Why Your Kid Might Be Lowkey Good at Math (And You Wouldn’t Know It)
The self checkout machine was blinking red at us last week, because my 11-year-old Javi tried to stack a manufacturer coupon and a store digital coupon and the system wouldn’t accept both. I was fumbling for my phone to pull up the store app, ready to just abandon the coupon and be on our way, when Javi leaned into the screen, squinted, and mumbled that we were better off ditching the $3 off coupon anyway. 20% off our total of $37 would save us almost $7.50, he said, minus the $3 we’d lose from the manufacturer coupon, that’s still an extra 40 cents than just using the original. I pulled up my calculator app to check, and he was right. Then he looked up at me, deadpan, and asked, “Is anyone like lowkey good at math??”
For as long as Javi’s been in school, he’s identified as someone who’s bad at math. He comes home from fifth grade complaining it’s boring, rushes through his homework to get it over with, and his teacher has noted more than once that he refuses to show his work on tests, even when he gets the answer right. I’ve done all the standard things: bought the summer workbooks, drilled multiplication flash cards on car rides, sat next to him at the kitchen table every night to walk through homework. He still says he’s terrible at it, and his grades have hovered right around a B- for the last year, so I’d kind of accepted that this was just how it was. He’s great at reading and art, I told myself, not every kid has to be a math person.
The coupon thing wasn’t the first time I’d caught him doing fast, accurate math that he never would do on a worksheet. Three months ago, he was saving up for a $70 wireless controller, and he tracked every dollar: $10 allowance a week, $2 for taking the trash out every night, 50 cents he found on the sidewalk outside the library, even the $3 his little cousin owed him from a bet about a Minecraft speedrun. When my mom offered him either $20 up front for walking her dog every weekend for a month, or $5 a week paid at the end of each week, he took the $20 immediately. He told me it was because he could put it in his kids’ savings account that earns interest, and he’d have an extra 32 cents by the time he hit his goal, which was enough to buy the cheap silicone case he wanted for the controller. I couldn’t do that calculation that fast when I was 11, and I can barely do it that fast now.
I brought this up with Javi’s teacher, Ms. Henderson, at parent-teacher conferences last month. She nodded like she heard this every week, and to be honest, she probably does. She said most of the time, we equate “good at math” with being good at memorizing formulas, showing work step-by-step the textbook way, and acing timed tests. But a lot of kids are really good at the actual point of math—problem solving, reasoning with numbers, figuring out what you need to know to get what you want—they just don’t do it in the formal setting of a classroom, especially pre-teens. Javi later clarified for me why he called it “lowkey” good: all the guys in his friend group make fun of kids who “nerd out” over school stuff, so if you’re good at math, you don’t advertise it. It’s not cool to be good at something the teacher makes a big deal out of. So he hides it.
That conversation made me rethink what I was doing to help Javi with math. I stopped forcing him to do extra workbook pages after school, and instead started doing small, concrete things that let him use his math skills on stuff he cares about. First, I hand off all the small, daily math tasks to him now. When we plan taco night for the family, I ask him to calculate how much ground beef we need to buy based on how many people are coming and how much everyone eats. When we plan movie night, he figures out what time we need to leave the house to get there 10 minutes early, accounting for stop lights and the time it takes to park. It takes 2 extra minutes, and I don’t correct him if he’s off by a little, just let him adjust on his own.
Second, when he says he’s bad at math, I don’t give him the generic “no you’re great!” speech. I just point to a specific time he used math recently. Last week he came home with a C on a test and said he told you so, he’s terrible at it. I just said, “Didn’t you just calculate how much lemonade you needed to make for your yard sale last weekend, and price it so you’d make exactly enough for your controller case? That’s math.” He just shrugged, but he didn’t argue. Third, I started talking out loud about my own lowkey math use, so he sees it’s not just a school thing. When I’m comparing gas prices at two stations off the highway, I say out loud, “This one’s 12 cents cheaper a gallon, my tank holds 12 gallons, that’s $1.44 saved. Is it worth driving three extra blocks? Nah, not today.” It normalizes that math is just a tool, not a test you pass or fail.
It’s not like this has transformed Javi into a straight-A math student overnight. He still hates homework, he still rushes through tests, he still says he’s bad at math most days. Last week he got a flier for the school’s after-school problem-solving club, and he didn’t throw it away immediately. He stuck it to the fridge with a dinosaur magnet, and asked me if I could help him look up what kind of problems they do. He hasn’t signed up yet, and he might not. But that’s fine.
I used to think that if your kid wasn’t excelling at math in class, they just weren’t good at it. Now I know there are a lot of kids out there who are lowkey good at math, they just don’t show it off. They’re too busy using it to get the things they actually care about, whether that’s a better coupon deal or a new game controller, to bother telling anyone.
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