[oob205]

Worth noting that a way NOT to teach kids to love math is to inundate them with arithmetic. My math education, like many in the US, was an endless barrage of memorizing facts, solving equations, then memorizing some more facts. It was not until college that I began to see the essence of math is creativity. Kids are naturally creative and inquisitive and we should use this to our advantage in early education. We should explore topics like topology and infinity, topics that still blow my adult, math-major mind. We also need to encourage students to be creators in math. One of the ways we learn to love reading is by writing and making up our own stories. We can have students make puzzles, write computer programs, and see that they can invent things with math.

For a more informed perspective on how we teach math all wrong, I recommend Lockhart's Lament: http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

[joezydeco]

I spent an hour last night working on a math homework assignment with my second-grader. The practice was adding up single digits to sums greater than 10.

The idea behind the problem (say 9+5) is to "make a 10" and then figure out the sum from the remainder. So 9+5 -> 10+4 = 14. But he didn't know which numbers routinely added up to 10. That was never memorized. The assignment was so focused on strategy and technique that it neglected the fact that the basic tools aren't there.

There's a point where you need to memorize something to make the strategy and discovery easier.

[aswanson]

We should explore topics like topology and infinity, topics that still blow my adult, math-major mind...

One of my happiest conversations was with my 7 year old inquiring into infinity...days after our conversation I overheard him saying to a classmate, 'Inifinity is not a number, it's a statement saying numbers never end...'