I'm starting a new series of blog posts, What Do You Think? (thanks to Drs. Courtney Koestler and Angie Gibbs for the name of this series), that explore what child-centered mathematics looks like in a way that is accessible to parents and the general public. I'm hoping I can stick with this and make regular posts. Click the "What Do You Think?" button at the top or click "WDYT? Blog" in the link bar to see all the posts.
Many of my posts will feature stories about my child Parker (P said it was okay for me to post about his math thinking). Some of my posts will feature some pretty cool math that Parker can do. This isn't to make Parker seem gifted, but instead to illustrate what can happen when kids are given rich opportunities to build on their own intuitive sense-making abilities. Most young children like math, they enjoy figuring out how to solve problems. Reasoning about quantity, space, and patterns is found in all cultures across the globe. It is an innate part of human expression. Unfortunately, as children enter school they often encounter something very different than what I think of as math—they encounter "school math" and in many schools it is miserable.* It turns children off of math because school math generally involves memorizing strategies you don't understand for no other reason than to please the teacher or to get a good grade. I equate the way math is taught in most schools to only learning the rules of grammar in language arts class and never having a chance to appreciate literature.
* This isn't the fault of teachers, but rather it is a systemic issue that teachers are trapped in (I'll explore why school math is so often problematic in future posts).
Next Time
I talk about reading the book A Remainder of One.