Door-2-Math Blog

We took our two young kids to see Avatar this past Saturday. Having cried her eyes out over Titanic, the other James Cameron movie, I was glad to hear our 12-year old daughter commenting “that was a fun movie!”. Our 8-year old, however, did not weather it well. First he refused to cry when the old holy tree got shot down; then he picked a fight and pushed his sister’s buttons before the movie credits went up. I offered to hold him and even encouraged his tears because, I told him, “grown up men cry too” but the mood didn’t change.

“Would you like to plant something of your own?” my daughter solicited once I whispered how sad the movie had made her brother. And that was exactly what he needed! I guess somehow planting and the prospect of taking care of a “tree” of his own made it okay to shed tears without crying.

Thyme, out of all the herbs was the one my son picked up at the nursery. Thyme heals.

Say you have a child who has lost interest in school and refuses to do his homework. (Nightmare for parents, I know). By posing the question “help me understand why you choose to ignore your homework assignments” gives you, the parent, a much better footing then asking “why do you choose not to finish your homework?”

The phrase “help me understand” puts your personal interest/agenda/intention secondary to that of your “opponent”. This gives the other person the room to spill his/her concerns/objectives. Only when all the agenda, hidden or otherwise, are in plain sight, can you effectively guide the subsequent discussion to friution.

If “help me understand” leads to your child confessing “math is just too hard” you have one solution that would be different to if he dumps “nothing I do ever satisfies you and Dad anyway”. The point is that unless you know what the real objection is, you’ve got no chance to influence the other person’s war on you.

Try it next time when you’re about to scream “why” again. You may find your child’s aversion to (math) homework is not to “push your button” after all.

Having a strong math foundation is the surest way to prevent math struggle. Just how do parents go about building that strong math foundation? The rule of thumb is subtract your child’s age from 21 and that’s close to the weekly # of hours a parent ought to use on building the math foundation at home. So for a typical 7 year old 1st grader, that comes to about 14 hours per week or 3 hours per day, 5 times a week. Shokingly long? And for a 18 year old senior, that number is roughly 3 hours per week, enough to complete the homework assignment each time the class meets. Shockingly short?

If you find it counterintuitive, you’re not alone. The vast majority of families have the upside down pyramid – spending very little time if any on building the math foundation when kids are young, then panicking and insisting on long hours of study when math tumbles over when the student enters high school. By then, the amount of math material is daunting, with adolescent hormones and the breakdown of parent-child communication, plus peer pressure, you have a total math meltdown. Adding salt to injury, grades matter all of a sudden. Colleges want to know that your child had what it takes to succeed, so an F in Algebra 1 Freshman year somehow matters more than a B+ in Trigonometry in senior year.

“It’s just not fair!” one of my seniors with a 2.75 GPA complains. He is right. The system is not fair, especially since he worked so hard to raise his trig grade from an F to 91%.

3 hours of math sounds like a tall order to fill even for the most ambitious type A parent who buys in to start early. The trick is to divide and conquer: take them grocery shopping, point out the sale items and see how much you save; take them to the mailbox and add the zip codes up on the junk mail pieces; take them to the gas station and watch the gas  meter go up as you pump gas… The point is math is all around, you don’t have to use Asian drill sessions hours on end. The point is if math building is on your mind, it’ll be on your kids.