Help Me Help You
what math issues do you or your kids have?
I’m working on a guide to helping parents help their kids actually be good at math.
I'm extremely alarmed by the new California math framework, which is so likely to result in American kids knowing less about math than they already do that it’s hard to believe that it’s not specifically designed to achieve that outcome.
I have a list of topics to cover with specifics examples—skills representing mathematical operations that kids should be able to do automatically and by rote (and suggestions for ways to achieve this, some of which are actually fun). The list is pretty long already, and I will probably split this into at least three parts, one covering skills through basic algebra, one covering high school geometry and more advanced algebra, and a final one covering precalculus skills that your high schooler should have mastered before moving on to calculus or considering any higher education that will involve university level mathematics.
The first section of the first part is already written, and covers several approaches to understanding positive and negative numbers, especially how subtraction is usefully understood as adding negative numbers.
The comments are open for everyone on this one (though I may end up closing them at some point, or re-restricting them to paid subscribers only, depending on how it goes).
If you have kids who struggle with math, please tell me what’s hard for them, and your best guess at why.
If you know that you’re weak in math, and you have some idea of why and/or what in particular confuses you or what sent you away from math when you were in school, I also welcome your input.
If you’re good at math and you use mathematical thinking in your career, what skills have helped the most?
About Me: I’m a data scientist (two years experience and presently job-hunting if you’re hiring). My specialties are presentations that get stakeholders on board by giving them a solid understanding of the math behind recommendations, building custom reporting tools to suit individual client needs, and building/expanding/improving analytic codebases in Python.
About My Substack: My great love is mathematics, but I also enjoy writing. My posts are mostly cultural takes from a broadly anti-Woke perspective—yes, I’m one of those annoying classical liberals who would’ve been considered on the left until ten seconds ago. Lately I’ve regained a childhood love of reading and started publishing book reviews. My most widely useful essay may be this one, about how to resist the demon of self-termination.
Paid subscribers get access to occasional creative writing posts and, starting with part 2 of the Declaration of Independence, have sole access to a journey I am making to educate myself about United States history. The first entry is not paywalled and is accessible here.
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I've worked as an engineer a long time. Most useful to me has been a training in grasping orders of magnitude by direct "seeing", as one used to have to do when one used a slide rule. The kind of thing I have in mind is "crap detecting" like "Would this putative blood pressure burst arteries with millimeter-thick steel walls?" I think this is one of the simpler parts of having math as one of one's "languages" for thinking about phenomena in the world.
I think covering some basic probability and statistics would be helpful.