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I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about "unschooling" math. I have
only been homeschooling for about 3+ years, and for a while I tried the
"school at home" approach, but even then I could never get my kids to do the
math. Well, after finding out about unschooling, and doing a lot of reading,
I decided to just let them go for a while and see what happened. Well, here
we are 2 years later, and they still haven't shown much interest in math.
HOWEVER, they have somehow, somewhere, picked up an awful lot of it! They
understand fractions, percentages, rounding up or down, estimating, positive
and negative numbers, and more. The only thing I have done to actively
encourage them is to give them money every once in a while to spend on toys
or candy, and I take them with me when I go grocery shopping and explain
things to them as I shop like cost per unit, and to read labels to check
ounces and compare sizes to see which is the better deal, etc. I let them
help me when I cook sometimes, they love to measure, and with such a big
family I am constantly doubling my recipes, so they have to figure that,
too.
My personal theory on the subject is this.... If a child needs to know it, they will learn it. If it is not relative to them, they will not be interested. My 10yo. still does not know his times tables very well (although he knows more than he thinks, he just can't rattle them off easily). I am not concerned in the least about him. Why does it matter if he learns them at 10 years or at 15? Is he going to be using them in the meantime? I do encourage him in subtle ways to learn, but I don't push. I am disturbed by some of the basic ideas behind teaching. We automatically assume that our children will never WANT to learn, therefore we must FORCE them to learn "for their own good," and that without us pushing them, they would grow up to be idiots. I hated math in school, and I couldn't wait for the day when I could graduate and never have to do a math problem again. Ha ha ha! Now that I am in the real world, I do math all the time. The difference is that I want to do the figuring. I want to know how much of a discount 20% off of $14.99 will be. :-) I want to make sure I don't bounce a check! I want to figure out how much wallpaper I will need to redecorate my bedroom. I have learned more math since I graduated from high school than I ever learned in class. I really believe you can unschool math. Just make it relative, and allow children time to mature. One last illustration..... You might take a 5 month old baby and start working with him, training him to walk, but until his brain and muscles are developed enough, it will not happen. You might get him to walk a week or two sooner with your efforts, but what is the point? When he is 20 years old, it will not make any difference whether he learned to walk at 6 months or 18 months. Unless there is a serious physical problem, the child will eventually learn to walk on his own. -- Stephanie (Ivywild913@aol.com) |