As I was visiting Parenting Magazine for a completely different reason other then math, a blog post caught my eye. Well…okay, I must admit, the blog picture caught my eye as an obsessed homeschooling mamma. I saw these fantastic flashcards and wanted them! Then I read the article that went with them and my mind started churning.
photo courtesy of Parenting Magazine
New Math. It made me think of the Tom Lehrer song, which had my husband and me rolling on the floor as we listened while shaking our heads, tears streaming down our faces. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that funny. But it was pretty funny!
Is this the same New Math he was singing about? What is New Math? Or Reform Math? Or Inquiry Math? According to the teachers interviewed by Parenting Magazine it is
…a catchall phrase for a group of new methodologies that aim to teach students how to reason their way through a problem instead of simply regurgitating a set of facts and formulas to get the answer…
Sounds a lot like living math. Sounds a lot like homeschooling math. Usually I find homeschooling curriculum trying to find different ways of teaching concepts that a public school teaches. But in this instance it seems we’re on the same page which, I admit, raises my hair a bit.
When I was first looking into math programs for Gabe this new way of learning was exactly what I wanted for him. In fact, when I was introduced to Math U See this is exactly what I liked about the program. It was so different then how I learned. I wanted that for Gabe. I wanted him to never ask the question, “And how am I going to really use this in real life?” So we bought the program and he has done wonderfully with it. Of course, his amazing math abilities stem much more from who God created him to be naturally and less to do with the actual program. This I didn’t come to see until Lily started down the same path. I quickly realized she was blessed in mathemetical abilities about as much as her mother, that is to say not at all! So I was going to have to actually teach her this material. And the only way I knew how to teach was the way I had been taught…the old math..finger counting, carrying the one, borrowing, tens columns, and plain old memorization.
But this week I was reminded that it really doesn’t matter which program you are using or not using or plan to use. It matters that your children understand with the least amount of tears. This week I spent two one-on-one sessions with each of my children and was so glad we homeschool.
Did you ever have one of those lessons where the teacher was asking you to do something that didn’t make any sense and actually distracted you from doing the work the way you’d normally do it? And you know the lesson is to teach you why something is done the way it is but it ends up being more distracting then helpful? That is Gabe’s lesson this week. I admit, I don’t watch the lessons with him. He is mathematically inclined and does just fine watching the teaching DVD then doing the lesson on his own. But today I heard whines of why he just couldn’t get this long division problem and after a half hour of him struggling and only getting four problems done, two of them wrong, I stepped in. He tried to explain to me what the DVD was explaining to him. I had NO CLUE what he was talking about!
But the great thing about homeschooling is…
I told him to ignore everything his lesson is trying to teach him and just work the problems. (Didn’t you ever want to tell you teacher this at least once during a math lesson???) When I realized he couldn’t because of the now mass-confusion swimming in his head, we threw out all he knew of long division and went back to the drawing board. For this homeschool mom going back to the drawing board means doing what works for you in real life. I showed him how I did division and I saw everything click for him. “This is easy, mom!” So much for new math!
And the same went for Lily this week. As she is moving on in money counting to mixing dollars with cents, she was introduced to that pesky decimal point. She already has problems understanding place value so how to explain? I did the same as what I did for Gabe…explained using what works best for me. Once she got it, she really got it.
So my point, you ask? Don’t feel bad as a homeschooling momma that you grew up learning touch-point adding and still find yourself doing that in the grocery aisle. Don’t feel bad that you use a calculator for any two-digit long division number. Math ultimately comes down to doing what works at the time you need it, whether in your head or with a calculator. (Isn’t that what the unschoolers keep trying to tell us?) And you may have invested in some new math program that your kid excels in…or hates, but the bottom line will be how do you, as teacher, explain it so that they get it?
Math U See ~ $65
Right Start Math ~ $50-$150
Teaching Textbooks ~ $120
Your kid getting it ~ Priceless!
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simply necessary 