They Aren't Doing Anything!

I used to worry extensively about my older children (Love of Learning and Practice Scholars at the time) seemingly "not doing anything". My conveyor-belt mind wanted to see worksheets, tests, and papers every day. I was worried they would not learn enough and that they would not keep up with grade levels.

For probably an entire year, we did no "formal math"...that's right...no worksheets, drills, tests, or lessons. We did play some math games and I pointed out areas of math that we were using in our every day life. One website that I used is Living Math, which I dutifully tried various ways of introducing math in fun ways.

Still.....no "formal math".

I wondered if they would ever pick up the higher maths.

Over the last year, Nayna (Self-Directed Scholar) has finished 3 "years" or levels of math. She completed Algebra I in just 5 months. She started on December 1, 2010 and told me yesterday that she was ready for the Final Exam, which she passed with an "A".

I would have never thought TJED would work with math. For some reason, I could just never get around my conveyor-belt education thinking with math. I figured I was loosing time and would need to force/require. Instead, what I did was Structure Time, not Content. I told them they need to do something "math" every day, it didn't matter if it was a Sudoku puzzle, measuring out ingredients for a cake, or figuring out a "real world" math problem.

Real World Math
One day Chris (Project Scholar), was trying to figure out the velocity of a figure in a game to make the figure slow down as he is being shot and loosing his energy. He has been trying his hand at game programming. When he showed me the problem to ask for help I thought, "This is advanced algebra, he has only formally studied up through fractions."

As he worked through the problem, I showed him math texts that we have that teach the concepts he wanted to know. He worked his way backward through the book in a few sections to figure out what he needed to know and then applied the math to his game programming. I was completely stunned that he was able to learn math that way.

I have always thought math had to be taught in a certain order...but I guess if a person wants the knowledge bad enough and they know where to find it, they can figure it out. I mean, how did Archimedes figure out machines and astrology? How did he discover Pi and how it applied to circles? No one was there to teach him each individual math concepts. He learned how to think and applied himself to the problem until he figured it out.