A New Method in Mathematics Education Rocks Canadian Schools

No one would ever be proud ever to announce in public that they didn't know how to figure out the stock market; they wouldn't be proud to declare that they didn't understand cars; yet, it's completely acceptable for a person to mention in a joking, self-deprecating aside, that he could just never understand math. There is usually even a touch of pride there - kind of the way George Bush always seemed to hold his failings as proof that he was one of the common people. Part of the reason this is so is that math education in this country has never really tried to help children understand what math is all about. When in a math class, there are kids who just get everything on their own, kids who get things after trying hard and kids who just never get anything no matter how hard they try, our math teachers never try to educate us in why this should be so. They just let us carry on with our superstition that math just comes more easily if you are born that way.

This much, psychologists and mathematicians are completely sure of - there hasn't been a normal child born so far who could have been bad at math. Every single normal human child is capable of performing at very high levels in math, if they aren't given the wrong kind of mathematics education.

Considering how terrible American children seem to be in general, at performing in math, the above statement might seem hard to believe. But a new kind of mathematics education called Jump Math, in use in Britain and in Canada, has proven that the only thing we lack is that we don't seem to believe in the abilities of our children and our teachers as much as we should.

One particular problem that's been identified with the American way of teaching math is that teachers ask children to try to analyze and formulate their own concepts as they go along. Our education system seems to not really understand how children need explicit guidance for the first few years. We’re trying to get our children to run before we teach them how to walk.

Jump Math involves breaking every single thing in a math problem down to its smallest possible components. For instance, if you try to teach a child negative numbers and then ask the class what -10 and +3 together make, the children in any class are usually flummoxed. Ask them instead what they would feel their position would be if they were at a game and they lost 10 sets but won 3, and they understand right away.

Jump Math is been used in places in England and Canada for years now. And they have had spectacular levels of success. There you have it. You need to teach math as guided discovery. Every single step needs to be broken down into the simplest sub-steps possible. To do this for a couple of years, the child becomes confident enough that he'll get with all the mathematical analysis that anyone could ever want.