When you discover Literacy Mathematics, you will realise that there is no old fashion or new way of solving Maths questions. They are just different ways of solving the same question.
My daughter was 4 years old when I discovered she was not good at Mathematics. We were swimming in the pool. I asked here a simple number sequence, 1 to 10 and asked her to count backwards. She was able to do so. But when I asked her what number should come after 7, she couldn’t answer. I tried again with several other numbers. She still could not answer.
I was quick to think it was a problem which was certainly a mistake on my part because I became stress. I tried number lines, sequencing and singing songs. Why couldn’t she recognise the concept of big and small? 1 is smaller than 2. I was hitting the brick wall. It taught very quickly to accept one lesson. She is different. We are different. I also accepted that she had more and I had less. I did not have the skill to teach a child like her. I had to learn again. I though my life was full but she showed me, it was not. My life was still incomplete until I stepped away from my own achievements and saw what I had not understood yet.
She taught me to look at lipsticks as crayon that could be drawn on walls and floors. She learnt to ride the bicycle at 5 years old and swam at 2 years old. I still cannot ride the bike and learnt to swim at 21 years of age.
The parent who refused to be wrong have to accept that I could not always be right. Fortunately, my lesson came really early. I saw how my friends who had no Mathematics background did score in that subject. When I discovered this about my daughter, I knew I had to teach her differently too.
Over the course of 12 years of teaching Mathematics, I realised that teaching Mathematics is simpler if you start from the point of how to communicate the concept to the student. I have managed to facilitate the learning of Mathematics. You can have many solutions to a problem but what really clarifies your mind may only satisfy your intellect but it does not necessarily make learning any easier for your student. The video that I posted is an example of why you cannot teach according to your personal style. You have to clearly show how it works without showing that a skill is ever involved.
In this video that I have posted, you will notice that we will totally miss the point of communicating knowledge to our children if we focus too much on the retaining the knowledge. Even though our solution makes sense, we will have to work and think harder to get the knowledge across to the student. Students do not like that, least of all children. If we are head strong about learning, we have to relax our mind and hearts about teaching. You can never accuse a child for not studying Mathematics properly. She may just be trying to understand what it is that you are trying to communicate to her after all.
Undo your old ways of learning so you can discover new ways to teach.
Thank you to ipostforParents member Masayu Nurjannah for posting this question.
