Demystifying Elementary Math (from a Secondary Perspective)

  Tell me if you've heard this one before...              Parent and child at the table working on child's homework.               Child becomes frustrated and begins to cry             Parent becomes equally (or more) frustrated by the tears/the                      assignment/both.           Sound familiar?            It's pretty common, but let's ask a new question - what's the upstream problem?   Not familiar with the idea of "upstream problems"? It was new to me until very recently - but the best description I've heard is this:  There's a town in which every evening a child washes up on the banks of the local river. Every day the fire department rescues the child and is lauded as heroes.  One day a new fire chief takes over. After a week, he throws up his hands and just as the child washes up, he hops in, saves the child, but doesn't stay for the celebration. Instead he marches upstream.  When he's questioned on his way out of town he

  My fellow math nerds and I may be the only people who REALLY enjoyed this show, but the opening always resonated with me. "We all use math every day: to predict weather, to tell time, to handle money. Math is more than formulas and equations. It's logic. It's rationality. It's using your mind to solve the biggest mysteries we know." "...more than formulas and equations..." that couldn't be more true for our youngest learners. While they are building the skills to add, subtract, multiply, and divide their teachers are also encouraging them to be pattern recognizers. Pattern recognition leads to deeper mathematical understanding.  Recognizing repeated addition or subtraction is the first step in recognizing linear relationships. Recognizing repeated multiplication or division is the introduction to geometric sequences and exponential growth and decay.  Ask the kids in your life about what patterns they see. Ask them to predict what comes next in a li