Part of figuring out how to help kids grow up comfortable with math, is to understand what math is. If you ask a group of first graders to describe math, the responses are very similar. Math is adding and taking away. Older elementary students will add multiplying and dividing. When prodded to include more, there are often long pauses followed by kids giving the same answer but in a different way. Rarely does anyone describe math as shapes or patterns or estimating or measuring. And even when I ask why we learn math I still have kids trying to convince me that it’s because we need to know how many apples everyone ends up with.

And it’s true. Knowing how many apples everyone ends up with is important. But how exciting would it be to hear a group of kids say that we learn math so we can build a pen for our new rabbit or design a new backpack or figure out how long it would take to save to buy a go-cart!

And if kids believed that that was what math was all about, wouldn’t math actually be fun? Wouldn’t they look forward to math? But instead, they learn that math is something we do in school for a set amount of time, that it usually involves following some sort of rules in a specific order, and we use a pencil to do it. In other words…math is not very exciting.

I don’t think we deliberately set out to teach kids that math is boring. I think it happens as a consequence of a couple of things.

First, we teach math as a subject in school that fits “nicely” into a series of lessons in a textbook. We learn one concept then spend a couple of pages practicing it. Then we learn the next concept and spend another couple of pages practicing it. And so on. It gets pretty mundane and…boring. (I’d like to note, however, that there are plenty of teachers who are trying desperately to change this through integrating math with hands-on projects. My hat off to them in this unforgiving environment of standardized testing.)

The other reason I don’t think math is very exciting is that we typically have a very shallow definition of what math is, as indicated by the responses received by kids. We tend to reduce math to arithmetic. And solving a set of arithmetic problems is…well…boring.

But when we understand the true nature of math, we realize that it is so much more than computation.

So what, then, is math? Math is a way of thinking about and describing our world through problem-solving. It’s figuring out how much time you’ll need to get ready for school or knowing if there’s enough milk to last another day or figuring out how long it will take to get to grandmas. We may use arithmetic to help us solve these problems, but arithmetic, by itself, is meaningless. The power of math comes in the real-life application, in the problem-solving. And when we understand this, we learn that math happens to be supremely useful in just about everything we do throughout the day. We just need to begin recognizing it.

How do we do this?

Start by being aware of and “advertising” the math that we do daily. For example:

Look how that cup holds more milk than this cup. (measurement)
I have two more crackers than you. One, two. (comparing, counting)
We need one spoon for each person. (one-to-one correspondence)
How many steps do you think it will take to get to the top of this staircase? (estimating, counting)
Can you help me put these in order from smallest to largest? (ordering, measurement)
That window is made up of a lot of rectangles. Let’s count how many. (geometry, counting)
This shape has one, two, three sides. Hey, that makes it a triangle. (geometry, counting)

When we talk about math this way, kids will see math as simply something we do and doing math then becomes natural. And if we periodically make the connections between what they’re doing and the fact that it’s related to math, we’ll create positive associations with math.

Hey, I really like how you solved that math problem by putting the triangles together to make rectangles for your ramp.

When we teach math as a natural extension of our daily lives, kids find it useful and meaningful. But, more importantly, it begins to make sense. And things that make sense make us comfortable.

We need to capitalize on this because kids who feel they can do math develop confidence in their math ability. And that’s good because as kids go up the academic ladder where math becomes more non-practical* and abstract this confidence is the foundation on which they’ll build their higher level math skills.

So begin by changing the definition of math from calculations to problem solving. Then be aware of the math that you are surrounded by in your everyday life. Find opportunities to draw out and discuss the math with your kids. More than you may know, math is a huge part of your everyday life. Now you just need to recognize and announce it.

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*There’s still a lot that kids can learn even when the math may not relate directly to their lives. It comes in the form of learning to think through problems, strategize, organize, evaluate, and, my favorite, persist.

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