There is an awful lot of debate about spiral versus mastery methods of math education these days. There is new math, common core math. There are manipulatives, worksheets, computer games (supporting a tremendous educational materials industry). All of this designed to more easily teach your child math.
But in reality all you need to teach your child math is you.
You know the basics of math. You learned it long ago and while you may have not have converted fractions to decimals in a long time, it certainly won’t take you long to remember once you look at a book.
So the real question is which book do you draw on to teach your child?
I recently looked at the books that Benjamin Franklin used to learn math: Cocker’s Arithmetick. Franklin, I reasoned was a very, very smart man with a strong command of math principles.
The striking thing is that Cocker’s approach to teaching math parallels Webster’s approach to learning spelling and Harvey’s approach to learning grammar: the book is a reference aid for a person who sits down with the student and teaches them. In fact any of those texts can be used to teach yourself, if you have the gumption to read through them. And they are all freely available on the Internet in PDF format (Cocker’s Decimal Arithmetick, Webster’s Spelling, Harvey’s Grammar, and McGuffey’s Readers.
So why?
Why do the curricula that trained and taught our country’s brilliant founders and their children not need manipulatives or worksheets?
Because the basic key to education is understanding. You don’t need animated cartoons explaining it, or a cute worksheet distracting from the basic concept.
Once you understand, you can move on and learn more. The drive to learn comes from the result of having learned. Understanding begats further understanding.
You don’t need a placement assessment or a comprehension test to prove it. Your child can easily pass a college entrance exam later if he really does understand the subject.
The important thing is your child understands.
You know he does, your child knows he does, and that is really all that matters.
