Many parents say, “We unschool except for maths.” I understand why some people are reluctant to let go of maths because, years ago, we were in the same situation. For some reason, it seemed hard to let my kids learn maths naturally from being exposed to it in their lives.
But one day, my youngest two children began saying, “I hate maths!” like their older siblings had. As I couldn’t bear the thought of pushing two more children to do maths they weren’t interested in, I decided to change my approach. I wondered if I could prevent my kids from hating maths. Could I help them see that maths is all around us, a natural part of life? Could I learn to relax and trust my girls to learn the maths they needed from engaging with real-life experiences? Could I help them see maths is a fascinating subject? Perhaps I could even tempt them to dig further by strewing some maths resources.
Recently, Erin from the Virtual Kitchen Table podcast invited me to join her and April from Modern Homeschoolers to talk about unschool maths.
Unschooling Math – What Does Learning Math/s Naturally Look Like?
Near the beginning of our long conversation, Erin asked us to share our experiences of maths while growing up. Here’s an edited bit of what I said:
I enjoyed math at school. And I was… pretty good at it which was a problem becauseI didn’t mind the higher maths… I just enjoyed it. It was like a puzzle.
If I had a quadratic equation, I didn’t care whether you could use it or not. That wasn’t the point. The point was, could I get the right answer? And there was only one answer. I knew if I’d succeeded or not. And I used to like… working it all out and then getting the right answer. So, I didn’t really care whether you could use it. But this turned out to be a problem with my own children because they didn’t like maths. And they were always saying things like, “Why do we have to do this, Mum? We’ll never use this, Mum.” And I would think, “But it doesn’t really matter whether you’re going to use it or not. Why don’t you just enjoy it?”
And then I began to wonder: if I presented the maths in a different way, would my children enjoy it? Perhaps I was just presenting it to them in the wrong way. And it became my mission to try and get my kids to love maths as much as me by changing their experience of maths.
And I think I succeeded to a certain extent, but I only have one child who actually did advanced maths…
I think it’s difficult when you enjoy something… I didn’t have much patience or understanding with my own children when math wasn’t the passion for them. They didn’t have a natural inclination towards it.
I really enjoyed chatting about unschool maths with Erin and April in episode 36 of the Virtual Kitchen Table podcast. We covered a lot of ideas and shared many stories.
We Discuss:
- What’s in a name? Math versus Maths ☺️
- How the timeline for learning math/maths is harder to pin down than it is for reading
- Concrete math as the putting down on paper of what we inherently know in some way, whereas abstract math can feel almost like learning a new language
- Enjoying higher math as a puzzle
- Math as beautiful and wonderful rather than drudgery
- Math as exploration
- How sometimes people assume they’re not a “math person” but how that can be attached to a negative experience that gets projected onto math
- How there are different aspects to math and different people might be good at different parts
- The randomness and pointlessness that are sometimes found in workbooks and math assessments
- Enjoyment of workbooks as a fun way for some kids to see or present what they often already know
- That at times and for many kids, things like workbooks can seem like a waste of time
- In a family that when you’re together and talking about different things, many concepts are naturally picked up
- Workbooks as having the purpose of getting kids to give the right answer – the child solving someone else’s answer rather than exploring and figuring out for their own purposes
- Being shown the idea of creative maths through our children
- Mathematics as a common language of the world
- Whether a lot of the math we learn ends being something we use or need or even remember in the future
- Developing mathematical understanding through conversation and exploring together rather than with pencil and paper
- Whether being accustomed to school math can make math presented in different ways initially seem daunting or confusing
- That kids can sometimes understand things at a much earlier age if it’s relevant or interesting to them and other times kids might get pulled through the grades and curriculum without really grasping it
- Fun math websites and learning for the sake of the reward – sometimes they are a fit but sometimes they are quite random to a child’s life and out of context
- The common decision to unschool in everything but maths
- Strewing mathematical ideas and information
- How ticking off boxes just doesn’t feel as rich as learning in context
- Record keeping
- How we can be talking about math and “doing math” all the time without calling it math eg. Being introduced to fractions through bike-riding and how easily that can be transferred and deepened
- That in conventional teaching, we have the information presented to us (out of context, randomly) so that we will have ahead of time if we need it and when learning math naturally, it’s the opposite – we learn it either as we need it or as it comes up
- “Embodied mathematics” – how we have inherent mathematical knowing within us – music, sense of pacing, sports, etc that can be expressed or translated formally on paper but that the formal expression is simply that – an expression of what is already known
- Whether or not it’s necessary to write things down and figure them out theoretically
- Forgetting knowledge and skills when we don’t use them
- Timing – what seems overwhelming in one part of life might come very easily in another
- That when we feel pressure, it becomes harder to take information in deeply
- That connection and partnership often negates the possibility of resentment of not being “made to learn”
- That we can learn things at a variety of times
- How a child’s own timing and way of doing things is often the most valuable and lasting
- Creative and individualized problem solving as potentially leading to future creative thinkers
- Being okay with kids not acing or even doing well on standardized tests
- That there’s something very beautiful about not taking away the opportunity for kids to come into things in their own time
Resources:
Stories of an Unschooling Family
Let ‘em Go Barefoot -Episode 39 – Joyful Maths with Ruth Rinaldi
The Mathematician’s Lament – Paul Lockhart
Virtual Kitchen Table – Spot the Learning
Modern Homeschoolers Instagram Math Reel
Kids Learn Math Easily When They Control Their Own Learning – Dr. Peter Gray article
How Children Acquire “Academic” Skills Without Formal Instruction – Dr. Peter Gray
Stories of an Unschooling Family – Maths blog posts
Virtual Kitchen Table Community
More Unschool Maths
Erin has kindly invited April and me to join her again for a second unschooling maths episode. We’ll be recording it soon. Why not subscribe to the Virtual Kitchen Table podcast so you hear about it when it goes live?
Images
We use a lot of maths when we’re in the kitchen, at a cemetery, or running.
