Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math - Hardcover

Sharma, Shalinee

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593543505 ISBN 13: 9780593543504

Verlag: Avery, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Bust the math myths that are holding you and your kids back and learn the importance of numeracy with this one-of-a-kind resource for parents, educators, and policymakers

Shalinee Sharma is one of the world’s top experts on math learning, but when she was in school, she sat in the back row, unsure if she could ever master the subject. Many of us buy into the idea that some people are innately good at math and others just won’t ever succeed at it—but it’s not true, and numeracy is as important as literacy when it comes to opening doors in life.

Sharma shows how complex problem solving and puzzle solving, abstract and logical thinking, developing fluency with numbers, and cultivating persistence in math are crucial skills for success that can be taught to everyone and how math, far from being a dry, dull exercise, shares common ground with art and creativity. She also debunks the myths that prevent us from learning and enjoying math, with chapters dedicated to the three roadblocks that discourage adults and kids from learning.

With instructive line drawings throughout, Sharma explains the math instinct that all humans have from birth, and better, more intuitive ways to solve math problems that are both rigorous and accessible. For anyone who has ever thought you’re “bad at math” but wants to get good—for your children and for yourself—Math Mind contains the guidance, takeaways, and specific approaches you need to learn to love numbers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Shalinee Sharma is a math expert and the CEO and cofounder of Zearn, a nonprofit educational organization behind the top-rated math-learning platform used by one in four elementary-school students and by one million middle-school students nationwide. In addition to her role at Zearn, she serves on the Braven board of directors, is a Pahara-Aspen Fellow, and serves as cochair of the Brown University Advisory Council for the College. She has a master of business administration from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University. A child of refugees, Sharma is passionate about universal access to an excellent education.

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What if I told you that we don't really know much about how we learn math?

For all the rigid rules and drills in the classroom, behind the scenes there's a shocking lack of certainty. "What do we really know about how to teach math to children?" the writer Jay Caspian Kang asked in a recent article on the state of math education. "The answer is not all that much-and what little we do know is highly contested."

This is a startling thing to hear about one of the fundamental building blocks of K-12 learning. Especially considering that an understanding of fractions in elementary school predicts the completion of algebra, and completion of algebra is the most predictive activity in K-12 of getting to and through college. Math can change life trajectories.

But what Kang found is also what I have found on my own more than decade-long journey through math education. In building and constantly improving a K-8 math learning platform, which now serves millions of students and hundreds of thousands of teachers, I've witnessed up close how much doubt and disagreement there is about basic questions of how to build mathematical minds.

More than a decade in, however, I know one thing for certain. We all could have been math kids.

Ten years ago, I wouldn't have believed it. While I knew I became a math kid and wasn't simply born one, I had not generalized my experience. But various events, especially the COVID period, took me on a high-intensity learning journey. As an optimist, I'd like to have believed in everyone's innate ability. But I am a skeptical optimist, meaning that I can believe something only when I see it with my own eyes. I assumed my personal experience was a one-off and that math success was a rare inborn ability, because that's the dominant societal narrative. Though I had worked hard and scraped by, I still assumed that the majority who succeeded with math were those with natural abilities.

Why does what we believe about math learning matter? Because the assumptions we start with matter, and some even decide the outcome. Assumptions consciously and unconsciously shape our behavior. Right out of college, I had a job where I built financial models that attempted to predict outcomes. As part of our training, we were told it was essential to find and explore our most sensitive assumption in the analytical model, meaning the variable that, if changed, would totally change the outcome or the answer the model would point us to.

Sitting alone late at night in my cubicle with my Excel spreadsheets, finding the most sensitive assumption, I would get lost in thought, dwelling on what assumptions were most sensitive in other parts of my life. If I want to drink better coffee and eat authentic Indian food, could I assume the cafés and Indian restaurants would improve in Boston? If not, then should I move? These assumptions can predict the future because inadvertently, they can decide the future.

Consider that "Who can learn math?" and "How do we teach math?" are two fundamentally divergent questions. Each starts from a radically different assumption and goes on to manifest itself distinctly. In one project we are sorting, and in the other we are teaching.

To grasp the importance of assumptions about who can learn math, let me share the untold story of the American high school revolution. In 1890, fewer than 7 percent of American students went to high school. High school was a luxury for the rich or a privilege for those who could pass an admissions test. All enjoying this luxury were born the right gender and ethnicity. Yet by 1940, the share of US children attending high school had risen more than tenfold to over 70 percent. This dramatic change in the way America chose to educate its children transformed the culture, economy, and politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and was seminal to the American-led global technology revolution that we are still in today.

It's hard to overstate how seismic this shift was. Historically in the United States and Europe, children were tested (read "sorted") by the specific high school they sought to attend, to determine if they were worthy. In the first decade of the twentieth century, America checked that sorting-based assumption. The zeitgeist shifted suddenly and many education leaders began to wonder if the act of going to high school would enable students to do well on the kind of tasks the admissions tests were assessing for and thus become more productive members of society.

Horace Mann, an education leader from the early 1800s who didn't live to see the high school revolution but influenced its design, advocated for free and universal education. He wrote that education "is a great equalizer of conditions of men-the balance wheel of the social machinery." While Europe continued to sort and test, the US decided to teach "everyone," including girls. (However, in most places "everyone" still included only those who were white. The work of integrating our education system continues today.) With this investment in children, in our human capital, the United States surpassed other developed countries at the time in technological and economic advancement. It turned out it was better for everyone to teach all students a high school curriculum instead of just the chosen few. Within a few decades, Europe followed suit. The American high school revolution, not the European sorting model, became our default setting for all countries across the world.

Positive Deviance

Let me circle back to the first experience that pushed me to question my assumptions. In 2012, I had quit my fast-paced job in business to start the nonprofit Zearn with a group of educators. Though I had spent more than a decade in business, I had never planned to be in the industry that long. As a child, I told people that I wanted to work at the American Red Cross, though I did not know what that meant. In college, I explored careers in the social sector and direct service. Among the ways I wanted to serve, education held a special place.

As the child of refugees, I had seen firsthand how access to an excellent education could transform lives. Once, both of my parents had been small children on the wrong side of the border. In the summer of 1947, as India won its independence from colonial rule, the devastating and hastily planned Partition by the British-with India and Pakistan on each side of a new border-resulted in the displacement of fourteen million people and an estimated three million deaths. It's the largest refugee crisis in human history. As a child, watching the aftershocks of Partition unfold in my family on multiple continents, I learned three key lessons: how an education could change the trajectory of a life, how many people weren't sufficiently lucky to obtain one, and how grossly unfair the whole system was. So, when the chance to spend my time and energy increasing access to education emerged, I grabbed it.

We founded Zearn to answer two questions: Could we continue the work of the high school revolution using digital tools to further democratize access to an excellent education? How could technology complement the work of teaching and learning? While charting our path, I found that the most interesting answers were to questions I had not initially asked, and I came to question several assumptions I didn't know I had.

There was no manual for what I wanted to do. I had to go a different way. In the book Switch, Chip and Dan Heath share a schema for solving hard problems in the absence of existing instructions. The method is to study "bright spots," the particular cases when things go right against the odds. In rural Vietnam, they write, child malnutrition was seen as an inevitable result of poverty and poor sanitation, so that nothing could be done about it until those...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Avery
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593543505
• ISBN 13: 9780593543504
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar