Door-2-Math Blog

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.

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!

(C) Feenix Pan, 2008. All rights reserved.

“Why would I want to do that?” asked Johnny to his mother, Teresa. The three of us, mother, so and I were sitting on my round table. Johnny is a 7th grader and Teresa holds an advanced degree in Chemistry. Johnny’s grades have improved steadily, and phase II of his program is now in full swing. During this phase, Johnny’s mother is invited back to work directly with Johnny with me as an observer and facilitator.

“Don’t use that tone on me,” rebutted his mother to Johnny. Now, there is no doubt in my mind that their relationship is a love one for I have watched their interaction for 3 months when the program started. Since protecting and nurturing a child’s confidence is the name of the game, in the past when sensing non-constructive interaction is about to take over, I stop the conversation and ask the parent to simply observe my work with the student and leave it at that.

“I’m not!” Johnny shot back before I had chance to say a thing.

“Now there, Johnny,” I reached over and patted Teresa gently so she could hold her tongue a bit longer, “what got you frustrated just then?”

“Well, she thinks she knows the stuff, but what she teaches me just confuses me. The teacher at school does not do it the same way.”

“Hm….so you don’t see why your mom asked you to rewrite that fraction in a different way?”

“No. Do you?”

“I do, Johnny. See the thing is I can see where you got stuck and also why your mother thought her suggestion would be helpful. I can see both because this is what I do for living. If you put me in your mom’s shoes as a chemist, I have no clue which liquid to pour where.”

“Well, if you put it that way.”

“See, huh, I don’t see what you see, Johnny.” Teresa interjected. “I’m here to learn from how to work with you. I am as new at this as you are. I haven’t seen this stuff since I was in my teens!”

Right then and there, it dawned on me that I need not worry about parent-child pecking. When love and devotion are present, a communication bridge will connect Teresa’s solution to Johnny’s problem if I could help them see what each does not see.

“Try this, Teresa” I said, “when Johnny is fighting your help, ask him ‘Do you see what I see?’” Quick, sharp and devoted as she is, Teresa picked it up right way. “He is not angry with my help, is he?”

“No, I’m not. I just don’t see what you see, Mom.”

“Give me a place to pivot, I’ll move the Earth”, Archimedes once said. Well, there you are, pivot on the phrase ‘Do you see I see’ when you feel your Johnny is rejecting your help.

Happy Zen Math!

(C) Feenix Pan, 2008. All Rights Reserved.