I’m seeing something in the education world I’m not really thrilled with. Maybe because it’s my favorite subject- math? 😉
Both of my children have struggled with math. It doesn’t surprise me at all. Their parents did, so it would be understandable that they would. But the reasons they have struggled are different.
My son has a math disability called Dyscalculia. You haven’t heard of it? Not many have. But it affects the brain similarly to Dyslexia only with regards to numbers. It’s been referred to as the “Dyslexia for numbers.” Math has always been a huge struggle for him and probably always will.
Our daughter doesn’t have Dyscalculia, but she does have Dyslexia, and in 1st and 2nd grades math was taught to her almost exclusively through word problems. That’s a problem when you are struggling to read.
We finally caught up with reading and then in 3rd grade, her teacher was a first year teacher and there were a lot of children with discipline issues in her class. This led to the class constantly being evacuated from the classroom for safety reasons that year. Third grade is when you learn multiplication tables, a key part of math building blocks. It feels like we’ve been playing catch up her entire educational career.
Both of my children are now in middle school, and in a recent IEP meeting, I stressed that if we could just get my son to get the 4 basic functions of math down I would be happy. I didn’t learn algebra until this past January. I’ve never needed it. I will probably never need it again. So I’m not really concerned with him not going further in math at this point. If we can, great! If not, at least with the basics he can function in life.
Yet I was disturbed when the Special Education teacher replied that anymore, they are just teaching kids how to use a calculator.
Yes, it is true that kids, now, have access to calculators on pretty much every device. And let’s face it, devices are rarely out of their hands.
But does that mean we should just forget teaching them Math?
In my statistics class earlier this year my professor was extremely cognizant that even though we had calculators that could do all the crazy formulas so we didn’t have to memorize them all, he still felt it was important to teach us how the calculator was getting it’s answers. We had to master that before he would allow us to use the calculator.
None of us liked figuring out all those formulas by hand. But doing so gave us key information. We understood where the numbers were coming from and what the answer actually meant. Without spending time putting in the work, these are things most of us would not have understood.
Our children need this. They need to understand. Understanding seems to be in short supply in our world. Learning to understand something, putting the work into it, brings a sense of accomplishment. That ability that they gained, that learning how to understand something, translates over into other areas of their lives.
My children (and I) will likely never be math geniuses. But I’m going to keep pushing to make sure they understand basic math. Just because something is hard, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work for it.
