When You Dread Teaching Math [Show]

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Gretchen Roe: 00:00:04.490
Welcome to The Demme Learning Show. Our mission here is to help families stay in the learning journey wherever it takes them. This bonus episode was previously recorded as a webinar, and was not created with the audio listener in mind. We hope you will find value in today’s episode.

Gretchen Roe: 00:00:22.908
Hi everyone, welcome. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to this conversation today. There is so much that we need to talk about. And I apologize for my officemate sitting here, I can’t let him out of my office because I have construction workers in my house today. So, we are delighted to welcome you to this conversation about what to do about math when you dread teaching it. And this topic is very near and dear to me personally, because I am that parent. Today, I have the privilege of being joined by two of my very favourite colleagues, Lisa Chimento and Michael Sas, the three of us function as Placement Specialists along with our colleague, Sue Wachter, for Demme Learning. And we have conversations with parents who dread teaching math on a daily basis. So we’re delighted to unpack this subject for you, and give you some practical tools to make this more doable today. I’m going to ask Lisa and Michael to introduce themselves momentarily. And we’ll do ladies first, Lisa. I, by way of introduction, am a resident of North Carolina, my husband and I have six children we homeschooled for 21 years. Five of them are now college graduates, four of them don’t live with us. And the youngest is a junior in high school. So we’re almost at the end of our journey as far as academics for children are concerned. I have been a Placement Specialist at Demme Learning for the last eight years, and I just transitioned into the Community Outreach Coordinator position about three months ago. I’m delighted to be the host today, and hopefully we’re going to give you some really good information as we go along. Lisa?

Lisa Chimento: 00:02:10.101
Thank you. My name is Lisa Chimento, and I am a Customer Success Consultant and Placement Specialist here at Demme Learning. I’ve been doing that for one year. Before that, I was four years as a Customer Service Rep. And before that, I worked at the conventions for about eight years. And I homeschooled my own four kids for 25 years, they are all grown and gone now. I miss them, but this has been a joy to be able to continue staying connected with the homeschool community, and supporting homeschooling parents, which is just a joy to my heart.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:47.669
Michael?

Michael Sas: 00:02:48.723
Hi everyone, my name’s Micheal Soss, I live in Iowa. And have been working alongside homeschool educators for the last 16, 17 years now. I’ve been with Demme Learning for the past eight, I am also a placement specialist. I’m excited to be here, and to kind of talk about this important topic. And I learn from you as well, so thank you for joining us.

Gretchen Roe: 00:03:12.489
Michael is our resident dad on the squad. And we love the fact that Michael is right, as my German father would say [foreign], in the middle of raising two wonderful little boys. And so he brings a wealth of practical experience in the beginning of math education to the table for you all today. Today, we really want to be getting started with a lot of questions that you all posted, you know? This is the one subject, mathematics, where so many of us as homeschooling parents, feel like we are failing as parents. And we want to be able to offer you all support in the journey, and to remind you that we’re not failing. We’re just not taking advantage of all the things that are available to us. So in this opening, I wonder, Lisa, if you could talk a little bit about the differences between parents who are weak mathematically and parents who are strong mathematically. And what might be the ability for parents to be able to find that information and know how to go forward?

Lisa Chimento: 00:04:30.002
Yeah, I’d love to. We have the opportunity every day to speak to so many parents over the years. And there’s many different experiences that all of you have. Some of you are excited about teaching your kids. And some are very– don’t feel the confidence. And there’s a couple of things to keep in mind here. You have options. Some parents decide maybe the dad will teach math and mom will teach other things. But hear me out with this one because if you are not confident with math, you actually have an advantage there. You have the opportunity to learn alongside with your student. And Math-U-See is by far the best program I know that equips parents while it’s teaching the kids. It gives you confidence because the concepts are taught and demonstrated so clearly that you will understand them maybe [laughter] for the first time. And that’s a powerful thing– to come alongside your student and say, “You are not alone in this. I never felt good about math myself. I am here, and I’m going to be learning right alongside with you. And we’re going to do this together. And the bus isn’t going to leave without you. We will stick together through this until you understand it and feel equipped and confident.” We also support the math at every level. So if you and your student are working together through a lesson and you get stuck and you’ve tried it on your own and maybe you’ve gone to the solutions even and tried to work it backwards and it’s still not making sense to you, you can call in. And one of our colleagues will walk you through a problem until you get it, until that lightbulb goes off and you can– you feel like you can go forward again on your own so that– you do have options. And one of the biggest joys for me is to go to a convention. And I live here in Florida. So I’m at the Florida convention every year. And to speak to a family one year and the mom is saying, “No way I can teach math. I bombed math in school,” and to encourage that mom that she can do this and to see her come back the next year with the book like this going, “I get it. I get it,” and– it’s a joyful thing because it works.

Gretchen Roe: 00:06:46.140
It does indeed. Michael, I think you were the one who said that anxiety is perceived. And if your children are anxious– if you are anxious, your children know it. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how that affects our ability to effectively help our children be successful in mathematics?

Michael Sas: 00:07:03.658
Yeah, absolutely. I was never a straight-A student when it came to math. It was a struggle that came to algebra. I’ll be honest, algebra through my high school years were difficult. And I still remember what it feels like going to public school, I remember what it feels like to walk down the hall, going into the classroom, knowing that it was going to be a struggle today that I was going to to get 30 new problems. And I was hoping I wasn’t going to get called on. I was hoping that I could just make it through because I didn’t want to disappoint my parents. And I still have that to a degree when I teach my kids. I still have that fear and that anxiety that it was not a strong subject for me growing up. I feel a lot more confident with it today. But there’s still that anxiety that there’s there when I was a kid. And as parents, I know we want what is best for our kids. We want to make sure that they’re not having the same struggles we had. And so I still have that feeling of, “I want to make this the last thing that we do for the day and not the first thing because I’m most dreading this topic. And kids can kind of sense that. When they feel that we aren’t quite certain on things, that kind of can go over to our kids as well, and they can start to feel like, “It seems like you’re more on edge today. You’re getting more frustrated today.” And that carries over to the kids because they want to please us as parents. And when that happens, typically, kids shut down because they don’t want to be perceived as disappointing us as parents. And so I think what we have as kids never really leaves us. Even as adults, it stays with us. Because we want to show our kids that we are that Superman or that Superwoman, that we can do all these things. And when we can’t show that, it’s hard for us, I think. And so, yeah, it definitely I’ve seen it go down to my kids, as well, because of that anxiety and because of those past experiences, and so.

Gretchen Roe: 00:08:58.235
Yeah, I was that parent who, when my kids came to me– and so the irony of it is, I became a homeschool parent, not because of a laudatory goal of being able to give my kids the best education but really, because my eldest daughter was told in third grade, she didn’t need to memorize her multiplication tables. And I knew that that was bad thinking, I think would be the nicest kindest way to say that. I knew that that was just insane. I wanted her to have more advantages than I felt that I had. And I knew that I was weak mathematically, so I wanted to change that game for her. We had a successful opportunity to do that for 21 years, but I have to tell you all. I say that I homeschooled 21 years one year at a time because if I’d ever had to look at the long game, I don’t think I could have hung in there. Lisa, on the other hand, began homeschooling on principle and stuck to it and learned right alongside her children and did so very well. I learned alongside my children, but it was out of desperation, not out of incentive, I think, is the difference between the two of us. And Lisa is one of our Algebra 1 support specialists. And so she entertains conversations all the time about kids who are struggling mathematically. And Lisa, I wonder if you would spend a few moments giving parents some insight into when Algebra 1 is a struggle, that’s not where the struggle began, really. So could you give our parents some insight there?

Lisa Chimento: 00:10:33.941
Yeah. And it was interesting to read the comments that some of you made when you registered. There were a lot of you that are dealing with upper-level maths right now. And one of them, in particular, stuck out to me, and it said, “All of a sudden, math is a struggle.” And I hear that very often when I speak with families either doing Pre-algebra or Algebra 1. And it’s not unusual. Student may be gliding along pretty well, pretty confident with math through the elementary topics. And it almost becomes like they’re on autopilot. They see a problem. “Oh, that’s how you solve this problem. This is how I’ll do it. And I move on.” And then all of a sudden, the brakes come screeching on because you hit something that you have not seen before. And what happens is when we’re in Pre-algebra, and even to a greater extent in Algebra 1, we’re taking all of those previously learned skills because math is by nature sequential. So it builds on itself sequentially. And two things can happen. First of all, they’re seeing problems that they haven’t had a specific lesson on how to deal with that kind of a problem. Well, that’s because we’re taking those earlier-level concepts and we are applying them in different context now. And so the student has to stop. They really need to slow down. That’s not easy. Most of you have got teenagers at these levels. And they’re in a hurry. They want to be done. But they need to slow down because this is a time where evaluation skills and critical thinking skills really have the opportunity to grow and strengthen. And that’s going to benefit them in everything in their lives. So they need to stop. They need to really look at that problem and they need to say, “Okay, I can do this, but how do I approach this problem maybe differently than I did the last one? What skills do I need to bring to bear to put into place for this one?” And they might have to try it a couple of different ways because often there’s more than one way to solve a problem at these levels and still arrive at the same correct answer. They might try it one way, and if they’re just not getting through, give it a try the other way. The previous levels have put tools into their hands that will allow them now to say which tool is the best to solve this problem. So that’s one scenario. The other scenario is they may have been gliding along and learning how to solve problems on paper but not really having a strong understanding of the underlying concepts of those math topics. And in particular, fractions is the culprit almost 100% of the time when they start struggling in pre-algebra or algebra one. So for you, parents, this is a time for you to stop and don’t continue forward progress if you are seeing errors made and especially if there’s a pattern to those errors. Be careful not to fall into a trap of, “Oh, he got 80% right that means we can move on.” 80% is 80%, but if he got a 100% of the fractions problems wrong and you keep on going, it’s going to get harder and harder for that student. So take a look at those errors that they made. But maybe they were just little careless error. They were in a rush. They made a small computational error. But if you are seeing the same kind of errror showing up over and over again, give us a call and we can do an assessment to find out if there’s a gap there and if so, let’s go back in and fill that gap so that he is properly equipped and foundationally strong to move forward.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:09.012
Michael, can you speak a little bit about when a parent calls in looking for placement assistance? What are some of the things we’re looking for as far as their students’ competencies, particularly if a student has not been a Math-U-See student heretofore? What are the things we are looking for for a student to place into pre-algebra and above?

Michael Sas: 00:14:32.358
Absolutely. One of the common questions I get from parents is, “I don’t know where to place them because you’re not grade level specific.” And it’s very common with us is that we see math as something that builds upon itself. And if we’re doing division, it’s very hard to do that well if we’re struggling with some of the operations we previously learned. Because in division, we’re taking everything and applying it to those problems. And so if we had just, for instance, 365 divided by 9, we have to know how many times 9 goes into 36. And then we have to be able to know which numbers to bring down and what we’re subtracting and what we’re pulling over. We’re doing all of these things to this problem. And if I’m uncertain of my operations or if I’m accounting for my facts, I can get overwhelmed very easily because if I have that problem in front of me and I go, how many times does 9 go into 36? I go 9 [mutters numbers]. Then I have to remember where I left off. I have to remember that I’m not forgetting steps. I don’t want to overcount. I don’t want to undercount. There’s so many opportunities to make a mistake. And so what we want to do is identify what is known and what may need some more work on– to have some more work on. And so we’re going to look at those math facts and one of the things that we commonly– what we see commonly happen is if we get past first grade and we do not have our additional subtraction facts memorized, if we get past third grade and do not have our multiplication facts memorized, typically, we find they never become memorized unless we stop to work on them what happens in its place is we develop a habit. We develop a habit of counting with our fingers, using tally marks. I’ve seen kids tap their pencil on the table. All of these different things inform that habit to get to the answer. And that may be okay for a while, but eventually, when we get these complex problems that Lisa was speaking of in algebra, where we have 10 to 15 steps, multiple operations, and many different ways to solve them, the wheels come off at that point. And so it’s usually not something that happens right away, but something that builds upon itself. We start to see more of those gaps really really taking shape. And so we recognize that if you have a fourth grader in division and we put them back into addition and subtraction, they’re not a first grader. They’re beyond that. We’re cleaning up some of the things that may not have been well understood, and fixing that first, and then getting them caught up to where they left off. I also like to tell parents I think math is a very interesting subject in the fact the goal is not necessarily to get through calculus. And so there’s some grace there. For me personally, I’d go through Algebra 2. So I had two years of grace where I could fill in gaps– if I could put in electives, I could be maybe what I would be perceived as behind some of my classmates. Because my goal wasn’t to get to calculus. I head on to go to Algebra 2. We also put a lot of pressure on students K through 6, I believe, because we want them to stay with their peers. But when they get to high school, they’re all over the place because they’re going the way that they want to go based upon where the future is going to take them. Well, do we want to go to college? Do we want to go into armed forces? Do we want to be able to go to community college? Do we want to go right into the job market? What do we want to do? And that shapes every individual student once they get to high school. And so there isn’t one necessary level they have to be on when they’re freshmen or sophomores or so forth. And so keep that in mind too. We’re not looking at– we don’t use the terminology behind or ahead. We are where we are. And we focus on those skills and move them forward.

Gretchen Roe: 00:18:07.417
One of the things I think that’s important to recognize is that mathematics is a conversation. And you have to be able to converse with someone. And that students who are mathematically successful have someone at some point in time with whom they can bounce the ideas off of. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to be at their grade level mathematically, it means that you have to be willing to listen. And one of the things that I think makes Math-U-See unique is that ability to teach back. So Lisa, can you talk, just briefly, about the teach-back as far as Math-U-See is concerned. And then Michael, I’m going to ask you to take that teach-back into the larger universe of how it affects the rest of academics.

Lisa Chimento: 00:18:56.838
Yeah. Teach-back is so important and so valuable for both parent and student. Part of the Math-U-See method involves the teach-back. And there’s such an important reason for that. First of all, we want to make sure that people know this information on how Math-U-See should be used is available to you in the instruction manual at the beginning of the manual. If you haven’t cracked it open, please do so. There’s a very helpful how to use section. It talks about the build-write-say method and the teach-back. And that teach-back does two things. It gives you the opportunity to evaluate what your student does and does not understand. And for the student, it helps build a skill to be able to communicate what you know. And to be able to do that, you have to be able– you have to have integrated that material in a certain place in your brain to then be able to bring it out of yourself verbally. That expressive opportunity to teach. And I have to say, in my work with students in math in Algebra One and pre-algebra because I’m talking with them over the phone, most of the time, if we’re walking through a problem, and I say to them, “Well, now I can’t see you. So you’re going to have to talk me through and narrate to me what you did to solve this problem.” And as they talk it through very often, they catch their own mistakes. And it’s really a neat thing. When we’re all finished with the conversation, I said to them, “What did you just notice about that talking me through the problem?” And they said, “Oh, it was really helpful because I was able to go one step at a time.” And that’s another piece of it, having them break down those steps and verbalize them as they go. You get an opportunity to see that they really do understand it, and they’re ready to move on.

Gretchen Roe: 00:20:48.693
So Michael, how does that translate then for a student who learns that process Lisa has described? How does that translate to the rest of their academics?

Michael Sas: 00:20:58.040
No, absolutely. It certainly does. One of the goals that Lisa just pointed out is that they’re able to teach it back, meaning that they’re able to articulate what they’re learning. And so I was thinking about that even with my son, who’s almost nine, and how when we started reading, it became a process. It was a first sounding out the words and being able to identify words. And then it was starting to become about recognizing really a comprehension of what we’re reading and building in the emotions of the characters. And I found after a while that he was reading, and I was like, he’s not understanding what he’s reading because he’s so focused in on sounding out the words. And so we stopped every once in a while, and we said, “Okay. We’re just going to take this page and let’s talk about what happened here. What do you think this character was feeling?” And helping him to be able to put all of those components together and share what he’s doing. And so I think it absolutely goes all the way not just simply within math, but throughout to make sure that if we’re able to articulate what we’re learning, it’s showing that that next level, I think, because a lot of school, I think we focus so much on rote memorization. We focus in on just learn these facts, learn these dates, learn this skill, and we’re going to move on. And a lot of times, we lose it. I hear that all the time from parents, my student lost what we just did for this past time. A lot of times, it’s not lost. It’s just that maybe we didn’t spend as much time on it as what we needed to. Maybe we took too big of a break where we didn’t do math for that period of time. And it’s going to take a little bit of time to regain that again. And so that teach-back is absolutely important all through life. And how we can apply it to the different subjects. And so absolutely. That’s a great question.

Gretchen Roe: 00:22:48.871
Lisa was talking about if you get 80% of the problem correct. 80% of the problems in a particular assignment correct, but your mistakes are all in the same place, then you’re really not addressing where the problem is. So I wonder if you both could talk a little bit about what Sue, our colleague, said this morning when we met talking about learning how to flounder successfully. Can you guys address that issue? Because I think I know for me as a parent, it wasn’t until I found my way to Math-U-See six years in that someone said to me, “You realize the value in the mathematical learning is not in what you get right. It’s in what you’ve got wrong.” So can the two of you in your positions of placement talk about how that is valuable? And a parent to really understand we had a whole bunch of parents, and I’m looking at my monitor screen over here with white people looking like what do I do with the frustration? What do I do when my child is having difficulty with a lesson? And I think that understanding this particular thing is a key to success. So could both of you talk about that, please?

Lisa Chimento: 00:24:10.578
Yeah, if it’s okay, I’ll go first, Michael. This has been, for me, such a learning opportunity as I support students in Pre-Algebra and Algebra 1. I have learned so much. And one of the first and biggest things that I have learned is that we have a chance to take that idea of an error or a mistake and reframe it. Both for ourselves, I think that has to happen first as homeschooling parents. For ourselves first and then to our students and have them reframe this idea of mistakes into opportunities for deeper learning. It is not a bad thing if you make a mistake in math. And I certainly hear the frustration that parents get when they’re like, “We just did this yesterday.” And it’s like I never said a word about it. But you have to understand, this comes with time that deeper learning of math comes with time, with conversation like what Michael was talking about. In the teach back and in the dialog between you and your student, there was an opportunity to deepen the understanding of the math and with the more conversation, with more teach back, with more practice, it gets deeper and deeper into a student’s long-term memory as well so that they can retain it for longer periods of time. But when an error happens, you have this marvelous opportunity, and for those of you with teenagers, this is my lecture to them when I’m on the phone. If you are showing all of your work, which I know is at least half of your battles out there, if you are showing all of your work, even if you make an error, now you have the opportunity to go back, follow through what you did, and you’ll be able to pinpoint where that mistake happened in a multi-step problem. And if you can find out where it went wrong and correct it, you probably won’t make that error again, but you’ll also understand the material better. You understand and remember the process better. If you don’t show your work, you won’t know where the mistake happened because it was all going on in your head. Chances are you’re going to do that again.

Lisa Chimento: 00:26:19.469
So even that, as a mistake, can be learned from and okay, let’s not do this again. But that opportunity to reframe the idea of mistakes and turn them into opportunities for deeper understanding. And hear me with this, everything that we don’t know when we are put in a position where we are forced to learn it, which kids are, it’s a little mini crisis in our brains because you just don’t understand it on this side of the line and at some point you’re going to cross over that line and bing, it’s going to make sense to you. But there’s a wrestling and a struggling through that. And that struggle is so valuable. And particularly for you parents out there that don’t feel confident, don’t be afraid to let your children know that you’re struggling too. And you have an opportunity to model that struggle for them that doesn’t blow up in frustration, but just says, oh, not getting this. Put it down. Put it down for a while because if anxiety is coming in, learning stops. Put it down, go do something enjoyable. Come back an hour later, fresh, and rested, and relaxed, and take another look at it and say, “Okay, we’re going to try this again.” Don’t spend too much time. If you’re spending an hour on math. It’s too much time. Nothing’s coming in and nothing’s going to stay anyway. Just put it away, come back the next day, give your brain a chance to download that information and sort of sort it out and then come back and look at it again.

Gretchen Roe: 00:27:50.689
Michael, Marie asked a really good question. At least it gave such a great answer there, but she asked a terrific question, and I know you have this child. So I would really love you to answer it. She said I have a student who needs to know why before they will memorize the steps. And you know what? We all have those kids. And they are the gold of learning. But I wonder if you could talk about why the why is equally as important to the how.

Michael Sas: 00:28:21.618
Absolutely. I’m going to piggy-back on what Lisa said too a little bit, but I’m going to start with the why question as I know that that’s the person I’m going to address. Steve Demme, he’s told us stories about this quite a bit, about how when we have a multiple-digit multiplication problem– when we get to the second level, we’re told to put a zero there. And I never knew the reason behind why we did that. And he said, “Typically, they just put a zero there because we’re supposed to. Well, the truth is, is we’re multiplying by the 10s column, and so we don’t have any units. So there has to be zero units into that place. And we get to the third column, we’re in the hundreds, and now we have to put two zeros because we don’t have any units or 10s. And so understanding that why is so important to kids and not just doing it for the sake of doing it– and that’s what Math-U-See he focuses on, is understanding the why behind what we’re doing. And it’s hard to teach anything back if you don’t understand why you’re doing it that way. It’s almost impossible.

Michael Sas: 00:29:18.577
And so that teach back portion right there is to explain, “This is why.” And the thing that I love about Math-U-See is, even with place value they make a story for the kids to visualize. They help them understand what that really means because I think place value inaudible is a tough topic. I might see a lot of kids struggling that well into their lower elementary years. And we try to give a idea of a neighborhood, and having up to three different houses. We have a units hours, our tens house, and our hundreds castle and we give up to nine living there. And Steve talks about having up to– we can have nine beds, nine toothbrushes, nine chairs. We have up to nine, but never more than nine. So if we have a 10th that comes to live with us, we have to go to the next biggest house, which is our 10th house. And then so forth with our hundreds castle. And sometimes everybody leaves the house, and when everybody leaves the house we have to have our hero Mr. Zero watching the house for us when everybody’s gone. And so Mr. Zero’s our placeholder. And that’s essentially what we’re learning is Mr. Zero is there to take that place. We’re doing multiplication. And so the why of it is so important. You’re absolutely right. I get that a lot from boys, especially, is that they want to know why they’re doing it this way.

Michael Sas: 00:30:26.219
I also wanted to piggyback just briefly off of what Lisa had to say. My son was a– my youngest son was a wise man for the Christmas program this year. And his speech was, “We have come so far.” I have adopted that as my model for the year. Because I think we get so caught up in the day to day of, “Man, we’re not making the progress. We have to get all the way over here.” And then my oldest son is such a perfectionist that he gets so angry sometimes if he doesn’t get a 100% on what he’s doing, or if something’s not coming easy for him. And I have to remind him, “Hey buddy, remember last week you couldn’t even do this. Now look what you’re doing.” Or, “Do you remember these spelling– when we’re going through spelling, just remember how hard this passage was? Now, look it, you’re doing so well. We only had five memorized for facts last week. We now have seven. You got two more memorized. Good for you.” And reminding them of that process. I think that’s so important that we remind our kids of how far they’ve come. And so keep that in mind too as the progress– we get so caught up in the day to day. And even the long term, like, “How am I my kid to be here when they’re 18,” my goal as a dad is to do the best I can today. And if I do that every single day, my kids will be okay when we graduate. And that’s my philosophy on that and if I can put forth all thatI can today we’re going to be okay. And we need to look back to remind ourselves the obstacles that we have made it through. And celebrate those as a family. And not get so caught up in the weeds of, this isn’t going right, because there’s always going to be something that isn’t going right. There’s always going to be a subject that’s a struggle. There’s always going to be something you’d rather be doing. But if we continually dedicate that time, day in and day out, doing the best we can, our kids are going to be okay.

Gretchen Roe: 00:32:20.712
Lisa said something to me yesterday, we were recapping a roundtable that we did a week or so ago. And I made an observation that we as parents often look at what is going on in other homeschool families, and we interpret that we’re less or we are not enough or what we’re doing is not enough. Because we all have that child in our homeschool group who’s learning Chinese and is a stellar gymnast and also the first player on the soccer team and all of that. And we’re sitting over here– there were some days in my homeschool life that if everybody got out of their pajamas in a day I felt like I had a victory. So I think it’s important to say that we read each other’s highlight reels and then interpret in our own homes what’s not working.

Gretchen Roe: 00:33:15.204
And as homeschool parents we have a unique capacity to observe our children. And so many of you have said math is a struggle, I don’t know how to help my student. And so here is my encouragement to say to you become the ardent observer of your child. And if you have a child who’s struggling in pre-algebra, the struggle didn’t begin there. The struggle is in something earlier that they’re not confident with, and it’s up to you to be the detective to figure out where the struggle began and right the ship. And that is the advantage and the joy of homeschooling, is we have the ability to fix what might have been broken, to repair what might not be working properly, and help our kids really achieve.

Gretchen Roe: 00:34:11.174
One of the things I want to talk about and address because so many of you mentioned this is, by the time you get a student who’s in middle school, I recognize having had six middle schoolers, that from one day to the next they don’t know what they want to do as an adult. And given the fact that I still have days wondering what did I really want to do as an adult, I think we shouldn’t box our kids in. But I think it’s important that we should look to ways to help our kids fulfill their potential. So I would like Michael and Lisa to both think of some of the placement conversations you’ve had with kids at the middle school level. And how do you frame for a parent the ability to do just as Michael said, to be able to recognize we’ve come so far and set expectations for those high school experiences?

Michael Sas: 00:35:12.383
I’d like to say, too, it’s tough as a parent to see your kid struggle. And sometimes it becomes overwhelming because you’ve been struggling for so long, and you just feel like nothing’s clicking. And I’ve seen it a lot of times with parents who say, “They’re not doing graded math at all. It seems like they’ve never gone it. “And a lot of times it’s important to take a step back and realize, like I said, it’s not that they’re not a fourth grade student, they are. It’s just that there’s some little things here and there that tripped us up along the way. And in most cases, even as a– I’ll just give an example of an algebra one student that I worked with. Her mom called in and she said, “She’s crying at the table right now.” She can’t get that she can’t move forward. I don’t know what to do. And we figured out that the first thing that we need to work on was multiplication packs. And so we went back and she did the AIM program for multiplication, which is our remedial program to help older students memorize their facts. And so we did that for a few months. We recognized she was great with multiple-digit multiplication and division. We worked on fractions for a little while a few months. We did a quick review of pre-algebra and decimals and percents. And within nine months, we caught her up. She did a pretest for algebra once. She got a 100%. Her mom said that she did cartwheels down the hallway, she was so excited. And so most of the time, our goal for us as placement specialists is not to sell you a bunch of curriculum and start you over. That doesn’t help anybody. What that does is just frustrates you and [laughter] forces you to try to go fast to get caught up. Our goal is to only work with the things that the student needs to work on. And usually, there’s not that many things to do. It’s just a matter of finding that first gap and building on from there because gaps change as we gain confidence in certain areas. And so if you’re finding you have a student like that -maybe not to that extreme, but they are struggling and we need to figure out why- that’s our goal– is to work with you and to talk to you about your goals because there’s also some times where we have parents who say, “We’re only homeschooling for this year. How do we best make this work so they’re ready to jump in with their class when they go back to the school?” And so it’s not my plan, or Lisa’s plan, or Gretchen’s plan. It’s our plan together. We’re going to work and talk about your goals for your student and how we can best address those to make sure that they are able to go back to school or they can be homeschooled the rest of their education. So that’s kind of what– how we kind of help in that area.

Lisa Chimento: 00:38:01.265
Yeah. And just to encourage you again, we are here to support you. There will be questions. There are difficulties. And no one of us have all the answers. There’s an awful lot of collaboration that goes on behind the scenes with our team, with the customer service team, and with other colleagues in the company when a question comes up to me. If I’m not really sure that I have the correct information for that parent, I turn to my colleagues. And we chat about it for a while first and come up with the best that everybody has to offer. But we are here to support you. I love Gretchen’s words about becoming a student of your student. And I made her say that. So she was forced. I told her -she did not say this [laughter]- I was going to yell at her because it was brilliant what she said– was, “Don’t read other people’s highlight reels. Read your student,” because that’s where it has to start. They’re not all the same. They don’t all process information the same way. And they don’t all have the same futures. Having a conversation with a teenager at some point outside of the [laughter] school time is a good opportunity to say, “What kinds of things interest you? What kinds of things are you thinking about doing later on? Well, let’s think about what you need to be equipped with to be able to do that. And then, we’re going to go in that direction.” And that helps a lot with motivation, too. When a child is struggling with math in higher levels, the first thing that’s generally going to come out of their mouth is, “Why do I need to learn this? I’m never going to use it again.” But you’ll be [laughter] very surprised what you’ll use again. Even if you never think you’re going to use algebra again, it is such a good practice and exercise to put your brain through to develop those strong evaluation and critical thinking skills. But you never know what you’re going to end up with. I spoke to a mom a couple of weeks ago. Her daughter was struggling a bit in math. And I asked her, “What kinds of things is she thinking of doing afterwards. She wanted to be an interior designer. And I said, “Okay, then math is going to be a big piece of this.” Geometry may be a much bigger piece for her than algebra, but she needs to get through this algebra first. Let her hang that little goal in front of herself as motivation to press through the wrestling, the struggling, and the difficult times but do so knowing that, first of all, you the parent are there with them. That’s first and foremost for the student. And then we are there to partner with you and offer the support. And so please don’t hesitate to email us or call us and have those conversations. And I love that Michael brought up be willing to take a good hard look – and we can provide you with assessments for this to see – are there gaps in earlier skills? Because if they are, then forward progress really does need to stop for a short time so that you can fill in those gaps. Think about building a building. If your foundation’s not finished, do you really want to go in and put in the penthouse? I don’t think so. Let’s get the foundation strong first, and then we’ll go forward.

Gretchen Roe: 00:41:16.888
I think one of the things that so many parents said is they feel like they’re well into the process and kind of discouraged in the process. And I know how that feels, and I think as parents, it is an enormously valuable conversation to have with your student, asking them where they’re coming from, how they feel about what they’re doing. Maybe your children have some insights into changing up the game that would be more beneficial. And I have to say, I’m a good German. I’m an only child. I was born a tiny adult. You will do it my way because I said so. And the truth is my children taught me far more than I ever taught them. And in retrospect, hindsight is always somebody else’s experience. In retrospect, I wish I had paid more ardent attention to my children. I would have learned more. We could have proceeded further. I think one of the things that happens in the process of parenting is the struggle becomes acute and so we assume that it’s our fault or there’s some sort of lacking moment. And one of the things that I want to talk about here is not assuming that the more mathematically adept parent is always the better instructor. I know Lisa and Michael both have experience with that. And so I wonder if you all would talk a little bit about that.

Michael Sas: 00:42:56.484
Sure. I’m really into sports. Football’s one of my favorite sports that I like to watch. And one of the things you’ll notice is a lot of times, the coaches there are backup quarterbacks, not the starting quarterback. And the reason for that is a lot of times a starting quarterback became so easy for them that it was hard to understand why other people struggled. And it was hard to teach that. And so I see that with myself, too, is that it’s something that– math is never something that came easy for me, like I said. But it helps me understand when they are struggling to better be able to be there for each individual student or each individual child. And so keep in mind, the goal is that they’re able to teach you. So if you don’t understand it and they can, they try to teach it to you and you still don’t understand it, it means they may not have it down well enough. And so the goal for every lesson is that they’re able to teach that concept back to you to build that understanding, and my role as a parent shifts a little bit too. My goal is that they can do the first page of practice if they can’t teach it to me the next day, we talk about what they’re struggling with. And my goal is to help them get to that point of mastery to teach it back. And so I’m going to work on those steps that they’re struggling with and talk about that because the goal is not to do all three pages of practice that’s there. It’s to master the topic. And so in school, I know a lot of times, the public school or private school, every worksheet is a grade. And that grade went on your report card. And the tests were a greater portion of that. We look at this differently. The practice pages are simply that it’s practice. And you practice until you get it. And one of the issues that most curriculums have is you have just a small amount of problems, and you move forward whether the students are ready or not. The difference is that with Math-U-See, we want the student to decide when they’re ready to move forward. And so if it takes just one day, terrific. They’re done. If it takes a week and a half, which hopefully won’t, but if it does, it takes a week and a half. And we see that differently depending on the level. The alpha level, memorizing facts, it took my son a year and a half to memorize those facts. And that’s okay because if I knew I would push forward and got done in a year, I know beta would have been that much more difficult for him. And so taking the time you need for them to get it. And if you need to take a math break to do something else, please take a math break. So know your kids when you have to do those things and what’s best for them as you move forward.

Gretchen Roe: 00:45:35.465
Actually, we even have a blog that’s going to come to you as part of the follow-up about when to take a math break, what that would look like. We also have a blog that’s going to come to you about how to present a Math-U-See lesson and another one that’s how parents can learn right alongside their children. All of these were written by people who had firsthand and personal experience for that process. So I think that you will find that to be particularly helpful. Lisa, I wonder if you can talk about the difference between game-based learning for the facts you know and how to get to it being a known fact and what the difference would be.

Lisa Chimento: 00:46:27.122
Yeah. And there’s a fine line with that. You can’t get away from the reality that facts have to be memorized with math in order to be fluent with it because the counting or the skip counting does create obstacles for them as the processes become more multistep and the concepts more difficult. So memorization does need to happen. And for some kids, that’s easy peasy, and for others, it’s not. Maybe they’re stronger in the concepts and less strong in the facts. One of the ways that we encourage parents to teach facts – and we do this in both the aim for addition and subtraction and the aim for multiplication courses – is to engage a number of different senses. For deep understanding and for long-term retention of material, there are two keys. One of them is make it multimodality, get a lot of senses engaged, and the other is keep the sessions short. And our aim programs do both of those things. So if you were trying to teach facts so that they stay and the student is able to retain them for a long time, you kind of have to tell that student’s brain that this is important. If you write yourself a list to go shopping and you leave the list home, you’ll remember it for a couple of hours, but the next day, you have forgotten everything on that list. Your brain discards it as not necessary because it was in this little list form. But if we’re talking about holding on to something for the long term, we need to see it in a lot of different ways. And so using visual and tactile and auditory and verbal and writing, all of those things can be brought in together. Thus, the Build, Write, Say method, which is so hugely powerful in Math-U-See, no matter how that student learns best, no matter what their challenges or their preferences might be, that multimodality Build, Write, Say method is a powerful tool. Once they have shown that they are getting that fact, that they can say to you, “4 plus 7 is 11,” now you can play games, now you can do drills, now you can refresh over and over for even longer-term retention, to keep on seeing it and hearing it and so forth. But I would say too, for the learning portion, the game won’t be as powerful if they need to still come out of the problem while they’re solving it and remembering what you did in the game, and then bring their focus back into the problem. That issue will still exist of, “Have I lost my place? I’ve interrupted my focus. I’m burning up brain battery unnecessarily.” So I hope I explain that well, but in a nutshell, for the learning of material that has to be memorized, keep lessons short, use multimodalities, engage as many senses as possible. And then once they show that they can recall those facts, then you drill them on a regular basis. And you can play games and do all kinds of fun things with them.

Gretchen Roe: 00:49:41.503
I think it’s important. We often say, “Drill does not teach; drill only helps you become more proficient at what you already know.” I have a graphic I want to share with you all. There’s four elements to fact fluency, and I think this is important for you all as parents to consider when you’re striving toward this particular goal. First of all, there’s flexibility. That is to be able to think about a problem of 8 times 7 as being 8 times 5 plus 8 times 2 added together or being able to recognize that 8 times 7 and 7 times 8 will still give you the same product. Accuracy is being able to arrive at the correct answer. And I used to say to my kids, “Mathematics is like horseshoes and hand grenades.” It’s, “Close isn’t good enough. You have to be accurate.” Efficiency. Efficiency means being able to arrive there with some degree of expediency. And Michael talked about that earlier, about– do you have to step away to calculate before you have to step back into the problem? So being able to stay engaged in the problem is often the difference between struggle and success. And then appropriateness is picking the right strategy for this situation. And kids being able to assess, “Am I using the right strategy?” is a learned skill. It’s not something we can absolutely expect kids to be able to deliver on in every moment of their academic experience. So I think that graphic gives you a wonderful ability to be able to follow through on understanding. We’re coming up to the top of the hour. We’re almost at the end. Michael, if you could give our family some closing words, and then, Lisa, if you would be so kind as well.

Michael Sas: 00:51:34.989
Absolutely. Thank you, first of all, for taking time out of your day to join us for this. Looking back on our conversation today, I just encourage you to be okay that math is hard. Math is not an easy subject. Be okay to reach out for help. We are here for you. Anything you need, whether it’s wondering, “How do we solve this type of a problem? How do we use the manipulatives for this type? How do we find the right placement?” Anything that you need support-wise, we’re here, and we offer free support. And I believe everybody here has homeschooled with Math-U-See or is using it in some capacity with their kids or views it even as a child. And so the people you talk to here care, and they want to help. And so don’t be afraid to reach out to us.

Lisa Chimento: 00:52:25.753
Yeah. It is such a pleasure to be able to share with you, and I just echo Michael’s words, we do want to support you. We do want to help. And I hope that you’re getting something out of this. We’ll follow up with you, and we hope to hear from anybody who still has any questions. There’s no small questions. Please let us know.

Gretchen Roe: 00:52:47.328
Thank you all for trusting us today, for the time that you’ve spent. Please feel free to share this information with someone with whom you think would benefit. And we look forward to your joining us again in the future. Take care, everyone.

Lisa Chimento: 00:53:02.190
Bye.

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:02.988
Bye.

Gretchen Roe: 00:53:06.223
This is Gretchen Roe for the Demme Learning show. Thanks for joining us. You can access the show notes and watch a recording at DemmeLearning.com/Show or go on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, or subscribe wherever you may be hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it.

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