Door-2-Math Blog

Most children will show you how they want to learn. Your job is to observe first and follow their lead. This is the most efficient way to impart knowledge to your child.

One day, I was scooping up rice into my hands to make some rice balls for my son at the dinner table. As I was putting the rice ball into his plate, one by one, out of nowhere he started to repeat after me. “one”, he said “two” I said. “Two” he said. “Three”, I said. “Three” he said. As you guessed it, I went out an started counting everything after that.

Our daughter was more of a self-learner. From very early on, I noticed that she waited to examine the toys I played with after I was done with the. To facilitate her learning, I played with this green toy frog that sang “one-little, two-little, three-little Indians”.  It paused and then waited for me to push the next number – a button with 4 on it, then the frog continued counting. After watching me several times, our daughter picked it up without any further instructions from me. To my amazement, one day I came home and found that she mastered the entire alphabet from the buttons on the same frogs belly!

Let your child lead, then follow…

Learning is a marathon, not a sprint. Resist the urge to push. As they say, there is no “free lunch” – protect a young child’s curiosity for they see not what you value as the importance of math – their college and career choices. They see fun and that is all they see. Can’t make learning math fun? Then don’t do it at the expense of lost curiosity. One can always find another teacher to teach math, but only you can protect your child’s curiosity. Guard it as if your child’s happiness depends on it – for it does.

Teaching and managing my student’s math potential comes easy and naturally for me. Maybe it’s because I struggled myself when I was young or maybe I can hear the unspoken questions in my student’s mind. Whatever life ingredients are in the art of teaching math, I’ve breathed them in.

Running a small business, especially marketing, now that’s an entirely different task. I’ve yet able to wrap my arms around the whole concept of “word of mouth marketing” or “permission marketing” or the “guerilla marketing” before another current trendy marketing wave crashes to the shore. So imagine my shock when one of my 9th graders announced to me “just buy me a pair of movie tickets and I’ll tell all my soccet teammates about your program.”

“A pair of movie tickets?”

“Yeah. I like going to movies and without your help in math, I’d be grounded for failing math in the first place.”

Now you realize that for the past seven years I’ve been paying on average seven thousand dollars per year on marketing with limited success at best. And a pair of movie tickets costs less than thirty bucks.!

So my point is this: what have you been paying in your life when it comes to your kids that is also 7000:30 or 233 times less efficient? Is it really the $400 iphone that your kids must have? Is it really the $7000 ski trip? What are your kids really asking for?

And did I take my student’s offer? You bet!