Read the full transcript of learning expert Shalinee Sharma’s talk titled “4 Steps to Unlock Your Kid’s Math Potential” at TED@BCG conference on September 12, 2024.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
A Mother’s Perspective on Math Education
SHALINEE SHARMA: Let me get started with this. I’m a mom and I have 13-year-old twin boys. I want to share a vivid memory from when they were in pre-K.
A mom came over at pickup to befriend me and she started telling me about her daughter. She said, “She’s like me. She’s just not a math kid. But your boys, your boys are math kids. We’re just not math people.”
I was stunned. I worried if I opened my mouth to disagree, I’d say something crazy. And we all know the price of crazy at pickup. You never get invited to any playdates. So I bit my tongue. She was the smartest and sweetest mom. And I remember thinking, “How do you know your four-year-old will never be good at math?”
Can you imagine if we thought the same thing in reading? If a kid struggled and we said, “Ah, she’s just not a reading kid.” And then we took away all the challenging books and writing assignments for the rest of her school years. We’d never do that. We’d never be OK labeling some of the kids “reading kids,” and leaving the rest illiterate. But that’s exactly what we do in math.
Changing the Question in Math Education
I’m a math learning expert and an education technologist, and believe it or not, I was not always a math kid. But for the last 12 years, I have observed millions of students complete billions of math problems and I’ve visited math classrooms on three continents, all to build the math-learning nonprofit Zearn.
And in all that work, I’ve learned one important thing: We are asking the wrong question in math learning.
Instead of asking who can learn math, we should be asking, how do you teach math? Because when we ask “who,” we imply that math learning is some rare genetic ability, but it’s not. We have piles of data that tell us we can all build a math mind, and we all need a math mind.
And so I have four steps to offer that begin to answer the question, how do we build a math mind and hopefully put an end to this labeling nonsense once and for all.
Step One: Believe
Remember when I said I wasn’t always a math kid? I was in sixth grade. I had just transferred schools and it was in math class that I fell apart. I had no friends in math class, and the kids who were thriving were a group of boys who wouldn’t talk to me. But I would not talk to them either. Because they were grody.
One day after a test, my teacher called me over to his desk and he said, “If you try your very best, you could be just as good as the boys.” Eek! Not an ideal thing to say to a little girl. And the gender gaps in math persist today. But it didn’t matter because my heart exploded. The coolest teacher I had ever met said that I could succeed. Hyperbole, maybe, but I think his words changed the course of my life.
Because he believed, he started a powerful chain reaction. Because he believed, I built up the courage to ask for extra help. And with that extra help, I did the extra work. And with that courage, extra help and extra work, I became a math kid. And along the way, I learned my experience was pretty normal.
All kids, even the math kids, fall behind, struggle or feel math anxiety. But the difference for those kids is someone believes. And so they do the work and they catch up. Actually, in any subject you learn, you can fall behind, but that’s usually a signal to work harder. But in math, that same signal is that you don’t have what it takes, and we give up and seal our fate. And so that’s why the first step is to believe.
Step Two: Understand
And the second step is to understand. Don’t just memorize math, understand it and use pictures.
Let’s say you have to take a reading test and you memorize 200 words to take the test. You don’t actually know how to read, but let’s say you get an A on the test. And then naturally, a few weeks later, you’d forget a lot of what you’d memorized, but with it you would forget how to read. Terrifying, right? And that’s what math class feels like for a lot of kids.
Think about how you can grab any book off a shelf and feel calm and confident, because you can read it. What if your math learning felt like that, where everything clicked into place and your math learning was durable?
Let’s take a big idea in math: ratios and proportional reasoning. One is to two or three is to one. More scary math to memorize? No way. I can use a picture from my everyday life to understand ratios. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. My twins have very different taste preferences. One likes his sandwich with one spoon of jelly and two spoons of peanut butter, and the other likes his sandwich with three spoons of jelly and one spoon of peanut butter. Very different ratios, very different sandwiches. Math can and should make sense.
Now let’s take a look at this problem. Which fraction has a value closest to one half? Two halves, five eighths, one sixth or one fifth?
Now a lot of us have been trained to just jump right in and start calculating. We’re looking for a common denominator across these fractions. And because that’s kind of hard to do for eight, six, five and two in your head, you might even reach for a piece of paper. But there is another way to get started, which is to pause and to understand.
You might imagine, or draw a rectangle and shade in one part and imagine, what is one half? And then what is two halves? Well, that’s the exact same rectangle. But now I’ve shaded in both parts. So two halves is one whole. And pretty soon from imagining or drawing these rectangles, it would become obvious that five eighths is the only reasonable option. Because sometimes the reward of understanding is not having to calculate at all.
Now, this question was given to American fourth graders on a national test, and 73 percent got this question wrong. The most commonly picked answer? Two halves. The most wrong answer possible. Because that’s what happens when we memorize math.
Step Three: Make Math Fun
And so just like we have to make math meaningful, step three is we have to make math fun. Make math practice fun. Math practice. I know what you’re thinking. A worksheet with 50 tedious, long division problems.
But we’ve known for years, in reading, if we want kids to learn it and to love it, we need to appeal to their interests. Fantasy novels with elves, graphic novels with spies. What’s that in math? Games. Card games, board games, real-world games you just make up on the fly. And just like we’re told to read to our kids for 20 minutes a day, play games often.
When my twins were little, a favorite was the game Battleship, where the objective is to sink the opponent’s ship. But also an engaging application of the coordinate plane. If you get a hit on E5, you’re quickly thinking of which coordinate to call out next.
You can also just play simple games that you make up in the real world. When our twins were little, we’d give them ten bucks each at the farmer’s market and we’d say, “Make sure you count the change before you hand over the money. Otherwise, how do you know you’re not getting ripped off?”
And a tip with all these games: don’t make them a math lesson. Just like you wouldn’t stop reading a book to underline the subject and the verb with your kids, just have fun and let your kids have fun too.
Step Four: Give Math a Second Chance
And that brings me to the fourth and final step. Give math a second chance. You might love it.
Have you ever noticed how the math kids giggle about math? They love it. They love the power and the beauty of math. And it’s not because they’re made of different genetic stuff. It’s because somebody believed in them. And they learned math so they understood and they had fun. So they practiced enough to build a math mind.
And maybe that wasn’t your experience growing up. And that’s OK. We can all give math a second chance now for ourselves and for our kids. Look, we all know that it’s pretty hard for our kids to like something if we hate it. And the world of math can be mean and exclusive. But it can change when we make a decision, when we see the power and the beauty of math. And when we do, no one can take that from us.
Kierkegaard once talked about two kinds of love. Spontaneous love and true love. Spontaneous love just happens to you. You don’t have any control over it. But true love is something different. It’s where you decide.
And so the change in you is to approach math with the plan, with the knowledge and with the patience that you will get to true love. Because in math, true love is waiting for you.
