Speaking of Math Podcast by Door-2-Math

The message that every little girl wants to hear from her father:

1. Daddy, when we're apart, I miss you and I hope you miss me too.

2. Tell me I matter to you.

3. Tell me you're proud of me. Even when you think I know this, tell me anyway.

4. Re-affirm me that I'm worth it.

5. Daddy, be there for me.

A www.door2math.com production.

In this video I talk about my experience with girls and math struggle. Girls tend to memorize math facts which leads to math success in the lower grades but math problems after 6th grade. Critical thinking skills and figuring things out is the long term path to success and I talk about how word problems can be used to change the mindset.

A www.door2math.com production.

When we look at the math topics that need to be mastered by our 6th graders, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged - there are many different math topics and it’s difficult to tell which ones are essential and need to be mastered so our kids can continue to be successful with math after 6th grade. From working over 400+ families and with dozens of different types of math curricula, I believe all that clutter taught to our kids in this age group can be simplified to just four essentials.

The first milestone set is adding and subtracting. This is the most basic number operation and it’s just manipulating numbers, that’s it.

The second milestone set is multiplication and division. We can think of multiplication as just a quick way to add and division as just a quick way to subtract. So if we lump these two together, we can call these arithmetics operations.

The combination of decimals, percentages and fractions is the third big milestone.This skill set is very important as this is most of our daily math communication in society. This milestone I call a magic triangle. So if you can imagine there's a triangle and on the very tippy top let's say there’s a fraction, and on the lower left corner you see a fraction and on the lower right corner you see a decimal. If your child is able to go to each point of the triangle and convert from percentage to fraction to decimal then they’ve mastered this milestone. For example, let's say you have a one over eight, that's a fraction, right? In decimal form it’s 0.125 and in percentages it’s 12.5%. So if you take any one of the these and your child is able to convert to the other two, that’s a good sign.

And after that is this concept called the LCM or the least common multiple. The reason that this one is so important is that's it’s the foundation for adding and subtracting fractions and lays the foundation for algebra, geometry and beyond. Learning the LCM operations also trains the mind in critical thinking skills. Unfortunately this is where we lose so many kids in math because the ones that got away with memorizing before won’t be able to successfully complete this milestone.

I have a tennis story and I hope you can gain some insights on test taking.

I’ve been having a problem with consistency so my tennis coach offered to help. We did a couple of points and she said, why do you think you'll game is not consistent? I said when I do the forehand, sometimes it goes where I want to go and sometimes I shank it!

So she said she wouldn't define consistency the way I define it! I'm thinking, great, what does it have to do with tennis? And what does this have to do with test taking?

When it comes to test taking, many students think you have to know math to get good scores. Yes and no. Test taking has two parts, knowing the material and test taking skills.

Just like test taking, consistency has two parts, a consistent stroke which I have, and the second part I didn't know is focus. My focus was poor. That's why I was shanking it.

Back to test taking. Let's say you have $100 and you’re traveling and you go in through a weird toll house that needs to take 20%. After the toll house you have $80 left. Not too bad, right? Twenty bucks. Then comes another toll house. This time they take 20% of $80 and now you end up with $64 :(

So on a test you want to get a 100, but you got a 64. Which skill do you work on, test taking or knowing the material? Because 80 percent of 80 percent is 64 percent. If you keep on working on the wrong thing, it's not going to increase your score and you're going to get discouraged.

Just like with my tennis game, I was working on my stroke, and didn’t know it was the focus problem. So if you’re getting low test score, you need to sit down and look where you're making the mistakes. Is the mistake made from not knowing the material or silly mistakes? All mistakes cost you points much like a focus problem caused me points. So you really need to analyze.

Back to tennis. Once I figured this out, I started to pay more attention to my focus problem. Every times the ball comes across the net and bounces, I say the word “bounce”. My consistency is better now because I'm working on the right thing!

Much Love, Feenix

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