Raising Future Adults

I don't sew. My mother sewed beautifully and I've already talked a little about her sewing matching shorts to go under all my dresses so I could be a prim, proper girly girl who wore dresses and didn't show my panties while being allowed to do cartwheels and climb the monkey bars at school.  Some of the drawings in my comic November West include a little girl in purple and white striped pants. That's based on an actual pair of pants my mother sewed me as a little girl. They were my favorite pair of pants and as I got taller, they began looking like high waters but still otherwise fit me. So my mother added a few inches of the same cloth but had the stripes go horizontal instead of vertical so it looked intentionally decorative rather than like a patch job. That was an extremely memorable experience for me and really made the lesson stick that during a certain period, children tend to get taller without getting bigger around in girth. I also moved the buttons on a cute...

When my oldest was two years old and I was pregnant, a friend with three kids under age five informed me she was taking my kid home so I could sleep. She didn't ASK. She TOLD me he was going home with her. I was EXHAUSTED. I didn't argue it. I slept until noon and got about twelve hours of sleep that night. The whole rest of my pregnancy was easier because of it. I was short of sleep the first 7 years of his life and I didn't have a paid job. I was a full-time mom.  When my sister came to visit me and her child was an infant, the last night there her baby was not going to sleep. I'm good at getting kids to sleep and also had experience with a baby with respiratory issues. I soon realized breathing issues were keeping her awake. I told my sister "She can't sleep because she can't breathe. You're flying back tomorrow. We could spend your last night in Urgent Care or I could feed her cola so the caffeine opens up her lungs." She opted for the caffein...

I recently rewatched the movie Stand and Deliver  which inspired me to write Math is a Universal Language because in the movie Jaime Escalante tells his Latino students that the Romans and Greeks lacked the concept of zero but the Maya -- " your ancestors" -- had this important advanced mathematical concept.  The movie also shows him politely standing up to gang members, threatening them, physically restraining one of them to prevent him from joining a fight and running to try to catch a few young guys behaving badly. Escalante was born in 1930 and the movie is set in 1982. He would have been 51 or 52 years old and the actor who won an award for the role doesn't quite sell those bits of the story for me. Escalante was originally from Bolivia and of Aymara heritage. The internet suggests the actor who played him was around 5'9" or 5'10" and a photo of them together suggests Escalante was a little shorter but stockier. He looks vaguely like a shorter ve...

In the US, children are typically expected to memorize the times table from 1×1 up to 12x12 before leaving elementary school. I learned them in 4th grade. Reality: There's a small number of answers you need to memorize. Most can be easily and quickly found via tricks. For starters, since it doesn't matter what order you multiply in, about half the chart is a duplicate of the other half of the chart. If you know the answer for 6x8 you also know the answer for 8x6: 48. 1. 1 times anything is the number you multiplied by one. There's nothing you need to memorize.  2. Any whole number multiplied by 2 will result in an even number.   5. All whole numbers multiplied by 5 will end in a 5 or a 0. If it's an odd number, it ends in 5. If it's an even number, it ends in zero. It's typically easier to multiply by 10 then divide by 2. This can work for quite large figures, especially if it's a round number like 1000 or 1500. 1000x5 doesn't really require that. 1×5=5,...

When Tigger was in public school, they taught him some math shortcut and he kept using it wrong because he really did not understand how to do it the long way, so he really did not understand how to apply the shortcut. He would use it inappropriately and tell me "It is a Rule. My teacher said so."  I had to go back and show him the long way and explain WHY the shortcut Usually works but would not work for this specific problem. So, when a concept is initially introduced, the student probably needs to do it the long way a few times in order to understand it. But, AFTER they get the basic concept, I hope my thoughts on factoring are useful to some people: Factoring I handle factoring differently from most people. This is not something I was ever taught. It was something I discovered by observation: It is half as much work (or sometimes way less than half as much work) to stop factoring when the numbers 'meet in the middle'. If I were factoring for 8, once I go...

Division: Cut an actual pie. Square: lay out tiles/blocks/whatever. Cube: build a 3x3x3 cube using cube-shaped items (like blocks or six-sided die). The school treated math in an abstract manner. Whenever my son with dyscalculia got very lost, I made it as concrete, hands on, real world and literal as possible. By literal, I mean I tried to show him that terms like "cubed" or "squared" were literal descriptors of physical phenomenon, not just made up keywords. If you draw up an old-fashioned times table , you can show that multiplication uses the word "times" because you have this number that many times and show why it makes absolutely no difference what order the numbers are listed for multiplication. You can do the same thing with coins or piles of anything (sticks, pebbles, whatever). Five piles of six items or six piles of five items both add up to thirty. I helped my math-challenged son get over his baggage in part by teaching him "Addi...

Not terribly long ago, someone asked "Why is it that when you divide by a fraction, you have to turn it upside down and multiply?" I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to explain that and a good explanation unraveled from the dialog, both on the list and what she and I e-mailed each other privately. At one point she exclaimed "So, you mean it really is The Same Thing and not some kind of 'trick'?!" And I said "Yes, it really is the same thing." It never occurred to me that anyone would view a shortcut as a 'trick'. I ultimately showed that you can directly divide by a fraction, it is just very convoluted and difficult to keep it all straight in your head, even for me, and that is why this is something where they teach you the Rule in place of teaching you the long process. Usually, schools teach the long process first and only let you use a shorter version if you have thoroughly mastered the long method first. One example ...