Welcome to Sentivia

Okay, let me tell you a little bit about who I am and why I'm so passionate about this topic. I’m a mom first and foremost, and those are some strong words to come from a mother who's trying to do the best she can with her children. I have 13-year-old twin boys, and like most parents, I've had my share of eye-opening experiences. I can still vividly remember when they were in pre-K, and I had a conversation at pickup that really stuck with me.

A mom, who was incredibly kind and intelligent, approached me to befriend me. During our first conversation, she started talking about her daughter, and how her daughter wasn't a math kid. It stopped me in my tracks. She went on to say that she was just not a "math person". But my twins, oh they’re math kids!. This blew my mind. I wanted to say something, to disagree, but I was afraid I'd come off as crazy. You know how it is at pickup – one wrong word, and suddenly, you're off the playdate list. So, I bit my tongue. But I was left thinking, "How can you possibly know, at four years old, that someone will never be good at math?"

Can you imagine if we had the same mindset about reading? If a child struggled, would we just say, "Oh, they're just not a 'reading kid'," and then give up on them? Absolutely not! We'd never label some kids as "reading kids" and let the rest struggle without help. Yet, that’s exactly what we do in math, and it makes me incredibly frustrated. It makes me feel as a parent I'm failing my kids for letting them believe this. I’m an education technologist, and I am passionate about math learning. But believe it or not, I wasn’t always a math kid myself.

For the past twelve years, I've devoted myself to this topic, and as an expert I have had the opportunity to watch millions of students solve billions of math problems. I've seen firsthand how students are being taught. I’ve visited math classrooms on three continents because I want to truly understand the learning experience. My goal in all of this has been to build Zearn, a nonprofit focused on changing how kids learn math. In all of this work, I’ve learned one incredibly important thing: we're asking the wrong question when it comes to math learning. We should not be focusing on *who* can learn math but instead *how* do we teach math. When we ask “who,” we create the idea that math ability is this rare, genetic gift. But that’s simply not true. The data consistently show that we all have the potential to build a "math mind," and it's something we all need in today's world.

So, I’ve come up with four important steps that I believe can help us all start answering the question of how to build a math mind, and hopefully, end this nonsense of labeling kids once and for all.

First, you have to believe. I told you earlier that I wasn't always a math kid. I hit a wall in sixth grade after transferring schools. I was having a hard time making friends, particularly in math class. The kids who were doing well, the boys, wouldn’t talk to me, and frankly, I didn’t want to talk to them either – I thought they were grody. Then, one day after a test, my teacher called me over. He said, "If you try your very best, you could be just as good as the boys." Now, I know that’s not the *ideal* thing to say to a young girl, especially considering that gender gaps in math still exist today. But, the truth is my heart exploded. It meant everything to me that someone believed that I could succeed. Because he believed, I found the courage to ask for extra help, I put in extra work, and I eventually became a "math kid." And through all of that, I realized that my experience wasn’t unique at all. All kids, even the "math kids," struggle, fall behind, and deal with math anxiety. The difference is that those kids have someone in their corner who believes in them, so they put in the work and get back on track. We fall behind in any subject but usually it’s an indicator that we need to work harder. Math is not like that, we fall behind and instantly believe that we don't have what it takes. We give up and seal our fate. That's why step one is believing in them.

Step two is all about understanding. We need to stop just memorizing math and start truly understanding it, and using pictures as tools. If you memorized 200 words just to pass a reading test you wouldn’t actually know how to read. You might get an A, but a few weeks later, you would forget the words. You would then forget how to read. That is terrifying and that's how many kids feel in math class. What if we felt about math the way we feel when picking up a book? Calm and confident. We need to make our math learning as durable as our reading abilities. Take ratios and proportional reasoning, for example, and just looking at the idea of one is to two, or three is to one. It is a scary concept for some to memorize. But I can use something like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to understand it. My twins have completely different ratios for their sandwiches. One wants one spoon of jelly and two spoons of peanut butter. The other wants three spoons of jelly and one spoon of peanut butter. Math *can* make sense. Look at this math problem, and I know we all dread these problems, which fraction is closest to one half? Instead of jumping into calculations for two halves, five eights, one sixth, and one fifth, let's pause and really *understand*. I can draw or imagine a rectangle and shade in half of it, then use that to compare the fractions. All of this is to show that sometimes the reward of understanding is not calculating at all. 73% of American fourth graders got the problem wrong, and the most common incorrect answer was two halves, the *most* wrong answer. This is what happens when we memorize math.

Step three is about making math fun. Math practice does not have to be tedious worksheets with 50 long division problems. We’ve known for years that if we want kids to love reading, we have to appeal to their interests, whether that is fantasy novels or graphic novels. So what's that in math? Games. Card games, board games, games in the real world. When my twins were little we’d play Battleship which is really just using the coordinate plane. Or give them $10 at the farmer's market and say make sure you count the change otherwise you are getting ripped off. The tip with all these games is to not make them into a math lesson. Do not stop in the middle of a game to underline the subject and verb. The goal is to just have fun and let your kids have fun too.

Finally, step four, we need to give math a second chance. You might actually love it! Do you ever notice how "math kids" giggle about math? It's because they love it! They love the power and the beauty of it. It's not because of some genetic difference. It’s because someone believed in them, they understood the math, and they had fun, and they had the opportunity to practice so they could build a math mind. If that wasn't your experience, that’s okay. We can all give math a second chance, not just for ourselves but for our kids. We all know it's hard for our kids to like something if we hate it, and the world of math can be mean and exclusive. But it can change. Kierkegaard once spoke of two kinds of love: spontaneous love and true love. Spontaneous love just happens, but true love is a choice. We have to decide to approach math with the plan, with the knowledge, and with the patience that we will get to true love with it. In math, true love is waiting for you.