Door-2-Math Blog

While attending a chess tournament this past weekend with our two kids, I observed that our 6-year old plays his game with much less thought than his 10-year-old sister. For one, he chases his opponents’ pieces with his own Queen as if he is chasing his buddies on the playground – run them down till they wear out. Yet, totally oblivous to the weakness of his strategy, he got a medal for winning all three of his games. Our 10 year old, on the other hand, is meticulously careful with her moves, watching the whole board for she has lost quite few games battles with my husband, the resident chess champion at our house. Her cautioun paid off for the 1st game, but being overly worried about bring out her Queen too early, she lost the next two games.

At night, while watching our two kids battling out with my husband on chess boards by the fireplace, I got to thinking –if you include my chess game in this, the four of us are at different stage of learning: the 6 year old is at the ground level (low consciousness, high performance) of “Baby Confidence”, i.e. “I have no idea why I’m wining, but I’m winning”; I’m at the next level (low consciousness, low performance) of “I’m losing all the time and I have no clue as to why); our 10 year old is one notch higher (high consciousness, low performance) of “I know I’m not playing the Queen piece right, but I don’t know how to change it yet”, and our resident chess champion, is at the enviable “I know how to win games, but I have to think it carefully.” (I always thought that my husband who is Russian got an unfair advantage since where he grew up, there were nothing but chess to play when the winter rolled around.) Reaching the ultimate Bobby Fisher stage of ‘Chess is easy’ is my goal next lifetime around.

Now connect this with math, if you have a child who had been acing math with ‘Baby Confidence’, it is vital that you help him to understand why math’s been fun and strategize on how to keep it that way for him. Of all the stages one goes through in learning a new skill, the most dangerous one is where I’m sitting now with chess: low competence and low consciousness. In words, if you hear your child say ‘I can’t get math right. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” be alarmed. This is the stage that, without proper help, we can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, and quickly succumb to ‘oh, who needs it anyway’, or ‘I hate math’ or ‘I could never figure out math’ or worst yet stop trying all together. (The last time I tipped over my King, Reagan was sworn in as the oldest President).

This brings me to the point I’m trying to make: homework help alone in the long run can not help your child to move to the ultimate “I know I can handle math with grace”. The reason is simple: without addressing where the pieces went haywire, all homework help accomplishes is to bandage the wound. Sure you can hand in another assignment, but what then? What about exams? What about critical thinking skills? Think about it — who among us would chose to run a marathon with crutches over taking a step on our own?

Happy Zen Math!

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