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By the lovely Grace Farris. Her new book, See One, Do One, Teach One: the Art of Becoming a Doctor, comes out March 24.
P.S. What it feels like to parent a teen, and which hot drink are you?
The Mathematical Parenting Point of No Return
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Haha—relatable!
Check out the amazing work of Denise Gaskins! She conceives of math as very different from a linear acquisition of skills. She’s a treasure trove of playful games that get you and your kids to ponder math’s puzzles rather than just look for the one solution.
My daughter came home recently having been told that two linear equations can have 1, 0, or infinite solutions but wondered what it would mean to have half a solution. We came up with all sorts of fun answers. You don’t have to know the answer, you can just model what it looks like to be curious and playful with math!
I’m a mathematician and I support this message :)
My 8 year-old is a math wizzard and I am really really bad at mathematics. So we have already reached this point.
At the same time though, my husband really cannot help my other children with maths. They are the child-version of me and my husband just really cannot understand why their brains cannot process numbers the way his does. So there is also a different kind of mathematical parenting point of no return.
My best friend (and my daughter’s Bonus Aunt) has a PHD in Mathematics and is so passionate about Math. I cannot wait to just tell my daughter to call her Aunt Katie to assist with math homework. Dr. Katie makes math so approachable and fun. It’s made me realize that I had some not so great Math instructors in my youth.
My college bestie is an engineer who is really good with math, so we’ve joked about how when my daughter is older (she is only 2 now), she will be on speed-dial for hard homework assistance. What a blessing to have those in our lives with varying strengths from ours!
Haha, I have been helping my 10th grader with sin, cosine, and tangent all week, so this feels VERY pertinent. I was an English major, but I’ve found that my kid’s teacher posts slides with her notes for each day’s lesson on Google classroom, and that gives me the info I need to talk him through the homework. Sometimes I wish he’d just do a better job of following along in class, but on the other hand, this is also quality time spent together at an age when that often feels in short supply!
I “do math” for a living (Finance) and I 100% have forgotten what COS does. and I really don’t want to remember….
I’m not a parent yet, and I’m curious about how much parents help their kids with homework.
I think my parents (smart and otherwise pretty involved) probably helped me with homework a total of 3 times when I was in K-12.
Is my experience an anomaly or have things changed in the last ~20 years?
I think it’s great that parents are helping their kids, and I know that different kids need different amounts of help, so this is asked without judgment.
I think the answer depends heavily on the homework expectations at your kid’s school. My kids are in 7th and 10th grade now, and the homework approach has shifted *significantly* in our school district as they’ve been growing up. When my older son was small, there was homework in first and second grades, for example. I did have to “help” with that homework, which meant getting him to sit down and actually do it. It was not fun for either of us . The elementary schools have since shifted away from assigning much homework — by the year my younger son was in 5th grade, there were a few projects that needed a little bit of parental assistance, but nothing routine.
The now-10th-grader does occasionally ask for help; he wanted me to help him review concepts for his chemistry midterm, for example. At one point he needed me to drive him to Kinko’s to print something because we don’t have a color printer at home. The 7th grader missed a week of school this winter due to illness, and needed a bit of help connecting with one teacher by email about a missed assignment. But otherwise it’s quite rare that I am doing anything related to their homework.
I have kids in primary school and mainly help them by providing structured homework time. They sit across from me while I cook, so can ask questions if they need help. For the youngest kid, I mainly have to listen and correct while he learns how to read.
My oldest is very easily distracted, so I think my contribution is mainly keeping her focused and teaching her to organise her own work.
Sometimes teachers do give kids homework that is actually homework for the parent as well. (E.g. look up information on… for a kid that can barely read).
Very rarely typically. Maybe a little scaffolding for projects. My seventh grader is in a freshman level algebra class (not gonna advise people to go down this path) and he didn’t understand a few things at the beginning of the semester, didn’t ask for help, got a D on a test, and lately we’ve been coaching him and sitting near him while he does homework to get him back in a good spot. He’s building his organizational skills still. The class moves so quickly!!
My guess is that it depends on your kid and their situation.
It depends on the kid and the school. Our school is unusual in our community in that it gives kids A LOT of homework. In 4th grade my kids were doing 3 hours of homework per night. Our neighbors thought it was terrible and asked us why we tolerated that amount of work. I explained that they will always have to work hard and it’s good for
them to accept working hard at a young age. My kids stayed in that shcool through 12th grade. All 4 of my kids have ADHD and one of them has dyslexia and dysgraphia. My 2 oldest boys are now in college studying mechanical engineering and have thanked me so many times for keeping them in that school. They said so many of their classmates dome know how to do homework. They haven’t had much to do before. So many of their classmates switched majors because engineering requires a ton of work and they just don’t know how to work that hard.
My youngest son is a senior this year. He’s been on ADHD medication since 2nd grade. The fall of his freshman year the dean of his school called me to tell he he was failing half of his subjects. He needed a lot of help managing his time, learning how to take notes and figuring out what he had to do to retain and memorize information. I worked with his through his freshman and sophomore years of high school every day after school rewriting notes, quizzing him on his notes, etc. His junior year he had established good study habits and didn’t need me to help him study anymore. He has been doing very well. He was offered a nice scholarship to study business administration in college this
fall. He must have retained the information because he got a 33 on his ACT score. All his hard work and mine paid off.
After I had kids I realized I wasn’t going to be able to help them with their math homework. So I actually went back to college and got 2 degrees in math. I’m so glad I did! I was able to help my kids so much, and my daughter even went on to get a degree in math, too.
hahahaha! My college studies focused on math, so while at times I need to refresh my memory, I’m still actual assistance. I’ve enjoyed having them teach me some of the ‘new math’ in elementary school. There are some great techniques being used now! Options!
But this was 100% me when confidently offering my high schooler chemistry help! I looked at the work for about 10 seconds are realized that NOPE, I have no idea what to do with a question about atomic mass! Those memories are GONE!
Women, please stop saying you are bad at math!! It makes me so sad. I never hear men say this. I hope the next generation of young girls can let go of this stereotype.
From someone who thinks math is beautiful and elegant :)
Agree and I’d also like to add that just because you are not “fast” at math does not mean you are bad at math. Especially while the kiddos are learning it is actually good to slow down and digest it.
Yes, I agree with this. This comic plays to gendered stereotypes and makes me cringe.
I’ve seen comics about dads who feel this way about The New Math too!
In reality, math is like music, or drawing, or reading. Just because you aren’t world-class doesn’t mean you should be barred from enjoying it. Unfortunately our culture here in the US approaches it all wrong.
But I am bad at math and my husband is good at it. Maybe I live in a bubble but I’ve never known this to be a stereotype.
Agree, we do not need to perpetuate the girls/women bad at math stereotype! I do high level math/statistics for my job and I try and set a good example for my daughters.
Grace Farris is a doctor that went to Harvard. It’s not that deep.
Here is the thing about math that I wish someone had told me when I was in school. Math is hard. Math is hard for everyone. Anyone can do hard things with effort. So the fact that math is hard does NOT mean that you’re bad at math. Keep trying. Everyone can do math.
Not just women, overall there’s a culture that it’s “cute” to be bad at math. Coming from a different culture, it’s like saying you are bad at reading, or listening to music – it’s not something that’s possible to be bad at, you just need more or less time to get it.
I mean, if we’re being transparent and honest, I do not remember how to do math beyond probably a 6th grade level. haha
I’m sorry if I’m feeding into stereotype, but also, I don’t care to develop my math skills more – I am successful despite! An elementary-level understanding is serving me!
My husband and I both have no idea how to help our teen with math. I don’t see a stereotype in this. It’s not so much at being bad at math as it is not remembering skills from 20 years ago that *most *of us never use as adults. I would never be able to look at any of the equations she is doing and remember what to do. Once she, or the internet, explains to me (lol) what to do, I can walk her through it.
I totally disagree – I did advanced maths (my teacher was female) through high school but since it seems to have absolutely no application in my life since I forget everything and am thus of no use to my kid. But is this a gendered thing? maybe your world is very different from mine – I mean when I think of who knows maths in my world – my son’s tutor is a woman, my neighbour is a maths teacher, my colleague’s daughter is a math teacher and my other colleague’s daughter does Pure mathematics at uni. Her husband is a physics scientist…. and one of my best friends (she is in her 50s) studied Maths at Oxford so I think math is absolutely in the women’s court. If my son wanted help reading 13th english english literature I could help him.
Also I was once in a bar and next to me was a table of four male ex- academics. Suddenly one of them said “You know I am 78, and I have never ever needed to measure the cubic litres of water in a pool”.
It’s also been shown that parents (of any gender) saying things like “I’m bad at math” or “math is so hard” influences their kids’ perceptions of math, usually negatively. (Can’t post link but google “university of Chicago parent math anxiety.”)
I’m all for, as an adult, acknowledging that some things are hard and that not everything is a strength and that’s ok- but as a lifelong math teacher, when our culture around math is so fraught, I implore parents to refrain from comments like this in front of their kids when there’s some evidence they might hinder learning!
YES. As an elementary math specialist, the number one thing I tell parents is please don’t tell your children “I’m not a math person” or “I’m bad at math”. They hear it and they will believe it too. Highly recommend the work of Jo Boaler at Stanford and her YouCubed project for those curious about busting some of those myths and building positive math mindsets for kids. There’s so much math joy to be had if we just look for it! Everyone is a math person!
Some of us really are bad at math. Sorry. I was in honors English and Spanish in high school while simultaneously failing pre-algebra – like summer school because I failed. I don’t feel like I’m playing into a stereotype – numbers just aren’t my thing.
I am bad at math, and I refuse to feel guilty about that. I took calculus in high school, and it was such a drag having to pretend I enjoyed it or understood it. I now wish someone had given me permission to take home economics instead. How much better prepared for the real world I would have been.
I always helped the kids with their written homework, as well as anything artsy, while my engineer husband was the go-to for math. That is until he offered to help our college daughter with her Calculus 5 homework and found himself both very humbled and incredibly proud of our kiddo who has now surpassed him!
As my oldest goes into 9th grade, this is me. I always feel so seen by Grace! Thank you!
I’ve gone back to school to get a second degree, which has involved taking a lot more math than I did the first go-round. It’s been nice for my daughters to see me as the math expert in the house. I’m generally able to help with whatever homework they might have, even as they’re moving into high school.
A love for math is a fantastic gift to give your kids. So glad both of my kids have surpassed what I learned. Math is power!
My kid used to go on math workshops int he summer holidays! Apparently it was the best fun ever!
My kids didn’t have to memorize their times tables for school, so I told them if they learned them up to 12×12 I would pay them!
Both of my daughters are interested and excel at math.
Neither one memorized multiplication tables.
I did.
And they are amazed at how fast I can rattle off totals for the number of boxes of Girl Scout Cookies they have sold.
I am not going to pay them. I am just going to continue to show them up in this particular arena LOL
Or you could, as we did with my sister, tape the multiplication tables in the toilets (and make it a game to do some multiplications during car trips?).
In France, all children learn it in school, so I’m very surprised to see it’s not the same everywhere! 😯
I am loving going back to 3rd and 5th grade math! (while my kids just roll their eyes at my enthusiasm). Long division! Decimals! Fractions!
Can’t wait for algebra! 😆
Ha! I just did 7th grade algebra last night. It’s so much better than elementary math because it follows the format we learned it in. “New math” has too many steps!
I’m really enjoying it too! My daughter has definitely picked up my enthusiasm for math lately (my son seemed to come into the world loving math). Sometimes I need to refresh my memory but I think that’s good for the kids to see. I was not a confident kid at math (definitely got some sexist messages about girls and math) and it wasn’t until I did a math-heavy PhD that I realized I am good at math, great at scientific thinking, and that it’s ok to need to work at skills sometimes. I saw that the main difference between me/most female colleagues and my male colleagues was confidence, not skill or intelligence. Trying to pass that on to my kids as well as any kid who comes into my orbit ;)
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