Door-2-Math Blog

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.

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!

Have you ever heard about the “pencil treatment”? If not, you’re not alone. I didn’t know what pencil treatment was either until today during a lunch meeting with a couple of good friends, one of whom is an accomplished surgeon.

“The pencil treatment,” my surgeon friend said, ” is placing a pencil in between my fingers and squeezing it hard when mom noticed that I was drifting off in doing my reading assignment.”

“Ouch!” I said.

“Well, it was so painful that from an early age I learned to spend my time efficiently – get the job done well the first time .

“So you can play.” his wife finished for him. For most of us, we wouldn’t dare to think about such thing as the “pencil treatment”, let alone using or coming up with one. (who knows what Dr. Spock would say!) One can’t help but think of this surgeons courage and his mother who made a lifelong contribution to her son. She taught him the best way she knew how and was rewarded with seeing her son reach his full potential. I don’t believe in corporal punishment or that the end justifies the means, but you do have to wonder “have we gone too soft when it comes to tough love” as a whole generation?

Yet one can’t help