<story><title>Math from Three to Seven</title><url>https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven-by</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kreyenborgi</author><text>This was a surprisingly interesting and well-written article. I hope people read it and not just the comments here :-)&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m unsure if it implies that &amp;quot;lame school exercises&amp;quot; are unnecessary or just not sufficient (I&amp;#x27;ve recently read articles about how teaching &amp;quot;insight&amp;quot; without exercises is detrimental, though perhaps doing problems implies getting that repetition-work).&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have good experiences with keeping kids math-interested as they get into their teens? My kid used to enjoy math in school, and love talking about math problems (&amp;quot;can you help me set up that triangle pyramid thing with the sums again&amp;quot;), but now is seemingly disillusioned and finds the school exercises boring. Combine that with, well, teen-age, and I fear it&amp;#x27;s going to be hard to get back the spark. Not that it &lt;i&gt;has&lt;/i&gt; to come back, but I&amp;#x27;d hate for the interest to turn into dislike due to lack of opportunities.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nerdponx</author><text>Can&amp;#x27;t speak for my own kids (yet), but personally I was able to hold my interest in math through my teens for 2 reasons:&lt;p&gt;1. I had some good teachers who showed (glimpses) of the how and why, not just the &amp;quot;what&amp;quot;, so it helped math feel like it made sense, rather than being just facts and calculating algorithms to memorize. One demo that left a particular impression on me was the teacher asking us to go around the unit circle in increments of 10 degrees and plot the ratio of the opposite side and hypotenuse of the inscribed right triangle. Watching the sine function -- until then some mysterious thing that just existed with no explanation or context -- materialize in front of me on graph paper was magical.&lt;p&gt;2. I was shown that math is &lt;i&gt;useful&lt;/i&gt;. In another great high school demo, the teacher assigned every student a length, width, and height, to be cut from construction paper and taped together in a box. After we were done, we laid out all the boxes together and computed their volumes. Then the teacher worked through the calculus on the board to figure out the dimensions of the box with the highest possible volume, given that fixed amount of construction paper. That was a really big moment for me, because until then I &amp;quot;hated&amp;quot; math, being a silly waste of time messing around with numbers and shapes just for the sake of doing it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Math from Three to Seven</title><url>https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven-by</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kreyenborgi</author><text>This was a surprisingly interesting and well-written article. I hope people read it and not just the comments here :-)&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m unsure if it implies that &amp;quot;lame school exercises&amp;quot; are unnecessary or just not sufficient (I&amp;#x27;ve recently read articles about how teaching &amp;quot;insight&amp;quot; without exercises is detrimental, though perhaps doing problems implies getting that repetition-work).&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have good experiences with keeping kids math-interested as they get into their teens? My kid used to enjoy math in school, and love talking about math problems (&amp;quot;can you help me set up that triangle pyramid thing with the sums again&amp;quot;), but now is seemingly disillusioned and finds the school exercises boring. Combine that with, well, teen-age, and I fear it&amp;#x27;s going to be hard to get back the spark. Not that it &lt;i&gt;has&lt;/i&gt; to come back, but I&amp;#x27;d hate for the interest to turn into dislike due to lack of opportunities.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dan-robertson</author><text>I think the amount of approachable math content online is incredible. Some comments mention 3Blue1Brown on YouTube, which is good but can go on a bit and maybe be a bit advanced. I think Numberphile is great for having a lot of videos, each of which is pretty short, and which still show some small proof of some problem. There are also books of interesting mathematical tidbits or puzzles, eg the Martin Gardener or Ian Stewart books. I guess one other thing to say is that it probably helps for you to appear to be interested in the math things instead of you being interested in your kid doing what you want (ie looking at the math things)</text></comment>