I feel like one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made this year in homeschooling is in how I’ve handled math. I’ve been thinking about this recently as I’ve been planning next year, and then I read Kathy Jo’s recent post about math and it brought home one of the things we’ve been struggling with the most in the Math-U-See system - the workbook. The videos are great, the teaching approach is fantastic, the manipulatives are extremely useful in illustrating concepts… but the workbook just isn’t working quite right for us.
A lot of it is my fault for a variety of reasons. I’ve been too linear in how I’ve handled the workbook. I’m the type of person that likes workbooks. If you hand me a workbook, I will happily sit down and work my way through it, page by page, even if what I’m doing is remedial level review. Completed workbook pages have always given me a strange sort of joy. So, when confronted with a workbook I want to work through it, page by page, no matter if the subject is already mastered. Not so surprisingly, this approach has been rather joy-killing for Emma. Also, since I didn’t have much access to a computer or DVD player for the first 4 months of our school year, skipped the math videos for that portion of our math. This meant I focused more on the workbook and less on the manipulatives and methods the videos teach - not a good thing. The other problem with workbooks is that they make it very easy to plop the kid in front of them and go off and do something else, coming back periodically to interrogate the child as to why it is taking so incredibly long to do one page of math.
So, in the course of the year Emma has decided that she doesn’t like math, and that the Math-U-See workbook is one of the worst things in the world. She has also developed a terrible habit of sitting and staring at her math page, lost in daydreams between each problem. She’ll do one problem, stare into space for awhile, maybe do another one or just start muttering to herself about this or that. Or she’ll start saying the math problem out loud to herself over and over, but not actually paying attention to what she’s saying or getting any closer to solving the problem.
I started recognizing this, slowly, a few months ago and we spent some time doing online math drills and other things to give her more practice with her addition before we moved onto subtraction. It isn’t that she doesn’t understand the concepts - that’s not the problem at all. She already completely understood the concept of subtraction before we even started on it. What seems to be lacking is diligence, focus and the ability to think through the problem quickly without getting flustered or distracted. We started really working on these aspects about a week and a half ago and so far it seems to be helping somewhat. I’ve started doing math orally with her, either having her read the problem, write it, and move onto the next one (to help her keep focus), or reading the problem to her and writing down her answer. I’m also trying to make sure she understands what to do if she doesn’t just know the answer by having her look at the manipulatives and explaining the strategy for the problem rather than getting flustered and panicky.
This all seems to be helping, but I still haven’t solved the fundamental problem of how to approach the Math-U-See workbook. Right now we’re doing a page that practices the new concept and a review page each day, so that she’s getting practice for both new and old. This works better than doing one page per day, where we have three new pages followed by three review pages. That made each lesson drag on far too long, and the new pages generally aren’t varied enough to make it really a good practice session.
I feel like I’ve learned a lot in how not to handle math, and I’m starting to get some ideas on how to do it better. I wish I had some fond memories of doing math to draw upon, but my math education was nothing but worksheets, endless drill, and boring lectures. I don’t think I felt like I had any handle on math at all until the end of my first year of college!
