Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Column: Why our kids hate math

And don't forget item #0: replace almost all of the existing elementary math teachers with people who are not afraid of math.

One of my dark secrets is that I spent one term in an elementary ed (MAT) program, in which 28 out of the carefully-selected cohort of 30 graduate students openly admitted to being math-phobic. The exceptions: myself, and a second-career individual coming from an entrepreneurial background. Aagh! And there's the answer to the question of poor math achievement in NA.

While this problem does not affect our children, the classroom setting does. By having students in their classroom that hate math, they are not getting a good classroom experience.

Fortunately, our children take the class early (not in 8th or high school).

This was the point I was considering adding to this conversation. Most of our early elementary teachers are afraid of math and do a terrible time teaching the subject.

Yeah-- and I realize that isn't terribly PC to mention, but the problem IS at the teaching and classroom level as well as at a curricular/structural one.

Maybe if elementary educators were less phobic about STEM themselves, they'd be a bit less threatened by children who are obviously highly capable and interested in those subjects, too.

BUT by High School the students in my High School are tracked and there is something like 9 different levels a regular (not in special ed) sophomore at the local high school can take. I've been pleased to see that the school now had a two year algebra class. Before that was an option students were being forcing into Algebra since it was required, many of those kids would fail because it was going to fast for them. Now at my school there are one or two kids who take Calculus as freshman, and there is a class for kids not even ready for Algebra.

It still doesn't fix the fact that by that time, those students are still starting with 8 years' worth of hash for a math foundation.

The pace at the high school level would still need to be differentiated, granted-- but the real issue is that NO amount of slowing the pace can compensate adequately for not having learned basic number sense in 1st through 4th grade. The mathy kids are fine-- they just need better opportunities to go further, faster. The problematic side of things is actually on the other end of the distribution-- mostly.

There are those kids who COULD be competent if they'd had reasonably good instruction, but aren't because they have not. My DD is a kid who could have been one of those, probably-- except that we intervened early and often when we saw it happening.

That is true and there is very LITTLE math differentiation until 4th grade when GATE kicks in, and all kids are tracked by 7th. But in elementary all the students of the same grade are expected to work in the same book at approximately the same speed. Really discourages those who miss something at the beginning and really frustrates the gifted math students.

This is why DD11 is taking Algebra I at her school in the fall... and attending a math tutoring center that has her working on division. In 3rd grade she had a nightmare experience with math (extreme pressure, public shaming, bullying) with a teacher who had no experience teaching math and no interest in hearing our input. She has such a block about it that it's only because of her LOG that she's managed to compensate and keep doing well in the higher classes. But it's getting progressively harder and slower for her because she gets stuck on the basic stuff. The tutoring center is doing a dual job of teaching her the skills she needs to know and nurturing her through a kind of numeracy PTSD.

Now for her it's less of an issue. After all, the only reason she's pushing to take Algebra this year (as opposed to, say, repeating pre-Algebra) is because she's adamant about needing it to meet her goals. But for kids who have had years of bad math curriculum (with potentially some bad teaching thrown in) hitting Algebra in 9th grade would be ROUGH.

For DD algebra concepts come easy and if she can use a calculator she's good (if a little lacking in confidence). But something about memorizing her multiplication and division triggers near panic. I hope that continued exposure on the side will help it come together for her.

And then there are the stealth kids, which I'm starting to realize my kid is one of. (What's the equivalent of stealth dyslexia, stealth innumeracy?)

For those following our summer math adventures, we started where school left off, doing 2nd grade math. Then I realized that struggling with her math facts was making 2-digit stuff unneccessarily hard, so we started memorizing addition with TimezAttack.

And THEN, just a couple of days ago, I tried her on DreamBox again just for a lark, and it's kind of amazing what it's revealing to me. It has her working on 1st and even K stuff, and it's like watching these little explosions go off in her brain. She says things like, "Now I know what eighteen LOOKS LIKE!" She's getting it for the first time WHY, for example, 9 + 2 = 11. It's not just a weird combination you memorize, or an answer you arrive at by doing a rote algorithm with your fingers. There's an actual REASON for it, that you can VISUALIZE.

So here's my kid, with her wacky visuo-spatial sense, heading into 2nd grade math with an entire year grade-skip because she's been compensating with her freakishly large verbal working memory.

I've completely revised our goals for the summer -- if we do nothing else besides DreamBox through 1st grade, and learn some math facts, so that she's not starting 2nd grade math on "wet cardboard," I shall be very well pleased.

Stealth dyscalculia. Though I find that they usually have working memory or visual-spatial issues. Sounds like your kid was never given a good foundation in number sense. It's one of the things I like about Singapore Math.