It’s like that dream where you’re in math class in your underwear, and the whole class starts laughing.
For the math averse — those who hated math as a kid and avoided careers involving numbers — that nightmare might feel like it’s playing out every day with your own kids.
Swap the classroom for your own kitchen table. While your elementary schooler looks up at you for math homework help, you’re having flashes of that math class nightmare. Luckily, you’re wearing pants.
“We have collectively traumatized an entire country about math,” said Angela McIver, an educator and former member of the Philadelphia Board of Education.
McIver has studied how American elementary schoolers’ math skills are taught and evaluated. Her findings, coupled with her own kids’ struggles in the subject, spurred her company Trapezium Math Club.
“So many parents have this phobia about math because of how they were taught math,” McIver said.
That lifetime of math fear develops in elementary school. And it can turn kids off from pursuing math-heavy fields of study in high school and college, she said.
“It’s become so clear we’re doing math all wrong at the elementary school level,” the educator said.
A different approach to math
McIver believes math education should be taught like reading.
It should be fun, practical and meet students at their level, just like literacy curriculum.
Any primary school classroom bookshelf has books of several reading levels for students. Students in one classroom may have reading skills at several different levels. Teachers expect this, and teach to each students’ level, McIver said.
“In elementary math, teachers have kids at at least seven different levels, but they teach one thing,” McIver explained about general math curriculum.
She also believes “sight” reading of basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts should be emphasized in elementary school math classes, just as sight reading is important for literacy education.
Meeting kids where they live:Meet TikTok’s @MyTeacherFace, the South Jersey English teacher with 12M views
Just a third of elementary schoolers have developed that math skill, according to McIver.
“If they had to sound out sight words, it would be considered a failure,” she said.
At the same time McIver studied math curriculum in her graduate studies, she examined her own then-elementary aged kids’ math curriculum.
“Children can be getting good grades in math in elementary school, but it means very little,” she said.
Making math real-life applicable
Do kids know how to apply the skills they’re learning to solve real-life problems? Are they fascinated by the problems they can solve using math?
In 2009, she started her first math club in her home for her own kids who were in first and third grades. Over the next several years, she was running clubs out of her home in Philadelphia every day of the week after school.
Trapezium Math Club opened in a brick-and-mortar storefront in Philly in 2014, providing engaging math games for kids in an environment that was completely technology-free.
Kids worked on hard math in really fun ways. They put on mental math plays, with audience members challenged to solve problems from their seats, and participated in math magic shows. It was an environment to take off your shoes, turn off your phone, and use play to build math skills. It went far beyond tutoring, McIver said.
Children choose their own math level. Often, McIver finds kids are ambitious in the level they want to take on.
“We believe that one-on-one tutoring is not what children need,” she explained. “They need to be engaged with other kids because they push each other.”
The impact of COVID
The colorful, joyful, in-person – and sometimes barefoot – math experience pivoted greatly when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020.
By mid-March of 2020, McIver furloughed her entire staff. By July of the same year, they closed their building and moved completely online. Trapezium relaunched in September 2020 with a completely new strategy – they’d use technology to give kids an at-home, virtual experience that was somehow still very hands-on.
“Most kids were learning 100 percent remotely … We realized we needed to create movement and out-of-your-seat games and activities,” McIver said.
Virtual clubs were established, made up of four student members and an adult club leader. Each member of the small club received a pandemic kit mailed to their home, and a meeting time to get online together.
Answering math questions became a little like gym class. Instead of answering multiple choice questions by picking A, B, C or D, students gave their answers with movement: a couple jumping jacks, squats or a dance move.
“Prior to the pandemic, I encouraged parents: regardless of where you send your child to school, you should be supplementing math,” McIver said.
LGBTQ legislation impact:‘What’s to stop them from coming for me?’: Anti-trans bills outside NJ impact local youth
After more than 18 months of COVID-related learning disruptions, McIver said kids are suffering in math skill-building more than ever.
“The data around learning loss for math is far greater than what we’re seeing for reading,” she said.
What can parents do to mend losses?
Even if report cards are stellar, parents should check on kids’ math skills at home, McIver suggested.
Throw your elementary schooler a basic math fact to solve with mental math.
Ask them to to solve 7+3 or 5×9 without using a pencil or device.
Test your kids’ understanding of fractions at dinner time, when you’re cutting up the meatloaf. Do they understand what the slices mean, and how to build a whole loaf?
McIver suggests parents ask kids to count forward and backward by twos, threes, or any other number for 30 seconds, to both test and flex their math brain muscle.
“Make sure you have an analog clock in your house so they get the feeling for time,” added Renee Shepherd, Trapezium’s spokeswoman who’s now-college age children are Trapezium alumni.
The Shepherds used to play a game around the house called “count it, keep it,” she remembered. If her daughters – Ryan and Kailyn Shepherd, of Merchantville – found change in the couch cushions or on the floor of the car, they could keep it as long as they counted the pennies, dimes, nickels and quarters correctly.
“When my daughter was in first grade, she came home and said, ‘Mommy, math is so hard,'” Renee Shepherd remembered.
“I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, you think math is hard in first grade, it’s all downhill from here.”
Ryan and Kailyn couldn’t wait for Trapezium Math Club on Saturday mornings. They had attended the original, in-person version of the club in Philly.
“It really didn’t feel like school or enrichment, it just felt like fun,” Ryan Shepherd, 18 said.
“It just definitely built that foundation … when you build that foundations, moving from one level to the next is a lot easier and less frustrating.”
Ryan attends the University of Chicago.
She and her sister are currently studying STEM (Science, technology, engineering and math) fields in college.
“We can all do it,” McIver said.
Each of her three children are on math-related tracks in high school and college.
“We need to empower parents to do it, too,” McIver said.
For more information, visit trapeziummath.com
Carly Q. Romalino is a Gloucester County native who’s covered South Jersey since 2008. She’s a Rowan University graduate and a six-time New Jersey Press Association award winner.
Romalino is based at the Courier Post and covers South Jersey schools and education issues for the Courier Post, Daily Journal and Burlington County Times.
She hosts NJ Press Pass, a live social media-based interview show diving into what matters to South Jersey residents.
Help support local journalism with a subscription to the Courier Post.