How to Help Your Tween or Teen With Math
Parents can help their children develop strong study skills and an understanding that math skills are essential tools for life.
Yes, you absolutely should make sure your child does her math homework. There are also other ways you can help her appreciate the value of math and succeed in this essential subject.
Keep in touch with the teacher. Email makes staying in contact much easier than when you were in school. Don't be shy about making sure your child's teacher knows you're concerned about her progress in math and that you want to know quickly if she's falling behind. "Savvy, experienced teachers regularly communicate with parents," says Francis "Skip" Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Help your child develop the personal qualities that will help him in math. To succeed in math, as well as other college-level classes, your child needs to take responsibility for his learning and learn to persevere when tasks are time-consuming and complicated. He can start now by learning to:student attributes. (To see this PDF file, you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which you can download here.)
Professor W. Stephen Wilson, who teaches freshman calculus at Johns Hopkins University, adds that the ability to pick up a math textbook and learn independently from it is essential at Johns Hopkins: "I have 150 students. There is no one-on-one here. If students don't learn to read a math textbook after a month of school, they're lost."
Help your child get help if he needs it. Talk to the teacher, counselor or principal if your child is struggling. Ask about after-school or community tutoring options. Or get together with other families and share the costs of hiring a private tutor who can supplement classroom instruction. Don't delay in hopes that the problem will resolve itself. Math is cumulative, and the further behind your student falls, the more discouraging it will be for him to try to catch up.
Point out ways that various occupations incorporate math. Or browse through a college catalog, where you'll see that math is a "hidden prerequisite" for a number of classes and degrees in non-technical fields. Social workers, for example, need to take statistics. Business majors need college calculus.
Point out real-life problems that require mathematical thinking. Consumers can't make smart choices about their cell phone service providers without math. Or evaluate the claims of pharmaceutical advertisers about a new asthma drug. Or calculate how long it will take to pay off a 30-year, $500,000 mortgage with a down payment of $60,000 and a fixed annual interest rate of 7%.
Examples like these will help demonstrate to your child that learning math is more than memorizing a set of rules disconnected from real life.
"It's as much about thinking mathematically about the situations students are going to encounter," says Moore.
Watch your attitude. If you respond to your child's struggles over a math problem with "I was never good at math either," you're making a powerful statement. Your child may pick up the widely held view that "some people can do math and other people can't," that luck and genetics have more to do with math success than effort. It's socially acceptable for people to say they don't understand math, says Fennell, and that's not helping students in a world that requires more math skill than ever before.
"A parent will say to a math teacher, 'I was never particularly good at math,'" says Fennell. "That same parent would never say 'I don't know how to read.'"
Find out what your school is doing to recruit and retain good math teachers. Moore says he hears the complaint that too many math teachers have just one way of teaching: "If it's not working their only solution is to talk slower or louder. What we need are for more teachers to have a broader repertoire of strategies for approaches they can try."
The shortage of math and science teachers has made recruiting and retention a challenging part of a principal's job. Find out what your school is doing to hire and keep great teachers — those with a solid background in math and experience with a variety of strategies for engaging students in the subject.
Updated December 2007
Keep in touch with the teacher. Email makes staying in contact much easier than when you were in school. Don't be shy about making sure your child's teacher knows you're concerned about her progress in math and that you want to know quickly if she's falling behind. "Savvy, experienced teachers regularly communicate with parents," says Francis "Skip" Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Help your child develop the personal qualities that will help him in math. To succeed in math, as well as other college-level classes, your child needs to take responsibility for his learning and learn to persevere when tasks are time-consuming and complicated. He can start now by learning to:
- Work independently
- Review and correct his own work
- Use available resources — class time, tutoring, study groups — and seek help when it's needed
- Try a variety of approaches to solve a multi-step problem, recognizing when an approach isn't working and switching to a different one
Professor W. Stephen Wilson, who teaches freshman calculus at Johns Hopkins University, adds that the ability to pick up a math textbook and learn independently from it is essential at Johns Hopkins: "I have 150 students. There is no one-on-one here. If students don't learn to read a math textbook after a month of school, they're lost."
Help your child get help if he needs it. Talk to the teacher, counselor or principal if your child is struggling. Ask about after-school or community tutoring options. Or get together with other families and share the costs of hiring a private tutor who can supplement classroom instruction. Don't delay in hopes that the problem will resolve itself. Math is cumulative, and the further behind your student falls, the more discouraging it will be for him to try to catch up.
Point out ways that various occupations incorporate math. Or browse through a college catalog, where you'll see that math is a "hidden prerequisite" for a number of classes and degrees in non-technical fields. Social workers, for example, need to take statistics. Business majors need college calculus.
Point out real-life problems that require mathematical thinking. Consumers can't make smart choices about their cell phone service providers without math. Or evaluate the claims of pharmaceutical advertisers about a new asthma drug. Or calculate how long it will take to pay off a 30-year, $500,000 mortgage with a down payment of $60,000 and a fixed annual interest rate of 7%.
Examples like these will help demonstrate to your child that learning math is more than memorizing a set of rules disconnected from real life.
"It's as much about thinking mathematically about the situations students are going to encounter," says Moore.
Watch your attitude. If you respond to your child's struggles over a math problem with "I was never good at math either," you're making a powerful statement. Your child may pick up the widely held view that "some people can do math and other people can't," that luck and genetics have more to do with math success than effort. It's socially acceptable for people to say they don't understand math, says Fennell, and that's not helping students in a world that requires more math skill than ever before.
"A parent will say to a math teacher, 'I was never particularly good at math,'" says Fennell. "That same parent would never say 'I don't know how to read.'"
Find out what your school is doing to recruit and retain good math teachers. Moore says he hears the complaint that too many math teachers have just one way of teaching: "If it's not working their only solution is to talk slower or louder. What we need are for more teachers to have a broader repertoire of strategies for approaches they can try."
The shortage of math and science teachers has made recruiting and retention a challenging part of a principal's job. Find out what your school is doing to hire and keep great teachers — those with a solid background in math and experience with a variety of strategies for engaging students in the subject.
Updated December 2007
