Don't click if you feel great about how you teach your kids math
In which I tell you about the one hidden gem podcast that really will change your life
Math is Figure-Out-Able by Pam Harris
Does this: Makes teaching math to your (even very young) kids dead simple
Is this: A short and dense podcast that goes down surprisingly easily
Skip if: You could confidently teach your four year old about equivalent ratios.
Get where: Wherever pods are casted
Since this is my first post, I feel obligated to say MOST of my posts will not primarily be about giving you an assignment of 200 hours or so of back catalog of a podcast as homework. They will typically focus unashamedly on shortcuts and outsourcing to the iPad.
But this is one if really worth it, if you are serious about getting much better at teaching your kids math, and you had a very traditional 80s/90s math education in elementary school and haven’t updated your game since.
Let me start at the beginning. If you were like I was [1], before you had kids, you had not thought for a long, long time about how you learned to add or multiply.
Much less how to teach one’s own chaotic little charges how to do so.
I had a vague notion from hearing the (surprisingly ubiquitous!) 1965 Tom Lehrer song “New Math” that at some point there was a spirited debate about the best way to teach the basics.
But my own vague recollection about math education at public school number [redacted] felt decidedly old school. As in, rote memorization of a small set of procedures, and matching the problem to the procedure.
Whatever “new math” had burst forth onto the scene post WWII had seemingly come to some unfortunate roadblock before it was able to conquer our corner of the West Village in the 1980s.
So when my tiny humans came of age for gunning it on math (or, rather, well after the eldest had done so, but that I didn’t know until later [2]), I had to figure out what the heck I thought about teaching and learning math in the early years.
I only knew that I wanted it to make people more like my husband (who at one point was an academic mathematician), and less like me (someone who colored inside the math class lines, so to speak).
(Now, the very first person that got me off my butt to take action was a dear friend who is, perhaps not incidentally, an academic economist. That story and the surprisingly effective iPad game he recommended I will tell in a forthcoming post.)
But the ladies who really whipped me into shape at the molecular level are people I only WISH I knew IRL. Their names are Pam Harris and Kim Montague and they are the teachers math teaching goddesses that the math teachers themselves go to.
For free [3] on their math education podcast “Math is Figure-out-able,” they will lead you by the hand through the big ideas in contemporary math pedagogy for preschool through middle school.
Crucially, they will teach you exactly how to apply the theory in real-world, conversational settings with your children. Among other things, they teach a structured teaching method called “problem strings,” which fits organically into spare moments at home or in the car.
I use it to entertain my little ones while they eat their toast and eggs in the morning or with pencil and paper before toddler bedtime.
And these ladies do it all in bite-sized, accessible episodes you can listen to while you take your morning sunlight walk (I see you, and I envy you, Hubermaniacs). (Or, more realistically, washing dishes.)
Some choice eps to get started
I Have, You Need (a game to really start to cook on addition and subtraction)
Top Ten Influencers (if you want to get some leads on texts and education researchers to check out, once you’re ready to go further)
If you wind up listening, please let me know what you think!
Happy learning,
Sophie
Notes:
[1] Unburdened by exposure to contemporary math pedagogy due to neither being a hobbyist or education professional
[2] More on the right age to start another time. But the rule of thumb “Try at 2, if you strike out then again at 3, and just keep trying again every six months if it doesn’t take” is not a bad strategy.
[3] If you don’t value the opportunity cost of your time…