Musings on math

This is not originally the intent of this blog, but now I find myself sharing more of my musings here. I'm telling myself, my musings on this blog is related to J and Prime so its okay.

Alright, I was reading "The unschooling handbook" last night and I came across something that really made me stop and think.

"A structured approach such as Saxon's usually produces competence, but seldom any real pleasure or joy in mathematical ideas." *gasp*

I think with J doing Think Math daily that is exactly what is happening. She is competent in math, but she is not finding any pleasure or joy in math. She already voiced her opinion; she doesn't like math. Gosh, and she is only in 1st grade.

Anyway, we had a fairly long discussion about how math is everywhere and how everything is related to math or is really math. This topic really got J and Prime going. They were saying you mean music is math? Your nose is math? The bed is math? You get the idea. And Prime's biggest question, you mean God is math? Why, yes, God created the world and this world is all related to math so I would think God is the God of all math. Then daddy pitched in and threw in few big words, like "resonance frequency" and I did too, like "4th dimension" that everything is math.

At the end of the discussion, I think J and Prime was convinced that math is everywhere and that if you look at it that way, it becomes more fun.

I think one of the problem with math worksheets is it disconnects from real-life and young kids do not see the connection between their life and what they are studying. When I told J that money is math, she frowned because I think she realizes $ is part of every day life especially since we give her $6 for Chinese new year and she has been buying $1.5 happy meals here and there. So she has experienced first hand that she needs to know how $ (math) works to live.

I personally never understood why I needed to learn Calculus, etc. Algebra / Geometry okay. Perhaps if I had become an engineer or architect, etc. But luckily in college, because I took AP classes in high school, no math credits was needed in college and I was free from math mostly other than statistic.

I guess my musing is how am I going to teach J math? I guess I'm leaning toward discontinue using ThinkMath and let her explore math as it relates more to real life. That puts more work on my shoulder, it seems. I'm not sure, wisdom needed.

The unschooling book does say " We make that choice on the assumption that our children will learn basic math facts and computation skills through their everyday activities. This often means that they learn those basic arithmetic operations at later ages than tradionally occurs in schools, but it also means that when they do, they learn more quickly and easily. " hmmm.... okay, this is radical shift way of thinking but it does make sense to me.