How To Impress Your Kids

Posts 1-5 are not behind the paywall. Parts 6 and beyond are, but this link will give you 10% off. If you’d like to get them but can’t afford a paid subscription, email me at hollymathnerd at gmail dot com and I’ll give you a free one.

Comments will open for paid subs when I finish work on Friday, December 6 and stay open over the weekend.

I have ongoing email correspondence with about half a dozen homeschooling parents. To their credit, all of them are desperate to do right by their kids and not shortchange them in the area of mathematics. They all realize that if their kids understand interest rates and can balance their own checkbooks they’ll be doing at least as well as (or, let’s be honest….better) than the public schools typically manage, but they want their kids to reach their fullest potential.

Some of their kids love math and some are frustrated by it, so there are ongoing conversations around different strategies for engagement.

The two best techniques I have — both of which I’ll go into, in some detail, in the book I am slooooooooowly writing — are these:

Give your kid the chance to catch you making a mistake and correct you. Nothing builds a kid’s confidence and enthusiasm faster.
Help your kid learn some of the ways that mathematics provides immediately practical, useful, and perfectly reliable shortcuts. Very little is more appealing to children than absolute certainty. (Why yes, that might have something to do with why a cetain MathNerd went into math…why do you ask?) 🤣🤣🤣

One of my favorite examples of #2 is the divisibility rules. If you learn the divisibility rules, you can quickly assert, with total confidence, whether a number is divisible by another number or not.

Then, with a little mental math shortcut-learning, you can even do the division yourself. By that I mean, you can not just confidently announce that 533 is in fact divisible by 13, you can go ahead and do the division in your head to tell your kids that 533 = 13 x 41.

It’s a lot easier than you think. If you read this post slowly and carefully and then practice a few times, you’ll have it.

Really!

If you’d like more math posts, access to comments when they’re open, and other perks, as well as the satisfaction of knowing you’re getting something for helping me pay off my student loans (as opposed to the way you’re paying off other people’s, ha ha), become a paid subscriber today!

Holly’s Substack

How To Impress Your Kids

How to Not Suck at Math, part 13

This post is for paid subscribers