Happy Wednesday!
Ruth Rinaldi got through a maths* degree without knowing her seven times table. It was only later, when she was a young teacher, that she memorized it through having to use those numbers so frequently in lessons.
She went on to spend more than ten years teaching secondary school maths in the UK, eventually working her way up to head of the department.
Now, she takes a different approach to numbers. She has done no formal math with her own two kids (aged seven and nearly ten). Instead of worksheets, she gave them a scientific calculator and let them play. Through that, her son worked out that finding a third of something is the same as dividing by three (a link she often watched older students struggle to make).
Ruth thinks that traditional drills and speed checks often block children from deep mathematical thinking before they even understand the concepts. In her view, math is about developing a flexible number sense, not memorizing rules on a timer.
That doesn’t mean she’s against knowing your facts by heart. “That’s not to say you won’t eventually memorise** them, or that memorising won’t be useful,” she told Ela, “but most people could get to seven times four by knowing seven times two and doubling it, pretty quickly.”
For parents who dread the math page, she suggests taking just one or two problems and answering each one in as many different ways as you can.
Listen on…
In the episode:
Why putting math facts on a timer can make a child worse at them
How she could tell which kids in her secondary classroom had played Snakes and Ladders at home (that’s Chutes and Ladders, to Americans)
The question she asks parents whose children love Minecraft math games
Why a parent’s fear of math reaches their kids (while a fear of reading usually doesn’t)
What she told her son, nearly ten and set on becoming an engineer, about when formal math begins
Check out Joyful Maths with Ruth, where she hosts problem-solving groups for kids and workshops for parents. She is also the creator of the course Multiplication Without Memorisation. You can find her on Instagram @joyfulmathswithruth.
Prefer to read? The full conversation is on the episode page.
As always, take curriculum and method advice as one voice among many.
That’s all for now.
– Ela
P.S. Ruth mentioned several free resources for math exploration at home:
Check them out and let us know what you think!
*Yes, they do call it “maths” in the UK. The word is short for mathematics, so the Brits kept the s.
** And for the spelling sticklers, they also spell “memorize” with an s instead of a z.
