What Do I Do For Math: Simple At-Home Strategies For Struggling Kids
The jam is still sticky on my kitchen counter when Lila drops her third grade backpack on the chair and pulls out her math homework. Her pencil clatters to the table before she even reads the first problem, and she slumps forward, forehead resting on the paper. “I’m bad at this,” she mumbles. “I don’t get why I have to do it anyway.”
This wasn’t new. For almost a year, math had been the battle that ended every school day. I’d tried everything: the $35 a month online math subscription that promised to turn drills into games, the thick Common Core-aligned workbooks I picked up at the big box store, extra help after school twice a week. When that didn’t work, I’d sit next to her and re-explain every problem the way her teacher had shown me, getting more frustrated when she still blinked back tears and said it didn’t make sense. The low point was last October, when we spent 45 minutes arguing over multiplication arrays, she crumpled her worksheet into a ball and threw it in the trash, and I left the table and ate half a bag of chocolate chips on the couch alone, wondering what I was doing wrong. I kept turning the same question over in my head: What do I do for math when nothing I try works?
My sister, who’s been a middle school special ed math teacher for 18 years, came over for coffee the next weekend, saw the crumpled worksheet peeking out of the trash, and sat down with me to talk. She didn’t tell me to buy a new program or hire a tutor. She gave me three small rules that didn’t require extra time or extra money, and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since.
First, we stopped doing extra sit-down math practice. All that extra workbook work I was adding on after she finished her assigned homework? It was just making her hate math more, she said. Instead, we weave math into the stuff we already do every week. When we go to the grocery store, I ask her to add up the cost of the things in our cart before we get to the checkout. If she’s within a dollar or two, we call it a win, and if she’s way off, we add it again together, no eye-rolling, no sharp “how did you get that?” When we bake chocolate chip cookies every Sunday, I ask her to adjust the measurements: we’re bringing half the batch to the neighbor, so how much flour do we need? If we want to double it for the team snack, how much baking soda? On car rides to soccer practice, I ask questions that matter to her: if the new stuffed sloth you want costs $22, and you get $5 allowance every week, how many weeks do you need to save? It doesn’t feel like practice, it just feels like part of the conversation.
Second, I stopped making her do it the “right” way first. Lila’s teacher still marks problems wrong if she doesn’t use the standard algorithm the class is learning that week, and I used to nag her to do it that way from the start, saying if she got used to the wrong way she’d never learn the right one. Now I let her work it out any way that makes sense to her first. Last week, her homework had a word problem: if you have 28 apples and split them equally between four friends, how many does each friend get? Lila dug into her craft bin and pulled out 28 pony beads, sorted them into four little piles, and counted out seven per pile. I almost opened my mouth to say she didn’t need beads, she could just do 28 divided by four in her head, but I bit my tongue. After she got the answer right, I just said, “That’s a really smart way to figure it out. Do you want to see another way you could do it if you don’t have your beads handy?” She said yes, and we talked through it for two minutes, no fight, no shut down.
Third, I don’t give big pep talks when she messes up. I used to say things like “You’re so smart, you can do this!” which just made her madder, because she didn’t feel smart when she couldn’t get the problem right. Now I just give her an out, and we come back to it later. Last week, she came home with a C+ on her multiplication quiz, threw her notebook on the table, and said she’d never be good at math. I didn’t argue. I just said, “Want to leave that there and go get ice cream? We can count the change when we pay, if you want.” We got ice cream, she counted the change, got it right, and by the time we got home she was ready to look at the quiz again and fix the mistakes.
It’s not perfect. Lila still has days where she won’t touch math homework, she still forgets her multiplication facts when she’s nervous, and she’s still working a little behind her grade level. I used to panic that I was letting her fall too far behind, that I was doing something wrong by not pushing harder. Now I see that the biggest problem wasn’t that she didn’t know her math facts, it was that she’d decided she was a “bad at math” person, and nothing I did was going to change that until we stopped fighting and started making math feel normal again.
Last month, she came home from school with a flyer for the school’s upcoming math fair, and she asked if she could do a project on figuring out how much dog food our golden retriever eats in a year. I was shocked. She did all the measuring and counting herself, and even made a little chart to hang on her display board. She didn’t win anything, but she didn’t care. She just liked figuring it out.
I don’t know if she’ll ever be the kid who gets straight A’s in math, and I don’t know if this will work forever. But right now, it’s working. We don’t do fancy drills, we don’t pay for expensive programs, we just do a little bit of math, every day, in the middle of everything else. That’s what I do for math.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Do I Do For Math: Simple At-Home Strategies For Struggling Kids