[HN Gopher] How to Force Your Kids to Do Math?
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How to Force Your Kids to Do Math?
Author : happycats
Score : 34 points
Date : 2025-04-19 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.avocados.ovh)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.avocados.ovh)
| ogogmad wrote:
| Maybe find an application of the subject that they might find
| interesting. I suppose if you can't find anything that interests
| them, then it's much harder to teach it.
|
| For instance, perspective drawing might provide a nice
| application of 3D projective space, its subspaces, and
| perspectivities between those subspaces. Some of the theory of
| conic sections might be relevant too.
|
| Computer graphics provides a nice application of coordinate
| geometry. This covers elementary algebra, Pythagoras's theorem,
| etc.
|
| Even eating pizza can provide an application of differential
| geometry.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I tell my kids they can have letter cookies if they pick a word
| that starts with the letter, and can have 5 treats if they ask
| for 4 but know what "plus one means" or can have 4 if they
| recite "2 plus 2 equals ... ".
|
| They're 3, so I don't expect that to scale, but I'm hoping it's
| normal reward-for-knowledge by the time we get report cards.
| CBLT wrote:
| Something that might work for getting your kids interested in
| modular arithmetic: The Chicken McNugget Theorem.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| When I was having trouble learning multiplication my father made
| up a payment system. He made flash cards and I got a payment for
| every one I mastered (I had to get it right some number of times,
| not just once). I ended up with maybe $25 or $50 which was a lot
| for a kid in the 1970s.
| Rendello wrote:
| My mother tried to give me $5 for every book of the Bible I
| read. I never took her up on it even though I knew about the
| basically freebies like Jude. I wasn't opposed to it, but it
| felt like -on the one hand- I didn't want to half-ass it and
| read a few books -and on the other- I really didn't want to
| read the entire Bible. So I guess that a completionist attitude
| prevented me from getting $30!
| helph67 wrote:
| Perhaps make them aware how important it is with examples from
| nature?
| https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=fibonacci+in+nature+examples&...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Kids do not understand the concept of "importance". At least no
| kid I've met. That part of their brain doesn't work. They'll
| trade effort for privileges or toys tho, and are little mimicry
| machines so they follow you if you use it.
| jerkstate wrote:
| yeah, I recoiled when the author of the post says "no
| bribing" - bribery is one of the most useful tools a parent
| has. I guess you could call it "incentive" or something, but
| really, it's quid pro quo.
| codemac wrote:
| It's not about forcing your kids to "do math", but to excel at
| important skills far before the benefits of being good at that
| skill matter.
|
| The amount of homework/study per day that maximizes math scores
| on tests is significant, 1+ hours/school day by the time they're
| in middle school, with it helping even more for those who are
| starting out poor at math[0]. You'll note the referenced study
| doesn't even max out progress for any group - meaning most could
| have studied more and improved more.
|
| I don't know any kids that voluntarily did an hour or more of
| solely math study per day. I know plenty that were forced, and
| ended up loving math or other technical fields as adults.
|
| As a parent of young kids, obviously I haven't gone through high
| school yet - but I don't think many children who reach their
| potential in math, english, music etc will have no pressure from
| their parents.
|
| [0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8025066/
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Me being forced to do tons of horrible math by my abusive
| grandfather at a young age for literally 4+ hours at a time
| gave me a few things.
|
| 1. A true hatred of work, make work, and a strong desire to
| defend laziness as a concept (note that Bertrand Russel agrees
| hard with me here!) -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_
| of_Idleness_and_Ot...
|
| 2. A love of subversives and cheating the system. Basically,
| the guys writing leetcode cheating software are saints in my
| book. All subversions of the attempt to turn society into a
| meritocracy (a term which was originally supposed to be a
| slur/negative connotation -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy) is
| extremely good.
|
| 3. An advanced knowledge of TI basic, so I could cheat hard on
| every single school assignment I could get away with. AP
| Chemistry? I've got a symbolic stoichometry solver app!
| Calculus? CAS system in the palm of my hand!
|
| Play stupid games with children, win stupid prizes. Maybe don't
| force them to work like little slaves in their early life, and
| they won't strike back at your society systems.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Raising kids is hard. Sad. And what do I know about it?
| Regardless, parents do need to get involved in their
| children's education. For instance, they should help their
| children prepare for entry exams into secondary school. This
| shouldn't take their child 4 hours a day. Maybe 10 minutes on
| some days, and 1 hour on others.
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| I had similar conclusions, but the other way around:
| absolutely no guidance. Fortunately by the time I programmed
| and sold the basic ti math exam solvers to by classmates for
| 2 euros a pop I had everything memorized.
|
| Nothing like cheating the system to know the system
| lanna wrote:
| I'm fortunate enough that my daughter has an admirable interest
| (and talent) for Math since very early age. She even won a medal
| at a renowned nationwide Math competition when she was in Grade
| 5... competing in the Grade 10 category.
| stuaxo wrote:
| My daughter and loads of kids watched number blocks from around
| two or three up, I think it made quite a big difference- she's
| far ahead of where I was now, years later.
| jerkstate wrote:
| ChatGPT makes it so easy to build a lesson/workbook for something
| your kid is interested in. I've used it to build workbooks on
| special relativity, tsolkovsky's rocket equation (including euler
| integration to build a scratch program), triangulation, logic
| gates, probabilities of simple dice games, etc. My pro-tip is to
| tell the LLM to format the document in LaTeX, so you get
| beautiful math typesetting.
|
| You don't even have to get through the workbook. Get to a part
| that they need to understand better and make a detailed workbook
| on that part (for example, triangulation -> solving a system of
| linear equations).
| twodave wrote:
| Another article where someone thinks being a parent means they
| understand all children. I have 4 kids, and 2 of them definitely
| would never do math, even basic math, for fun, ever. Their brains
| lack whatever pathways most people utilize to learn math, so I
| now have a 15 year old who has to work nearly as hard at
| arithmetic as she did when she first learned it. No amount of
| drilling, change of curriculum, buckling down or backing off has
| had any impact. She has absolutely no interest in math. But the
| kid reads faster than I do, which is not slow at all.
|
| The only thing I know about kids after having adopted 4 of them
| is that none of them are alike. The only time when you can really
| train them to do anything consistently is when they are babies.
| As a result all 4 have great sleep habits :)
| diego898 wrote:
| Best advice I ever received is: You have to parent the kid you
| have - not the kid you want
| mathattack wrote:
| Yes. And it's the same when the kids come from the same parents
| too. We have one kid that's willing to go very deep on math.
| The only does what can be figured out in 3 seconds or less.
| Same genetic parents, same school system.
|
| The original concept in the article of exploration is great.
| Some kids want to explore math, some science, some music, and
| some Starcraft.
| smath wrote:
| About a year ago I came across the concept of 'math circles',
| here on HN. It was this longish but very interesting article:
| https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven...
|
| The key element here is nurturing curiosity. Since then i and my
| 10yr old have been sitting through a virtual math circle led by
| Aylean McDonald on parallel.org.uk an organization run by Simon
| Singh
| r58lf wrote:
| For elementary school age kids, maybe even middle school, try
| getting them started with the app "Euclidea".
|
| They won't think of it as math. It's gamified geometric
| constructions. Starts simple, "how do you bisect an angle" with a
| compass and a straight edge. It goes to a very high level that
| will challenge anyone.
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Something we don't pay enough attention to is that while
| calculators have solved everyday math to the point we downplay it
| as a required skill, people are not pulling out their calculator
| at the grocery store to make better purchase decisions, even
| though we all have one in our pocket now.
|
| So we handwave the importance of being able to do everyday math
| in our heads, while also not taking advantage of the tool that's
| a substitute for it. We're less educated but also less effective
| than we would be if we'd never invented automated calculation and
| were forced to be sharp about it.
|
| Is there a name for this phenomenon?
|
| And what's it going to look like a decade after AI has caused
| people to stop using their brain for general thinking like it's
| stopped them from doing math?
|
| (I'm sure you, the reader, are very good at math and are an
| exception to this still-apt generalization.)
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