Make math fun again
Let the kids have old-school kindergarten
There’s a new math museum near Seattle that people are super-excited about. The founder says there’s not anything else like it for mathy field trips.
I do want to quibble a bit as a parent since the Seattle area already has a giant science museum downtown as well as a couple of children’s museums where kids can play with all sorts of geometric shapes and origami and physics-related exhibits, but I digress.
It’s great when math gets any sort of positive attention, right?
And it’s especially impressive when it’s something that could lead to better math skills and much stronger math interest.
The Seattle Universal Math Museum (SUMM) in Kent, Wash., focuses on teaching people, especially kids, how to play with math, and even had a special math festival on Pi Day. (March 14. You know, 3.14!)
The museum staff will do outreach programs at schools, has an extensive array of math toys, and it even has a very cool collection of math stuff on its website, with factoids and articles that are very compelling for adults and big kids, like “Math in … Probabilistic Fallacies” and “Math in … Fraud Detection.”
Meanwhile, the superintendent of public instruction for the state of Washington, Chris Reykdal, just said recently that schools need more math. Well, yeah, that’s what scores of parents have been saying for a long time in Seattle.
But he means for the little kids. And I am not as enthusiastic in this area.
He’s pushing for much earlier math: “We need math intensity from the day they step into school, the same way we do reading, and it’s just not been a national priority anywhere,” Reykdal said, according to a recent Seattle Times report. “There’s pockets of excellence, but we have to think about reading and numeracy, and that language has to change in families.”
I am an admitted zealot for math and acceleration whenever it’s needed with older kids. (E.g., I almost blew a gasket when our local high school cut the course AP Calculus BC from its curriculum for a year.)
But I also have the old-fashioned idea that pressure to perform academically in kindergarten (with children who are 5) might be exactly where many current math problems begin. “Math intensity” in the form of learning at a desk is unlikely to be the answer in kindergarten, though it would be fantastic to get all kids ready with intensive, playful number awareness and intensive free-form math play. I’m hoping that is what Reykdal means.
Academic-style learning in kindergarten was not a thing until the late ’90s and 2000s. Since then, the U.S. has largely remade kindergarten into a kind of early first grade — instead of a free-play, learning-intensive environment — and that developmentally inappropriate move does not seem to have accelerated anyone’s overall achievement.
Think back to your own experience in kindergarten: Was it sitting down at a desk to do worksheets or did you play with blocks, have story time, and play with a pretend kitchen? Did you play with clay or Play-Doh, which would help you have the small motor skills to start writing words with a pencil, as a first-grader, the next year? And not as a kindergartner?
Did you sing a lot? Me too. And some of those were counting songs. And some kids were building incredibly complex towers with blocks or Legos or Lincoln Logs or playing cards.
Not for a grade. Because they wanted to.
And we counted blocks and beans and all sorts of things. That’s math at age 5, when a school is following a developmentally appropriate curriculum.
This all leads back to the math museum, where kids are learning how to play with math as a firm foundation for numeracy, the number equivalent of literacy.
That’s what kids need as kindergartners, not a lot of compulsory problem sets and memorization. Not yet.
Let the 5-year-olds have fun and explore numbers and letters and play with blocks and beans.
Then at age 6, bring on the drudgery!
That sounds terrible, but at least they’ll be prepared and ready for the big stuff.