<story><title>Calculus for Seven Year Olds [pdf]</title><url>http://mathman.biz/materials/Calculus%20By%20and%20For%20Young%20People%20Worksheets.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DoreenMichele</author><text>Copyright 1991. This was probably making the rounds of homeschooling circles I hung out in.&lt;p&gt;We tend to do a sucky job of teaching math to kids. A lot of elementary school teachers are women who were encouraged to go into early education because they weren&amp;#x27;t doing so well in math and this is very much gender bias.&lt;p&gt;My ex husband wasn&amp;#x27;t good at math. No one told him he should spend his days teaching little kids because of it. He was a career soldier and he just got tutored in college (by me) for his math classes. He was just expected to work at it if it didn&amp;#x27;t come naturally and he did.&lt;p&gt;So we just culturally pass around this idea that math is scary and little kids can&amp;#x27;t learn it rather than going &amp;quot;Well, adults just need to up their game and, by god, explain it better.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;My oldest was math phobic by the time I pulled him out of school to homeschool. My one and only goal for math was to get him over his phobia.&lt;p&gt;He loves physics. I hate calculus. Calculus makes sense to him and he has read calculus books for fun.&lt;p&gt;I was good at explaining the math to him and he learned lots of solid math concepts even though he likely has dyscalculia and isn&amp;#x27;t good at crunching the numbers. But I got the concepts through to him and that&amp;#x27;s more important.&lt;p&gt;He&amp;#x27;s what gets called &amp;quot;calculator dependent&amp;quot; in some circles.</text></comment>
<story><title>Calculus for Seven Year Olds [pdf]</title><url>http://mathman.biz/materials/Calculus%20By%20and%20For%20Young%20People%20Worksheets.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>fatnoah</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know how I feel about this.  I&amp;#x27;ve always been good at math, and was one of five kids (out of class of 120) that took Calculus as a senior in high school in the early 1990&amp;#x27;s.  To even take Calculus as a senior, you had to have taken four years of math in the previous three years.  I was even the HS Math Champion&amp;quot; for my state.&lt;p&gt;However, when I took Calculus in High School, it was taught similarly to this.  Lots and lots and lots of math foundations, infinite series, areas under curves, and I was able to trudge through it but I didn&amp;#x27;t really grasp what it all meant or why I was doing it.  Finally, about 2&amp;#x2F;3 of the way through the year, I was working on a problem and had an &amp;quot;oh, shit, this is just about how things are changing&amp;quot;.  It was a Eureka moment, and entirely based on such a simple statement that was never brought up in lectures or our crusty 1960&amp;#x27;s texbook.</text></comment>