘I/good/great/wonderful/nice/well’ out and state the fact.  Got a 100% on a spelling test?  I now say ‘Wow! You put all the letters in the order they wanted’.  Tough?  Yes.  Worth it? yes!

It may sound like load of work for such little things (or as we Chinese say it ‘tons of chicken feathers with no meat’), sometimes, even I can’t help but wonder is it really true that an ant hole can really take down a dam? But then I remember what an old village elder said, ‘drops of water put holes in rocks, never the other way around’. Hm.

Uh, only if our children know how much we love them!!

Happy Zen Math!

(c) Feenix Pan, 2007. All rights reserved.

When a child comes home with a bad math grade, the first two assumptions that a parent makes is that the child is either lazy or “just doesn’t get it”. From my experience with individual work with numerous of students with all abilities and work habits, 95% of the time the child is neither “lazy” nor “dumb”. Overall there are three major reasons why kids don’t do math, and only one of them has to do with “aptitude” and even in this case it has to do with strength of math foundation, quality of test-taking and study skills, not “intelligence”. Understanding the cause of your child’s seeming lack of progress in math is critical to giving him/her the right antidote.  What you don’t want to do is nag Johnny to do his math homework – after all what good is a Band-Aid if a broken arm is what is causing Johnny his agonizing pain?  The three reasons are:

¨       Lack of math confidence.  Johnny is locked in a vicious self-defeating cycle of having poor math foundation, which in turn makes understanding new material impossible and when inadequate skills in taking tests and in learning are added, the child’s math fear takes over.  Who among us has not shied away from our worst fear?  Imagine, would you do with your speech homework if your worst nightmare is standing in front of a room-full of strangers telling them how you dread to giving a speech!?

¨       Lack of perceived importance.  If Johnny is way out of the norm curve when it comes to connecting with peers, reading your emotions or if he is being overtly generous in his time and energy in helping out mankind in general, you might have a very sensitive and socially intelligent child.  For those children, being able to keep that connection with the outside world is of the supreme importance.  Unless you paved the road to math early (and often) and demonstrated the importance of math into his consciousness early on, Johnny might be equating math with that old piano practice he dropped in 3^rd grade or that Tae Kwon Do lesson back in 1^st grade.  Come to think of it, if having a shiny new car is not important, would you wax it every other day in our hot desert sun!?

¨       Lack of adequate communication tools.  Some kids are born stronger willed than others and depending on the kind of communication tools Johnny picked up from his natural environment, he may not have enough tools to say ‘I don’t agree with you on topic #1′ whatever that topic #1 is.  For some, it’s ‘you favor my brother more’, and for some it’s ‘I need more attention’ and still for others it might be ‘I’m lost and scared’.  Whatever that topic #1 is, the stress of not being able to communicate it with you, his primary care provider, is enough for Johnny to pick the nearest tool he’s got: math homework.  Kids intuitively understand that school is important for parents, and there is really not a thing we can do if Johnny doesn’t do his homework.  Sure, we can take his internet away, his cell phone away, his biking privilege away, his TV away- when Johnny has nothing left, then what!?  They say that the richest man is the one who has nothing.  Think about it, if we have no kids, no job, no money, no obligations, who can possibly do what to us?  So if not doing homework is all Johnny has left in his tool box to tell you what he could not find any other way to tell you, why would he go do homework?

I know, I know. If you read this article this far, you probably are thinking, what?  Do you mean that its okay Johnny does not do his homework?  No, to the contrary, I’m saying that unless you know, understand and appreciate Johnny’s reasons (however silly they are to you) for not wanting to do him homework, you’ve got no chance to give him the nutrition he needs to nurture his mind.   We care about Johnny’s homework because we’ve learned what can happen when homework is not done, we know how it can lead to loss of interest in school, we know how that it can threaten his future – but unless we can hear Johnny first, he does not have the room to hear us!!    The ironic thing is that Johnny does need our help and we are right about the importance of homework.

So, the greatest challenge for any parent, I believe, is not love our children.  I mean, really, who among us would hesitate to jump in front of a moving train to save our children?  We nag on Johnny about his homework because we care, because we love him and we worry for him.  Yet, none of our love would make an iota’s difference if we can’t hear him reasoning in his own world.  How do I get into his world, you ask.  The answer is almost ridiculously simple.  So simple that it is hard for us adults to do.

How we get into Johnny’s world is this: we appreciate him.  That’s right, we appreciate him.  We appreciate his silliness, his stubbornness, his misshapes, his mistakes.  The whole nine yards.  We appreciate him, and in appreciating him, we empty his ‘buckets’, so he can hear the importance of homework, the worry we have about him, the love we have for him.   In St. Francis’s words, “in giving we receive.”

In giving Johnny our appreciation, we receive his permission to be in his world.  Only then can we hope to make the kind contribution that each one of us as a caring parent is desperately trying to make.  Appreciating Johnny cures Johnny’s homework.

Now, it’s up to us to do the hard part: appreciate all that is Johnny, all the time.

Happy Zen Math!

(c) Feenix Pan, 2007. All Rights Reserved.

Parents who work with me give me an opportunity to learn from them as much as they learn from me. In this particular case, “Mira”, a mother of a 9th grader, was extremely effective in working with her son’s math teacher, who was also the math department head. Needless to say, having the teacher “on our side” was invaluable to her son’s math success. Here’s what “Mira” had to say:

This is the circumstance.  You need to talk to your son or daughter’s school teacher about issues that Dr. Pan has concerns about as well as inquiring about the structure and lessons being taught in the classroom.  The immediate thoughts that come to mind; finding a way not to jeopardize your open line of communication with this teacher; inquiring without the teacher feeling threatened, worrying that the teacher is wondering if you are questioning their abilities as a teacher. Will you and your child be despised?   I believe most educators have the child’s learning needs at heart, but sometimes human nature takes over and inquiries take on a form the other party views as an insult to their personal attributes.

I found a couple simple rules to follow for myself that led to a teacher becoming a strong part of my son’s math team.  The communication didn’t come without frustrations at times, but for the majority of the time and the end result…these rules kept the lines open and helpful feedback was returned.  The first rule I made for myself, to have the teacher know first and foremost how much I appreciated his time and input.  I never started out a conversation or an email without first recognizing how valuable his time was and how grateful I was that he would take time to explain certain items with me.  Rule number 2, I never approached a question in the form of an accusation. Every question was written or voiced as an inquiry.  This meant that I would like to let the teacher explain his process of teaching instead of telling the teacher why Dr. Pan or I didn’t agree with him.  This allowed Dr. Pan to understand the teachers approach without me threatening his method of teaching.  A third rule was to make sure the teacher understood why my son was doing a problem differently than the teacher might have explained the process in class. I always reaffirmed with the teacher that my son’s process was still acceptable for tests and homework.  This made the teacher feel that he still had a major influence in his classroom work and that we were all on his side supporting him.

The teacher and I still stay in contact and he appreciated how hard he could see my son working.  He made sure that my son was on track and kept me informed of concerns he had.  The teacher made me aware that he was going to be teaching a class next year that my son would need and offered to get him into his class so he could continue to monitor and help. 

The teacher is the Math department chair at the high school and has become an intricate part of my son’s math team.  We have developed a respectful relationship that allows communication to flow freely in both directions without personal attacks becoming an issue.

Way to go!

Happy Zen Math!

(c) Feenix Pan, 2007. All Rights Reserved.