As a high school Math teacher, I hear all the time, “I suck at Math!”, especially, considering that everything else in the world is found at the push of a button, when my students are faced with problems they can’t immediately solve. I hear “I hate Math” when we’re solving equations, when we’re factoring, when we’re plugging x values back in to find angle sizes. I hear it all the time. but it’s when I hear it that got me thinking.
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Since 2003, I’ve been keeping a mental log of all the times I have heard “I hate Math” or “I suck at Math”, mainly because each one has left its own little crater on my Math soul. I want – need, really - to figure out why kids feel this way.
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It took nearly 9 years, but yesterday I finally figured out why some kids hate Math with all of their being. It’s because they can’t multiply. This had been my suspicion for a few years, but yesterday it became clear that multiplication makes the difference.
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“But multiplying is easy, it’s not that. Math is WAY harder than just multiplying!” you may say. And I agree with you. However, Math is 90% confidence, and when a kid loses this confidence because “multiplying is easy” and he can’t multiply, then he feels like a loser and closes off to the rest of his years of problem solving.
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The Conclusive Evidence
I had never seen a little kid do Math until yesterday when a former student of my husband came over with her Mother for lunch. She’s in 4th grade now and has been having trouble with Math, so we sat down with her current homework: multi-digit multiplication problems. The algorithm “multiply then carry, then multiply again and add what you carried” is a little weird, but she got that part. Then all of a sudden out of nowhere, with fists slamming on homework…
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“I stink at Math!”
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“I hate Maaaaath!”
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Within the giant problem my husband gave her to do, she needed to multiply 8 x 5. When it didn’t come immediately, she exploded. And up went the walls. Single-digit “multiplication is easy”, right? Not if you don’t know it. If you don’t know 8×5, then Math is the shittiest subject there ever was, ever is, or ever will be. It totally blows.
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So what would help her? Memorizing her multiplication tables. Sounds simple and ridiculous, right? Hold on a second. Below are a few excerpts from an article, “Chess Experts Use Brains Differently Than Amateurs”:
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Experts use different parts of their brains than amateurs, maximizing intuition, goal-seeking and pattern-recognition, says a new study that examined players of shogi, or Japanese chess.
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Researchers believe that experts who train for years in shogi are actually perfecting a circuit between the two regions that helps them quickly recognize the state of the game and choose the next step.
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“Being ‘intuitive’ indicates that the idea for a move is generated quickly and automatically without conscious search, and the process is mostly implicit,” said the study.
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Math is a lot like chess: strategy, visualization of next moves, attack! When a kid is a multiplication amateur, strategy can never develop, patterns will never be recognized, Math will always be counterintuitive. Multiplication facts take a lot less time to master than chess.
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Memorization: Mathematicians’ Dirty Word
Memorizing sight words doesn’t make reading Harry Potter easy, but it does make it easier. This is why we do it. So why not memorize multiplication facts to make Math easier? At some point between being a Math student and being a Math teacher, ”memorization” became a dirty word. I agree that we shouldn’t force kids to memorize every Mathematical formula or the digits of pi, but I remember a deep sense of pride in having my multiplication facts memorized. Maybe the way it was done – calling us up one by one to recite the facts to our 3rd grade teacher – was not the best method and probably contributed to my high-strung demeanor. But when I got to pre-Algebra, I could cross-multiply; in Algebra I could quickly find factors; and in Geometry I could “plug it in” without a calculator. All of these seemingly-unrelated abilities contributed to my feeling that Math wasn’t impossible. I had confidence because I could multiply quickly. I was fluent, solving came easy. I could do more advanced problems because I had confidence. I had confidence because I didn’t need to stop and think through every instance of multiplication.
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A recent brain study done by Dr. Carolyn McGettigan in the UK yielded unexpected results. Contrary to hypothesis, the expert beatboxer uses less of his brain than the novice:
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The novice used many more brain areas, suggesting a need to plan each sound and a lack of automatic processing.
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Dr Carolyn McGettigan, a neuroscientist at University College London, compared magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans during two tasks – counting and beatboxing.
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Dr McGettigan says: “When you think about an expert you might think they activate extra bits of the brain – not just the bits you use to make sounds, but something exciting and different that you might not expect.”
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“What we have at the moment is a demonstration that being an expert doesn’t mean you activate more of your brain. The phrase ‘less is more’ is sort of appropriate here.”
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Thinking is Overrated
Thinking is important, but not that important. When it comes to the building blocks of any language, a level of fluency is essential. Without it, reading is exhausting, and things that are exhausting are avoided. I doubt that my husband – a true bookworm - would have read the entire Harry Potter series [more than once] if he had to individually sound out each word. It just wouldn’t have happened. J.K. Rowling would have never earned the necessary funds to go on to write The Casual Vacancy (is it any good?) if everyone struggled through her Harry Potter books. Is it any mystery that kids hate solving equations or finding missing side lengths if they have to “sound out” each instance of multiplication?
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So what to do?
We have to stop making our kids think so much! It’s exhausting them. When I was a kid, my parents gave me this Math toy that tricked me into learning my multiplication facts. Flashcards for facts up to 12×12 are also great. It’s got to be fun, not forceful, of course, but it’s got to happen. It will make all the difference later and is really that simple.
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