Math and the Home Front

Many years ago a colleague of mine asked me, "if you had all the money you could spend on education, where would you put it".  I said, "parental involvement".  He said that no one else had said that and he had asked over one hundred educators that same question.  Today I have not changed my mind.  It all starts at home.  It is ease to blame the teacher, but they only see the child 7% of their lives.  Send them off to school with curiosity, and the love of learning.
The new year is about to start for our students.  They will be one grade higher or starting anew.  Most will be coming home with questions about their Math.  What will we say?  How will we approach their questions?  Will we say, as some parents do, "I was never good at math, I can't help you".  Some may even go as far as saying "I wasn't any good at Math, and you probably won't be either".
If your teenager is taking Trigonometry, and your last Math class was Algebra, you might have trouble helping him out.  However, that does not make you bad in Math, it only means that you are unaware of the concepts that he is asking about.  If your child is in the 6th grade or below, you should be able to help him.  The last thing we need to do is place more anxiety in their minds.  At times their own teachers do that for them.  After all you would not tell them, sorry I cannot read.
Just because you were not that pop-bottled glasses youngster in your 3rd to 6th grade class that always earned the highest grade in Math class, does not mean you can not handle their Math.  The four basic operations are the same, and by sitting down together, writing out what you know, and showing them how you see the problem solved will go a long way in building their confidence.  You might even show them problems that are similar that you solve on a daily basis.  This shows them the importance of what they are learning.
We want them to be life learners.  We want them to get up in the morning with the excitement of learning something new.  While I am thinking about it, school is not FUN.  Going to a theme park on the weekend, playing video games, or building a tree house, these are fun.   I do not believe that telling our kids  "have fun" every morning,  as they leave for school,  is the message we want to convey.  Perhaps saying "go learn something new",  and tell me about it later, might be a better message.  Perhaps I am being picky, and I am sure my own family would tell me so.
As a teacher, I wanted to make Math interesting, and easy to understand through the use of patterns.  Often times my students would say that they had fun learning the concept,  however  my intent would be to have them wanting to know what comes next.  It is like leading them to a beautiful meadow,  and then watch them discover the wild flowers.