Find a good story and the knowledge will come.
My wife homeschooled our two sons (with some help from me), and we found that teaching math was not easy. Schools give you drills and threaten consequences if you don’t. That’s no way to learn. We had to find a better way.
Until I had kids, I felt like people who couldn’t learn math were just being lazy. “If you just do enough problems sets, you’ll get it” I thought. All it took was hard work. That’s what I did.
My interests aren’t like other people’s. I think about math all the time. Everything reminds me of math. Even in a heated discussion about current affairs, I just want to talk about statistical models. Math excites my brain. It draws my attention.
I learned a lot about attention as a parent, what evokes a child’s attention, what drains it. My sons only want to talk about video games. My eldest loves to talk about political theory now that he’s 16. I can only half keep straight what he’s saying. We all have attention deficits.
I find listening to people talk about their family member or people they know extremely dull. I won’t remember people’s names or anything going on in their lives. I was probably thinking about math at the time. That’s my attention deficit.
For most people, learning about math is like that. It’s not that they aren’t smart enough or their brains don’t work in the right way. Their brains just don’t want to pay attention.
To teach our sons math, we used a series specifically designed for homeschoolers called Life of Fred. They are thin-ish, hardbound books with hand drawn pictures that tell stories. They have quirky names like “Butterflies” and “Kidneys”.
The stories aren’t your typical math textbook word-problem stories either. They don’t pander. Some of them are even a little dark in a Toy Story-ish way. The stories are about the life of a fictional character named Fred from birth until he is 6 years old. He has a doll named Kingie. The stories are funny too. They hold your attention.
From the website:
No other textbooks are like these. Each text is written in the style of a novel with a humorous story line. Each section tells part of the life of Fred Gauss and how, in the course of his life, he encounters the need for the math and then learns the methods.
Author Dr. Stan Schmidt, retired high school and college teacher, invented Fred early in his career and kept writing more and more books.
All the books are targeted at the appropriate age level and follow the curriculum for that age, but they trick you into learning by telling an engaging story about math. The books go all the way from elementary school to college level math like calculus.
My eldest son would read them cover to cover just for the stories.
Even my own mathematical career started with books like Who was Fourier? A mathematical adventure produced by the Transnational College of LEX with a star studded advisory team. It was my first introduction to ideas about waves, something I work with every day now.
It doesn’t take a math Ph.D. to know that learning math is hard and learning anything in a boring way is even harder. You can put a lot of sweat into drills, but in the end you aren’t going to retain it.
A long time ago, before mandatory classroom attendance and death by Powerpoint, teachers knew how to explain concepts through stories. Story telling is more than just fun. It is built into how people learn.
Traditional teaching methods in math and science are dry and dull on purpose. As education researcher Jonassen, et al., explains:
Logical exposition has traditionally been used to teach problem solving, because education was impelled to appear scientific in its discourse. Despite the dominance of logical forms of exposition in academic disciplines, it is the narrative form of explanation that “just plain folks” … use in their every day negotiations of meaning and problem solving.
In other words, we want stories and not just any stories, «just plain folks» stories that teach us why what we are learning matters.
The brain is wired not only to learn through stories but also to cooperate with others. As neuroeconomics researcher, Paul Zak says [2],
in order to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first sustain attention — a scarce resource in the brain — by developing tension during the narrative. If the story is able to create that tension then it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it, and after it ends, likely to continue mimicking the feelings and behaviors of those characters. This explains the feeling of dominance you have after James Bond saves the world, and your motivation to work out after watching the Spartans fight in 300.
Thus, a story obtains from us both attention and the willingness to cooperate in the learning (or whatever else) that is happening in the story. If we read a story about somebody learning math and that story sustains our attention, it will not only help us to learn that math, but it will make us want to learn more math.
A lot of science and math textbooks try to make themselves more interesting by adding stories, but most of them expect you to already know what’s going on before you read the story. The story is like dessert or maybe an appetizer. Real learning needs to have the story as the main course. Drills and exercises are for people who want or need to do them.
The conclusion is that learning is more about attention than ability. Ability helps of course, but anybody can learn math if it’s made interesting enough. Maybe I could even learn to remember people’s names if they had an interesting enough story to go along with it.
[1] Jonassen, David H., and Julian Hernandez-Serrano. “Case-based reasoning and instructional design: Using stories to support problem solving.” Educational Technology Research and Development 50.2 (2002): 65–77.
[2] Zak, Paul J. “Why your brain loves good storytelling.” Harvard Business Review 28 (2014).