Math lessons and partial quotients
I've never pretended that math is my favorite subject. While I can do it, it has always taken more work for me to do successfully, and we all know that I like to do the things I feel successful at. Numbers are funny things and they just don't stick in my head without a lot of effort. One number can sound very much like another number to me. My children have learned over the years that reading a math problem to me and hoping for help is just not going to happen. I absolutely need to see the numbers written down. This is is also probably why I didn't really finish memorizing the multiplication tables until I started to teach D. how to multiply. Finally, after going through school (up through honors trig) and teaching four other children how to multiply, the last few multiplication facts stuck with the fifth child. I don't really adore math.
I will also say that having to teach math to my children that I have discovered that I appreciate it far more now than I ever did when I was in school. More often than I want to admit, I've had moments as I have gone through various text books explaining things to my children where something suddenly makes sense or I learn something that I somehow missed and would have been a really useful piece of information at the time.
I'm going to share one of those pieces of information with you. As I've shared, one of my children is really not clicking with long division. I also shared that I had a couple of math teacher friends help me out by sharing some other ideas. We started in on the YouTube videos and new way of doing division today.
(As an aside, it has been over two weeks since the last unhappy math lesson. When I have a child who feels so defeated by something, I like to give a bit of a break before we tackle that same thing again. This isn't just avoidance on my part. I want to have enough breathing space so that when we do come back and revisit the difficult topic, the child doesn't immediately start to panic because the last upsetting session was fresh in their mind. No one can learn when panicking, even if they are not aware they are panicking. I had also primed the pump so to speak by saying I had some new ways to try the perceived difficult idea, but waiting a while before I "got around to it". In my opinion, we spend far too much time worrying about keeping "on track" [oh, how I loathe that phrase], than we do about a child's emotional and intellectual readiness to actually learn. Think of all the time and unhappiness we were save everyone if we put the emphasis the other way around.)
So this morning, I sat the child in question down and showed the videos that had been shared with me about the partial quotient method for doing division. My friends, I think this is going to make a huge difference to this particular child, and I am grateful for friends who actually enjoy doing math for them sharing their knowledge with me. If you, too, have a child struggling with long division, look up the partial quotient method. It's a lot less painful than the traditional way of doing long division, and you still end up with the correct answer.
The other thing that this made me realize is that my own quirky way of figuring out answers to math problems, which I believed was somehow wrong or bad because it wasn't quite the way that was explained to me, is just as valuable and viable as any other method. It was actually a little freeing. The thing I like about the partial quotient method is that the child starts to figure out the problem by starting with what they know and moving on from there. Because math facts NEVER stuck in my head as a child and teen, this is how I had to approach every single problem, by starting with what I knew. There was no other way for me to figure them out, but it always made me feel as though I was doing something wrong. It's nice to feel a little bit vindicated even if it is forty years after the fact.
Here is my little cheerleading message. This just goes to show you that you do now need to know everything to homeschool your children. I've often learned right along with my child. I've found resources to help me when I wasn't quite sure, or I figured out which people had the expertise that I didn't and asked them questions. No one knows everything, but it is not a difficult thing to find people around you who do.
I still try to make math as accessible as possible by turning every day events into hands-on math lessons. Today's lesson was division with lychees. I had gone to the Asian grocery store over the weekend and bought lychees, which excited nearly everyone. We love them and don't find them that often. But I knew that if I just opened the bag, my own personal swarm of locusts would devour them before everyone had a chance. So, they divided the many lychees into thirteen piles. Y. decided that it would be faster just to do the math problem on paper and then divide them up. It became a sort of race to see who could get the answer faster.
No, I don't actually know who won.
I will also say that having to teach math to my children that I have discovered that I appreciate it far more now than I ever did when I was in school. More often than I want to admit, I've had moments as I have gone through various text books explaining things to my children where something suddenly makes sense or I learn something that I somehow missed and would have been a really useful piece of information at the time.
I'm going to share one of those pieces of information with you. As I've shared, one of my children is really not clicking with long division. I also shared that I had a couple of math teacher friends help me out by sharing some other ideas. We started in on the YouTube videos and new way of doing division today.
(As an aside, it has been over two weeks since the last unhappy math lesson. When I have a child who feels so defeated by something, I like to give a bit of a break before we tackle that same thing again. This isn't just avoidance on my part. I want to have enough breathing space so that when we do come back and revisit the difficult topic, the child doesn't immediately start to panic because the last upsetting session was fresh in their mind. No one can learn when panicking, even if they are not aware they are panicking. I had also primed the pump so to speak by saying I had some new ways to try the perceived difficult idea, but waiting a while before I "got around to it". In my opinion, we spend far too much time worrying about keeping "on track" [oh, how I loathe that phrase], than we do about a child's emotional and intellectual readiness to actually learn. Think of all the time and unhappiness we were save everyone if we put the emphasis the other way around.)
So this morning, I sat the child in question down and showed the videos that had been shared with me about the partial quotient method for doing division. My friends, I think this is going to make a huge difference to this particular child, and I am grateful for friends who actually enjoy doing math for them sharing their knowledge with me. If you, too, have a child struggling with long division, look up the partial quotient method. It's a lot less painful than the traditional way of doing long division, and you still end up with the correct answer.
The other thing that this made me realize is that my own quirky way of figuring out answers to math problems, which I believed was somehow wrong or bad because it wasn't quite the way that was explained to me, is just as valuable and viable as any other method. It was actually a little freeing. The thing I like about the partial quotient method is that the child starts to figure out the problem by starting with what they know and moving on from there. Because math facts NEVER stuck in my head as a child and teen, this is how I had to approach every single problem, by starting with what I knew. There was no other way for me to figure them out, but it always made me feel as though I was doing something wrong. It's nice to feel a little bit vindicated even if it is forty years after the fact.
Here is my little cheerleading message. This just goes to show you that you do now need to know everything to homeschool your children. I've often learned right along with my child. I've found resources to help me when I wasn't quite sure, or I figured out which people had the expertise that I didn't and asked them questions. No one knows everything, but it is not a difficult thing to find people around you who do.
I still try to make math as accessible as possible by turning every day events into hands-on math lessons. Today's lesson was division with lychees. I had gone to the Asian grocery store over the weekend and bought lychees, which excited nearly everyone. We love them and don't find them that often. But I knew that if I just opened the bag, my own personal swarm of locusts would devour them before everyone had a chance. So, they divided the many lychees into thirteen piles. Y. decided that it would be faster just to do the math problem on paper and then divide them up. It became a sort of race to see who could get the answer faster.
No, I don't actually know who won.
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