For the Love of Math
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Don’t look! The Product of your cards is 81. Can you figure out your card’s value?
Children love what their parents love, well, at least until they’re teenagers. For example, a beautiful mom-friend of mine who played professional soccer has four daughters who are true soccer prodigies. She instilled in them a love of the game and spent tons of time in the backyard drilling toe touches and passes. Another family I know gave their child a love for horticulture and husbandry. Others have raised incredible violinists and artists by investing hours a day together. My poor kids have a couple of teachers for parents, who raised them to love groan-eliciting puns, correcting grammar on TV, computing mental math and singing The Magic Flute at ear-piercing volume & pitch. They often blame us for their nerd bent, “Why couldn’t you have been really into basketball, skiing or something cool?”
Unfortunately, the inverse is also true. Kids tend to dislike what their parents dislike. Mathematics has suffered a progressively worsening reputation with each generation. I’ll spare the rampage of how curriculum experts have boiled math down to the procedures and formulas but also divorced it from its context and application, its story. Why do I need to know this? How will I use algebra in life? We never ask this question about Shakespeare; we learn it to enjoy it and appreciate the skill that created the masterpieces. Math too is a part of this great story of human innovation.
My advice to parents is this: If you want your kids to do well in math, they need to love it. And your kids will only fall in love with math if you love it…or at least take it out on a few dates and enjoy its company. Here are a few ideas of how to love math together.
Math in Play
From time to time, our youngest makes demands. Screen time, dessert, new toys are a daily expectation. So being the just and righteous parents we are, we bribe her to practice good behavior and use the opportunity to sneak in a little math lesson.
“When you can say, ‘Yes, Mommy’ and follow my instructions 10 times, you’ll get a prize.”
“OK, yes, Mommy. How many is that?
“2 so 8 more to go. 2 and 8 make ten.” (Make 10 Pairs)
We divert impatience with a little lesson on time. “You can watch a show in one minute.”
“One minute is so looooong.”
“It’s not that long, it’s just 60 seconds. Can you count to sixty with me?”
For clean up, we practice doubles: “If you pick up one toy, I’ll pick up two.”
“What if I pick up 2?”
“Then I’ll pick up 4!”
Math Games
Limiting math to homework keeps it in the “do I have to?” chore category, but mathematicians developed it more like a game for sheer pleasure. It’s much more enjoyable to practice math facts during family game nights. My favorite game is Math Headbands where 2 players put a normal playing card on their foreheads (without looking at it) and a facilitator gives the product of the two numbers. Then each player divides the product by their opponent’s card to figure out their own! For younger students I give the sum and they subtract instead. Black Jack and other card games are really effective! Dominoes are great too, and I love doing competitive mental math dice games with this Pound-of-Dice.
Math to Music
Music is the fastest way to learn multiplication facts. Our oldest learned Skip Counting Songs at age 4 and was multiplying at age 5. It was an easy transition to stamp an array of rows and columns, point & sing to give the numbers of the songs real mathematical meaning! She still uses them occasionally in Advanced Algebra.
Math History
Learning the story of how math came to be this tedious subject in school makes a huge difference. It’s a narrative with passion, intrigue, and real people. Throughout history Mathematicians have fought each other, won wars and even been executed!
Archimedes (287-212 BC) helped defend his hometown of Syracuse against Romans and Phoenician invaders during the Punic Wars by calculating the force of a crane nicknamed “The Claw” to lift a ship out of the water, shake its passengers loose and crush them.
Hypatia (350-415) was violently flayed on her way home from teaching math at the Museum of Alexandria accused of influencing students with her Greek paganism and politics in a newly Christian Roman Empire.
Isaac Newton rivaled G. W. Leibniz from 1699-1716 over who came up with calculus first. Modern calculus students still learn their two diverse notation systems.
Sophie Germain (1776-1831) read about Archimedes as a child and wanted to grow up to be just like him. Later she spent the Reign of Terror confined at her Paris home studying differential calculus. Turns out she was a lover not a fighter. As a woman, she couldn’t attend a university, so she posed as a man and completed correspondence courses until she was found out!
Sofya Kovalevskaya (1850-1891) grew up in a nursery wallpapered with her father’s calculus notes. By the time she was 11, she learned calculus. Eventually she was the first woman to earn a Ph.D in mathematics.
The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdos (1913-1996) tells the story of a nomadic Hungarian couch surfer who knit together the global math community by working with 512 mathematician co-authors. To date 13,113 mathematicians have an Erdös number of 1 or 2, certainly a bigger game than “Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” During the McCarthy Trials, he was exiled from the US as a spy for his unusual lifestyle and math correspondence with a Chinese citizen.
With all of these resources available, we wish you and your family a wonderful new relationship with our friend math. We hope you’ll be very happy together!
Also published in the column Live & Learn, The Crier, Southern Marin Mothers Club, Feb 2022
