Parent Magazine Article October 2008
Chris Cleave, another parent wrote the following for a magazine:When we have a big number (say, our mortgage) to subtract from a little number (say, our income), what we do is, we borrow one from the tens column. If there isn't enough in the tens column, we borrow from the hundreds column, and so on until the Federal Reserve has to intervene. That's maths, right?
Happily, there's another way. Our five-year-old's school staged a maths night this week. Children and arithmetic, the school seemed to suggest, are like tonic and gin, unthinkable separately but fun when combined and served in a frosted class. Fun? I wasn't going to be fooled. I've been around this particular block and I can testify that the maths industry learned everything it knows from the heroin trade. They'll start you with some painless counting on a number line. You'll like it. It will make you feel confident, powerful, euphoric. Next they'll turn you on to times tables. This will be like learning to smoke: at first it will leave you headachy and nauseous but soon it will come to seem second nature - a comfort in these fluid times to know that seven eights are, immutably, fifty six. Now they'll start you on the hard stuff. Division. Long division. Equations and - let's whisper the word - matrices. Each time the penny drops you'll enjoy a brief surge of self confidence and a rush of endorphins, but immediately some crazed pusher with a whiteboard and a green marker pen will arrive with your next fix. These fellows will mess with your mind, using slick proofs to convince you first of the existence of negative numbers, then of imaginary numbers, and then of whole intangible dimensions. Gradually every familiar number will be replaced with a symbol; every common sense concept subjected to a scrutiny verging on mockery; every aspect of your reality subsumed into abstraction. There is no end to maths. Once you take that first step onto the number line they will flex it until you either fall off or become one of them, a paranoid genius scribbling arcane notation in coloured wax pencils on the leaded glass windows of an Ivy League university, occasionally popping outside to talk with extraterrestrials and the CIA. This is not an outcome I want for my son. But what was I to do? Stand up in the middle of the packed school assembly hall and shout: PLEASE DON'T TEACH MY KID TO COUNT!?
I'm glad I didn't, because the maths evening was truly fun. The speaker was a talented mathematician and a former gifted footballer who'd once had a trial with Matt Busby and taken to maths, rather than the bottle, on being turned down for Manchester United. He was a square, in other words, with roots. Amazingly, he got an audience of 7x8 jaded grown-ups doing maths out loud and laughing. Admittedly he'd worked out that we required the addition of wine beforehand, but you have to admire his calculation. And he showed his working. It turns out that maths teaching has changed. These days they're more interested in children understanding what's going on in a calculation than they are in teaching fixed methods for doing each kind of problem. Kids are encouraged to use their common sense, and given a bit of leeway. These days when the problem is 301 minus 296, for example, its okay for the child to say, well, those numbers are pretty close so I can just count from one to the other - rather than reflexively writing down the numbers in rows and starting to borrow one from the tens column. Essentially they're teaching children to do calculation the way grown-ups do it once we've forgotten how we ought to be doing it. They still teach times tables, they still teach the trick for doing long division, but these days the child owns the techniques rather than the other way around. And, rather wonderfully, they're trusting parents to get involved. They're not worried we'll teach the wrong techniques, because they're no longer precious about the techniques. And so, back home today, we played a maths game and it was - honestly - fun. We practiced adding up and taking away on our fingers. With much patience, and after a lot of mistakes, it went so well that my wife and I are considering involving our five-year-old next time.
Episode 15: Maths is fun, kids!
By Chris Cleave, 10th October 2008
Links
http://www.chriscleave.com/main/?p=133
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/18/family Chris Cleave
