Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy advocacy and passion for Math

DS9 definitely has a passion for Math. He actually shakes and bounces when he is excited about it. I believe he inherited this from his Dad. DH was told be was the best college student in statistic the teacher ever had. DH comes across situations in everyday life and analyses it and turns into a math problem. He shares this with the kids and they are very interested.

So I'm wondering about passion for Math and advocacy. I'm thinking about ways to keep this going are Math Mentors, Online courses with class interaction and Math clubs.

I'm thinking it's hard to share the Math Passion in regular Math classes. Am I wrong?

Does anybody have anymore insight to encourage Math passion to be considered with advocacy? What's your experience with Math Mentors? Is a tudor the same thing as a mentor. I should read the Davidson mentor guide.

There were a couple folks on this board who had had success in finding good, enthusiastic math mentors and I want to say they were located in university towns. One had a math grad student, I believe. I think tutors are different--they want to help with current coursework but won't necessarily think up new extensions (that's what one tutor told me when I was trying to find a mentor). If you don't live in a university town and can't locate someone to mentor, one suggestion is AoPS (art of problem solving). It provided my son a "math community" exactly at age 9--albeit online. My ds was so excited to "meet" other math-talented kids and participate in fast-paced classes. For a while he did the FTW (For the Win)--it's a game where kids challenge each other to solve problems and see who can do it faster. It was a good start. Since then, DS shared math passion at jhu cty summer camp (inductive & deductive reasoning) and an online Fractal Math course. I tried to convince him MathPath camp this summer (for 11-14 yr olds) would be great for him, but he declined (I think he'll entertain the idea next summer after a teacher at school also recommended it).

thank you.

I have a DS5 that is passionate about Math as well. He has a math mentor type person at school and is going to start a local math class for gifted kids in a few weeks on Saturdays. Also, not sure if you have math olympiads at your school but that would be fun, I think that is generally grades 4-8...but they may make exceptions. Our school requested that DS start it next year but I am not sure yet. I also want to recommend that you look into fun Math books. My DS loves the Penrose books (here is a link for the first one):

http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Pe...mp;s=books&qid=1264692040&sr=8-1

Also, just books about Math and proportions are fun. We found this at our library recently....and a bunch of others that I can't recallt the name of. There are so many cool math books and stories out there.

http://www.amazon.com/Very-Improbab...mp;s=books&qid=1264692098&sr=1-1

I have heard the murderous math books are neat but haven't gotten those yet, and the life of Fred books.

Good luck, I enjoy math but I never thought Math would be such a main focus in my house. : )

shellymos -
thanks, it's nice to hear you have some great math things going. I never thought I'd be doing so much with Math either. My husband is the calculator head in the family, but I'm here the most so it falls in my hands.

I'm in luck my library has the two book you suggested.

DS's math mentor was just reading this book with him this week:

http://www.amazon.com/Dogs-Were-Din...mp;s=books&qid=1264815694&sr=8-1

It's a neat book about proportions. Apparently DS wants to solve this problem: if a computer monitor was the size of Mount Everest, how big would a computer key be? I guess they are going to do some research and figure it out together.

Shellymos -Thanks you. I ordered the book from our library. It looks fun.