To Whom Does the Pencil Belong: How NOT to Teach Math at Home
When I was young, math was a scary thing. It was scary for two reasons: one, I simply didn’t get it and two, the scary of the scary, was that Mom and Dad didn’t get that I didn’t get math. I remember dreading the pending ‘homework’ help after dinner when the last grain of dropped rice on our small dinner table was picked off and someone, somewhere said ‘now let’s take a look at your math homework’. I could still feel my stomach got tighter and was ready to throw out the food that I just ate! Being a child who did not understand math and trying to complete my math homework was like being dropped off into a different world where everyone speaks a different language and I had no clue what’s been said. The feeling was always that the joke was on me.
Now that I’m on the other side of the ‘mountain’ and having started a business in teaching math for a living, I look back and understand what it was that I couldn’t verbalized to my parents back then when they tried to help me. And that is: Please Don’t Grab My Pencil.
Grab pencil? You might be wondering what on earth I’m talking about. You’re not alone.
In the past few years, while working with parents who wish to help their children on the math, I noticed that sooner or later, the child’s pencil ends up in the parents’ hands and lo and behold, that’s when the tension goes way up and a fight is imminent – tears start to flow, voices are raised, papers are pushed around and within minutes, either the child or the parent, sometimes both, give up. They look at me and say ‘you see, we can’t work together on math!’
Working with your child on his/her math homework does not have to end with a ‘volcano eruption’. One of the most useful and productive things I ask parents to do is to refrain from grabbing their kids’ pencils. Sounds almost too trivial to do, yet over the years, the results are unbelievable.
I had one student whose mother had several advanced degrees and happened to be very passionate about mathematics – she didn’t know that she was grabbing her son’s pencil and solving his math problems all along. When I first pointed out to her, she said, ‘oh, no, but he is solving the problem himself – I just help him out.’ Determined to help them, I asked the mother, ‘Can you sit across from your son and try the next problem with him from there?’ She took up the challenge and within minutes, her son’s pencil was in her hand again – she had grabbed it across the table without even realizing it!! What the mom shared with me later was that having a typical type A personality, watching her son struggling in each and every one of the steps was too much to take – it was much easier and quicker to just show him how to do it. Except that over the years ‘showing’ had became ‘doing’ without her noticing it.
We tried several things for her to temporarily occupy herself when she sat down to help her son with his math homework and in the end, reading a trade magazine worked for her. When her son asked a question, she was instructed to listen and then, without using his pencil but one of her own, she’d answer his question and go back to reading her magazine. Over the course of a few months, the quality of his math questions improved from a generalized ‘how do you do this problem’ to very specific ones like ‘I don’t see why you’d have to find common denominator first’. Not only did the mother-and-son relationship improve, so did the son’s math performance. Upon completion of the math program with me, the mother jokingly said, ‘only if I knew it was that darn pencil!’
Pencil or not, the key to successfully transfering your math knowledge is to give your child the space to be.
Seriously, can you imagine when your car broke down and you went to a mechanic – only to have him grab the car keys from your and show you how you should’ve been driving? Would you ever go back to the same mechnic again? See, you and I have choices when it comes to our mechanics for our cars, but our children do not have a choice when it come to having us as their parents. We are stuck with our kids and they are stuck with us – or like we say it in Chinese, ‘we are stuck together like cooked rice.’ Suddenly, ‘be and letting be’ takes on a new meaning and letting go of that pencil may just be the key to unlock the door to math for your child!
Happy Zen Math!! (c) 2006 Feenix Pan. All Rights Reserved.