Made for math

I have news for you: Unschooling works even for math.

Long division
At different times—but at about the same age, interestingly
enough—both girls came to me and asked me to show them how to do long division. So I did. MJ's response was, "That's it?!" Evidently this task gets a lot of unnecessary buildup in our society. :-) (And it is pretty ridiculous when you think about it. I'll bet the vast majority of my readers reach for their calculators any time long division is required.)

Chloe's response was a little different. She watched me doing my thing for a while, said, "Why are you doing it like that?" and proceeded to show me a faster way.

Multiple-digit subtraction
This story took place just a couple of nights ago and is what prompted this post. It all started with Chloe sitting me down to tell me she wants to learn something. "I haven't learned anything for years," she said. Once I quit gasping (doesn't the girl read my blog, for Pete's sake?!), we talked for a while about just some of what she's learned in the last five years*. It turned into a game, with me quizzing her and her happily supplying answers, and it went on for a couple of hours.

Somewhere in there, she started talking about how she uses addition to do subtraction. She grabbed a piece of paper and walked me through a six-digit problem. Here's what she wrote:

234,238
..65,762

The second line is the answer to the question, "What is 300,000 minus 234,238?" I imagine if the bigger number had been more complex, she might have written it down, too, but she didn't bother with it here. (Pop quiz: What's the bigger number in a subtraction problem called? I had to look it up.)

Just for kicks, I showed her how I was taught to do the same problem, with all that borrowing (zeroes are the worst that way). Needless to say, my notation was nowhere near as clean and pretty as hers, and I think she worked the problem faster than I did.

Why this is
So, just how have my kids become so proficient at math computation when they haven't had a math lesson or done a math worksheet or cracked a math book in five years? The short answer is, none of that is necessary for learning computation. The longer answer delves into the way schools have taken math computation out of context—aka, real life—and turned it into an abstract concept that is meaningless and intimidating to many students. For unschoolers, math is simply part of life, and they instinctively move toward the efficient use thereof.

Here are some links for those who want to read more on this subject:
Sandra Dodd's math collection featuring a great article by Linda Wyatt
Senseless School Math (Joyce Fetterol)
Unschooling Math (Joyce)
Joyful Math (Pam Sorooshian's math blog)
Dogs doing calculus
And other animals, too
And Frank has lots to say, in his own inimitable style, on this subject

Finally, here is what I reported about Mary Lewis' "Math Happens" talk at the LIFE is Good conference last April:

[The talk] was given by engineer and math tutor and unschooling mom Mary Lewis, and it served to ease away the last wispy bits of my concern that unschooling math is "iffy." Turns out schooling math is pretty darned "iffy," too. (Did you know that 55% of college freshmen [that is, high school grads who've been accepted into college] are not prepared for college math courses?) She talked about how schooling begins immediately to interfere with the brain's natural ability to do computation by taking math out of the physical too early and moving it into the abstract. Also, that's when we start to tell kids they're "wrong" about math, thereby injecting fear and doubt into something that should be as natural as breathing. She said every one of her students (mostly math-phobic adults returning to school) would have been better off if they hadn't had a single math lesson during their childhoods. And she cemented my understanding of the difference between math computation (can be done on a calculator) and math concepts (must be understood by the brain) and how schooling tends to promote the former to the neglect of the latter.

Oh, and about those math concepts
Are my kids learning math concepts? Judging by the results of their annual standardized tests, they are evidently doing so better than their age-mates. Or maybe they just test better. Who knows?
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* Yes! Five years of unschooling! It's a happy anniversary indeed.