11/22/05: What this column is about
My name is Feenix Pan and I’m a private educator. I help students build math confidence for living.
Alexa and Byron are our kids and this column is a collection of ‘drop-off’ lessons I have with them while driving them to their schools. The lessons are roughly ~15 minutes for each child and we talk about math in the car. Alexa was born in ’97 and is currently a 8-year-old 2nd grader and Byron was born in ’01 and is currently a four-year-old preschooler. They both go to Montessori Schoolhouse in Tucson, Az. Both kids love their schools and are thriving well.
Based on my experience at work teaching other students (grades 2 – Calculus III), I designed a general approach to introduce math so that our kids will not struggle with math down the road. Although I have a general idea on what, how and why I’m introducing each topic the way I’m teaching them, I do not have a set time line. I believe the most important thing I can pass to our kids, when it comes to education, is to help them have fun. To that extent, if ever, they say they don’t feel like ‘playing with math’, I find other things to have fun with them (play with pun, with jokes, with foreign language, etc., etc.).
One thing I realized early on in my professional teaching life is that foundation of math (from Calculus down) is in addition (details are in “Addition: Why it’s important for your child’s math future). It may sound ridiculous, yet over and over again, the math struggles my students go through have almost always stemmed from improper training in addition. Without solid work with addition, subtraction is hard, and that in turn makes the multiplication table hard. Since fractions are based on the multiplication table and weakness in fractions sets off a domino effect in algebra, geometry and trigonometry. Without trig, Calculus is impossible to tackle. You get the idea.
Children are so precious and they grow up so fast !! I hope you’ll find the entries to the math lessons for our kids useful. Nothing beats the joy of hearing my own kids brag to their friends that ‘math is easy and fun’.
Happy Zen Math!!
(c) Feenix Pan, 2005. All rights reserved.