How to Help Your Tween or Teen With Math
Yes, you absolutely should make sure your child does her math homework. There are also other ways you can help her appreciate the value of math and succeed in this essential subject.
Keep in touch with the teacher.
Email makes staying in contact much easier than when you were in school. Don't be shy about making sure your child's teacher knows you're concerned about her progress in math and that you want to know quickly if she's falling behind. "Savvy, experienced teachers regularly communicate with parents," says Francis "Skip" Fennell, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Help your child develop the personal qualities that will help him in math.
To succeed in math, as well as other college-level classes, your child needs to take responsibility for his learning and learn to persevere when tasks are time-consuming and complicated. He can start now by learning to:
- Work independently
- Review and correct his own work
- Use available resources - class time, tutoring, study groups - and seek help when it's needed
- Try a variety of approaches to solve a multi-step problem, recognizing when an approach isn't working and switching to a different one
"Plenty of faculty have told me that if their students came in with these attributes, they could teach them math," says Bill Moore, director of the Transition Mathematics Project, a private-public partnership in Washington state that is working to make sure students are prepared for the transition from K-12 to college math. The Transition Project has developed a list of college-readiness math standards, which contains an expanded description of these
Professor W. Stephen Wilson, who teaches freshman calculus at Johns Hopkins University, adds that the ability to pick up a math textbook and learn independently from it is essential at Johns Hopkins: "I have 150 students. There is no one-on-one here. If students don't learn to read a math textbook after a month of school, they're lost."
Help your child get help if he needs it.
Talk to the teacher, counselor or principal if your child is struggling. Ask about after-school or community tutoring options. Or get together with other families and share the costs of hiring a private tutor who can supplement classroom instruction. Don't delay in hopes that the problem will resolve itself. Math is cumulative, and the further behind your student falls, the more discouraging it will be for him to try to catch up.
Point out ways that various occupations incorporate math.
Or browse through a college catalog, where you'll see that math is a "hidden prerequisite" for a number of classes and degrees in non-technical fields. Social workers, for example, need to take statistics. Business majors need college calculus.
Point out real-life problems that require mathematical thinking.
Consumers can't make smart choices about their cell phone service providers without math. Or evaluate the claims of pharmaceutical advertisers about a new asthma drug. Or calculate how long it will take to pay off a 30-year, $500,000 mortgage with a down payment of $60,000 and a fixed annual interest rate of 7%.
Examples like these will help demonstrate to your child that learning math is more than memorizing a set of rules disconnected from real life.
"It's as much about thinking mathematically about the situations students are going to encounter," says Moore.
