Emily Oster

22 min Read Emily Oster

Emily Oster

Every Kid is a Math Kid

Debunking the myths around learning math

Emily Oster

22 min Read

I first encountered Shalinee Sharma back in the early summer of 2020. Shalinee runs an online math platform called Zearn, which serves many schools in the U.S. and many more individual children. In the midst of the COVID pandemic, Zearn was teaching my kids math and providing some of the most compelling early evidence on the impacts of remote learning on math scores (conclusion: bad).

Since that time, Shalinee has continued to be one of my favorite people to talk with about math and math education. I would say, in the nicest possible way, that she is a math zealot — a person who really, truly believes that all kids can not only succeed in math but love it.  

Illustration of teaching mach
Banana Bones for ParentData

Her new book, Math Mind, puts that belief onto the page. It’s a guide to how we can make all kids “math kids.” The book is great for many reasons — it’s something you’ll want to give as a gift to both your child’s best math teacher and their worst one — and today we talk about why she wrote it, what she hopes people will get from it, and how schools can do math better. 

Here are three highlights from the conversation:

Do kids learn math through memorization? 

Emily Oster:

Your new book is called Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math, and I would say the pitch of the book is some version of “we’re not doing it right and there’s a better way, and I want to talk about what that better way is.” And I actually want to be super-concrete, so maybe we can start with a particular thing that kids learn, like multiplication. How are we teaching multiplication wrong, and how should we do it better?

Shalinee Sharma:

The first thing I would say is, memorizing is really important. I’m not in the camp of “we shouldn’t memorize facts”; that’s vital. But imagine if you took a reading test and right before the test you memorized 200 words, and then you took the reading test the next day and you read the passage, but two weeks later you couldn’t read those words anymore. That’s super-weird. You would be illiterate, even if you got an A on that reading test.

It’s a metaphor, but it’s very intentionally provided, which is because in math we prize memorization over understanding, and we should just do both. If you get into these silly math wars, people are like, “Well, should you memorize or should you understand?” And it’s like, well, how about both? 

Let’s take that with multiplication. This is one of my favorite problems. Tell me the proof to why n times zero equals zero. When I ask most folks the answer to that question, they don’t know the answer.

Emily:

I feel like in my family, when we go on hikes, sometimes if there’s a bridge, my husband stands on the other side of the bridge, and you can only cross if you’ve answered a math fact, and the kids’ math facts are always suited to what they’re doing, and mine are always just problems that he thinks that I should know because I have a PhD in economics, but I never know. This is like that. He is always like, “What’s the proof of the concavity?” And I’m like, “Can you just please ‘nine times seven’ like the last person had? Thank you.” What’s the proof of n times… So when you talk about multiplication, it’s the n and the number of times, so it’s n, but it’s zero times, so then there’s zero of it.

Shalinee:

That’s right.

Emily:

Nice. I’m across the bridge.

Shalinee:

But we have no expectations as a country collectively that 8-year-olds can learn that proof, but on Zearn they do. And not only can they learn that proof, they love learning it. It makes them really happy. They feel empowered, they feel joy. 

Why are my kids being taught math differently than I was?

Emily:

For a lot of parents, I think what is daunting about this is this idea of the new math. I’ll give you an example where I myself have struggled with this, which is when you’re adding together two  three-digit numbers. And when I was in school, we pretty quickly got to the stacking mechanism, the stacking and carrying. I’m excellent at stacking and carrying, so good that I stack and carry in my head. If you told me “add these three-digit numbers together,” I would imagine them in my head stacked, and I would do the stacking and the carrying, and then I would give you the number.

The way my kids seem to have learned this, they eventually did get to some kind of stacking and carrying, but the first thing and the way that they default to, is this “we’re breaking it up into the pieces and we’re adding the…” I’m not even sure I could really replicate it, but it definitely involves breaking things down and combining them. Can you explain to me why that’s a good idea instead of the stacking?

Shalinee:

It’s beautiful that you can stack in your head and you love it, and that’s awesome. There are lots of children — there are 8 billion people on earth, and so there are lots of children — who are going to prefer that way as well. But everyone doesn’t prefer that way, and so here’s the part about math that we have to tell kids — and we have to tell adults, especially women, when we think about how leaky the STEM pipeline is — that math is creative and there is only one right answer.

If we’re going to add, let’s say, 37 and 13, the answer can only be 50. That’s it. There’s no other option. Emily, you’re welcome to stack in your head, but I’m going to say 30 plus 10 plus 7 plus 3. That’s just how I want to do it. And I know a 7 and 3 are automatically a 10, so I’m really just going to add 30 plus 10 plus 10. And so what that tells me is, I get to do it my way and you can do it your way. And what it allows for is creativity and problem-solving.

And then the meta learning, why that really matters in real life — particularly if you think about your work and how creative your work has been — is that we need STEM workers, and we need workers in general to think about problems creatively and think about many ways to solve them. And so when we teach mathematics in a way where children have many ways at the problem, their many ways are accepted, though the answer is still 50. There’s no other option, but there are many ways at it.

Now, I’m not saying that new math is always presented with that big-picture lesson — that it’s about creativity, trying a different way, feeling empowered in mathematics — but it absolutely needs to be. And if you think about the children who feel most successful in mathematics and then are in a position to go on to do a STEM degree, they have that lesson in their own head.

What do we need to change about our math education system? 

Emily:

So, if you had a magic wand and you could fix some aspect of our current math education, what’s the one thing that you would do?

Shalinee:

Can I have two things with my magic wand?

Emily:

I guess so, yes. It’s magic, so I guess we’ll be flexible.

Shalinee:

Okay, well, if I only have one thing, I’ll start with belief. It would be scandalous, unacceptable child abuse to think that children walk into an elementary school, we sort out the reading kids, and we’re completely content with the rest leaving elementary school illiterate. I mean, it would be on the front page of the New York Times. I mean, it would just be absurd. The way I’d say it simply is that when children can’t read at a population level, we get very angry at the adults.

In contrast, the idea that kids could go to kindergarten through eighth grade and come out with the vast majority of them failing any math test you give them, including the NAEP or these well-regarded math tests, so thus they’re innumerate, is completely acceptable. And instead of blaming the adults where we say, “Let’s not be mean to the kids, because they’re not math kids. It’s okay, they love ballet and soccer.” You’re like, what? How is that related to what we’re talking about? And so I think the first is just belief, and we just don’t have it collectively. Parents don’t believe yet enough in their kids. Teachers don’t yet believe enough in their students. Governors don’t believe enough in this. We just don’t have enough belief. The first is just, let’s believe.

If you give me a second one, I would say that it’s what I talked about earlier, which is we have to pair understanding with memorizing. And the best way to understand really anything, but especially math, is simple pictures, concrete context — just make it feel real, not abstract and theoretical. What’s a negative number? Well, think about sea level is zero, and then you dive into the ocean — that’s a negative number. And then you climb a mountain, well, that’s a positive number. Okay, I’m not talking about things that are extremely elaborate, but bringing pictures, real context. 

We just need pictures to be a part of mathematics. And right now what happens is we have abstract symbols that are shorthand for pictures, and that shorthand for pictures, we need. You can’t draw a picture at the SAT, right? So if you’re taking the SAT, you need to be doing more abstract mathematics. So I’m not against, in high-stakes contexts, abstract mathematics, but you have to pair that with understanding, and the simplest path to understanding are pictures.

Full transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain small errors.

Emily Oster:

When I was a kid in elementary school, I thought I was pretty good at math. My high point came in the fifth grade when I had Mr. Celine who did a bunch of things that really played to my strengths. There was a timed math test in which Matthew Makowski and I traded off one, two in multiplication tables. And the other day I came across in my parents’ storage bin, a worksheet in which I had used combinatorics to take the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 and combine them to make all of the numbers up to 100. Like 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 is 10, but the summation of four is also 10. You could multiply it by three to get 30. The sheet was long.

When I got to high school, I still thought of myself as a math kid, but by the end of high school I didn’t. There came a point at which I decided I wasn’t that good at math. I hit something that I found really hard and I didn’t have the mentorship, the advice, the stick-to-itiveness to push through that. And now if you asked me, “Are you good at math?” I would say “Not really”. And I realize how that sounds. I have a PhD in economics, I do data for a living. But I don’t think of myself as someone who’s very good at math. And I think that is a position widely shared by almost everyone, whether it was the end of high school, sometime in college, sometime in elementary school, I think most of us at some point decided, well, I’m not really a math kid. 

We got to a point where mastery was hard, where the thing we were doing was so difficult that we kind of stopped. And we don’t really do that in English. You learn to read and you never decide well, I’m not a reading kid. I’m not good at reading. We all read. But we do often decide we’re not a math kid. And my guest today would like to push back on that. Shalinee Sharma is the founder of Zearn, an online math platform. She has a new book out called Math Mind, The Simple Path to Loving Math. And her core claim in this book is that every kid is a math kid, and that in order to do math education better, in order to serve our kids better, we need to have that core belief about our kids and probably also about ourselves. Every kid is a math kid.

In this conversation, we get into a little more detail about math learning. We talk about the question of memorization versus deeper learning. We talk about creativity and problem solving. We get into the question of why our kids are doing something called the new math and why it terrifies us and looks ridiculous, and nevertheless, still might be a good idea. And we talk about how to get kids excited about the tools of math and how they can unlock the secrets of the universe and be really, really fun. 

After the break, Shalinee Sharma.

Emily Oster:

Shalinee Sharma, thank you so much for joining me.

Shalinee Sharma:

Hi, Emily. So nice to join you. So excited to be here.

Emily:

So I’d love to start by having you just tell people who you are and what you do.

Shalinee:

Thank you. So my name is Shalinee Sharma and I am the CEO and Co-founder of Zearn, which is a nonprofit math learning platform used by one in four elementary school students and a million middle school kids. And I recently wrote a book, which I’m so excited to talk about. And I hope the idea that your listeners consider, especially as parents, is that their kids can succeed in math and can love math.

Emily:

You love math. You love math teaching as much as anyone I’ve ever encountered, and we met during the pandemic, and there are few people in life that one meets who are so deeply passionate about math or about anything that they do, so it’s really a delight to read the book, which is all about math and math kids. And we’re going to talk about your ideas, but can you tell us a little bit more about how you got… Why do you like math so much? A lot of people don’t like math. What’s the deal?

Shalinee:

Yeah. Well, I can say what I love about math teaching, is a little different than what I personally love about math, but there is an expression on a child’s face when it all clicks, and you can see their face actually light up. Their eyes will light up, their eyebrows will arch, they’ll have a deep smile. And when I see that, I feel just incredible joy in my heart. So I love seeing when everything clicks for kids. And unfortunately, we don’t always share that version of math with kids. We share this silly math, where you memorize your way through it and forget it. But when we show kids that understanding, to me, they are learning the secrets of the universe. They’re learning how the world actually works, and that joy in their heart puts so much joy in my heart.

Emily:

Did you start as a teacher?

Shalinee:

No.

Emily:

Really?

Shalinee:

No. Yeah. So I am the arms and legs of Zearn. My co-founders are the fabulous, amazing math teachers who did the hard work of showing what’s possible by working in schools where students typically don’t succeed in math, low-income schools that serve a lot of Black and brown students. And most of my co-founders got to results where they led the state. Their classrooms were just showing what was possible.

And when the idea of Zearn came about, which was their idea, the idea that they brought forward is, what if we put the best math teaching and learning up online for free for everyone, could we change the world? And my background, I had worked at Bain & Company, and had done a lot of tech and digital transformation, and I thought, I could be useful to you. That’s a great idea. I could help with that. And it’s actually in working with them that I’ve fallen in love with teaching and teaching and learning, but my main contribution is still actually the arms and legs of the digital transformation of Zearn.

Emily:

Can you say just a bit more about what Zearn is and how kids are using it?

Shalinee:

Yeah. So Zearn is a math learning platform the kids use, teachers, administrators use across the country for a bunch of different purposes, but the primary purpose is to help kids every day feel like they understand and get to practice enough math. The way I would describe it is there’s a very famous math researcher who describes our problems in America of middle school math, which is that everyday kids are 10 to 20 minutes behind where they need to be. And if you accumulate that 10 to 20 minutes behind, halfway through let’s say seventh grade, you have no idea what is happening. Your confidence is shot, you hate math. It doesn’t make sense.

And so Zearn provides that complement, that support to teachers and to families, of that 10 to 20 minutes every day, where it’s practice, but it’s also learning and understanding. One of the issues with just going about doing mathematics and practicing, is if you don’t understand anything, what would be the point of practicing? You need to understand and practice, and that’s really important, and what we offer in Zearn.

Emily:

So your new book is called Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math, and I would say the pitch of the book is some version of we’re not doing it right and there’s a better way, and I want to talk about what that better way is. And I actually want to be super concrete, so maybe we can start with a particular thing that kids learn, like multiplication. How are we teaching multiplication wrong and how should we do it better?

Shalinee:

Yep. Okay, let’s do multiplication. The first thing I would say is memorizing is really important. I’m not in the camp of, we shouldn’t memorize facts, that’s vital. But imagine if you took a reading test, and the reading test was right before the test you memorized 200 words, and then you took the reading test the next day, and you read the passage, but two weeks later you couldn’t read those words anymore. That’s super weird. You would be illiterate through the course, even if you got an A on that reading test.

It’s a metaphor, but it’s very intentionally provided, which is in math we prize memorization over understanding, and we should just do both. If you get into these silly math wars, people are like, “Well, should you memorize or should you understand?” And it’s like, well just how about both? How about just both? Let’s take that with multiplication. This is one of my favorite problems. Tell me the proof to why N times zero equals zero. When I ask most folks the answer to that question, they don’t know the answer.

Emily:

Okay.

Shalinee:

Prove it. Prove it to me.

Emily:

I feel like in my family, when we go on hikes, sometimes if there’s a bridge, my husband stands on the other side of the bridge, and you can only cross if you’ve answered a math fact, and the kid’s math facts are always suited to what they’re doing, and mine are always just problems that he thinks that I should know because I have a PhD in economics, but I never know. This is like that. He is always like, “What’s the proof of the concavity?” And I’m like, “Can you just please nine times seven like the last person had? Thank you.” What’s the proof of N times… So when you talk about multiplication, it’s the N and the number of times, so it’s N, but it’s zero times, so then there’s zero of it.

Shalinee:

That’s right.

Emily:

Nice. I’m across the bridge.

Shalinee:

You can cross that bridge.

Emily:

Okay, I got across it.

Shalinee:

Yeah. Yeah. It was only because of your PhD in economics-

Emily:

Actually, that’s day one, first thing you do.

Shalinee:

But we have no expectations as a country collectively that eight-year-olds can learn that proof, but on Zearn they do. And not only can they learn that proof, they love learning it. It makes them really happy. They feel empowered, they feel joy. How do we present the proof? All right, so you have three plates of cookies. On each plate, there are two cookies. How many cookies do we have all together? Three plates times two cookies, is six. And so we present the meaning of multiplication as the first number is the number of groups, and the second number is the number inside each group.

If you take that forward and you say well we have three plates and each plate has zero cookies, well if you imagine that in your mind three times zero is zero, now if you have eight plates and they have zero cookies, now if you have a hundred plates and they have zero cookies, well then N times zero is always zero. And an eight-year-old can grasp this and enjoys grasping this.

And again, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t memorize, but if math is viewed by children and by adults as memorizing facts, first of all, that’s the empty calories of learning. But second of all, there is no way to build on that. There’s no way to build understanding. And really the parallel is memorize 400 words, memorize 100 more, and at the end you will be illiterate.

Emily:

The memorization of words is an interesting parallel because there’s so much discussion about science of reading, which is all about this idea of building blocks of phonics being the building blocks to reading and memorization not working. And I see the very clear parallel to, okay, you understand that in reading, but why in math do you still think we should be just memorizing these facts without context?

One of the things I… For a lot of parents, I think what is daunting about this, is this idea of the new math. Give you an example where I myself have struggled with what is this? Which is when you’re adding together three digit numbers, two, three digit numbers. And when I was in school, we pretty quickly got to the stacking mechanism, the stacking and carrying. I’m an excellent stacking and carrying, so good that I stack and carry in my head. If you told me add these three digit numbers together, I would imagine them in my head stacked, and I would do the stacking, and the carrying, and then I would give you the number.

The way my kids seem to have learned this, they eventually did get to some kind of stacking and carrying, but the first thing and the way that they default to, is this we’re breaking it up into the pieces and we’re adding the… I’m not even sure I could really replicate it, but it definitely involves breaking things down and combining them. Can you explain to me why that’s a good idea instead of the stacking?

Shalinee:

Yeah, so I think this is back to the unfortunate either or way that we approach math. The reading parallel would be, can you read the word concept? Can you read the word procedure? Do you understand what it means? Both. You need both. What I would say is algorithms, which is the stacking, they are beautiful, they always work, they’re magnificent, a great human invention. You are welcome to keep stacking in your head.

Emily:

Thank you.

Shalinee:

Yeah.

Emily:

I’m 44 years old, so I think it’s over.

Shalinee:

Yeah.

Emily:

It’s the way we have.

Shalinee:

Yeah, it’s not over, Emily. Anything is possible, but it’s beautiful that you can stack in your head, and you love it, and that’s awesome. There are lots of children; there are eight billion people on earth, and so there are lots of children who are going to prefer that way as well. But everyone doesn’t prefer that way, and so here’s the part about math that we have to tell kids and we have to tell adults, especially women, when we think about how leaky the STEM pipeline is, that math is creative and there is only one right answer.

If we’re going to add, let’s say 37 and 13, the answer can only be 50. That’s it. There’s no other option. But Emily, you’re welcome to stack in your head, but I’m going to say 30, plus 10, plus seven, plus three. That’s just how I want to do it. And I know a seven and three are automatically a 10, so I’m really just going to add 30, plus 10, plus 10. And so what that tells me, is I get to do it my way, and you can do it your way. And what it allows for, is creativity and problem solving.

And then the meta learning, why that really matters in real life, particularly if you think about your work and how creative your work has been, we need STEM workers and we need workers in general to think about problems creatively and think about many ways to solve them. And so when we teach mathematics in a way where children have many ways at the problem, their many ways are accepted, the answer is still 50. There’s no other option, but there’s many ways at it.

Now, I’m not saying that new math is always presented with that big picture lesson, that it’s about creativity, trying a different way, feeling empowered in mathematics, but it absolutely needs to be. And if you think about the children who feel most successful in mathematics and then are in a position to go on to do a STEM degree, they have that lesson in their own head.

Emily:

Yeah, I think this is aspect of the way math is taught, I think is part of what makes it hard for people, for parents, is it almost feels like I learned one algorithm, and now you’re teaching my kids a different algorithm, and it’s not presented like there are a lot of ways and we’re going to do… I mean, I’m sure in some cases it is, but for many kids, it’s not presented like, “This is a super interesting creative set of problems. How can we get to 50? We know it’s 50. What are the 47 interesting ways to get to 50?” It’s just like, my algorithm was stacking, and your algorithm is this particular aspect of chunking, and you better show me the right chunks because that’s what you expect. And so that almost feels to me like the point of your book, and you can correct me if this is not right, is this big picture creativity, the idea of many ways into the problem?

Shalinee:

Yeah, I mean the way I titled that chapter, rather than saying there are three algorithms, you should learn them all, which is silly and kind of missing the point, is instead what I want people to remember and what I want kids to know, is that you are empowered to make tough problems easier. You have the interest, skill, preference, working memory to stack the numbers. Others do not and that’s okay, but then they can make it easier for themselves.

And easier, I say in the book, easier is in the eye of the beholder. And when children are taught that, that part explicitly, so they’re not taught to sort of pare it back some new algorithm or some different way, but when they’re taught explicitly easier is in the eye of the beholder, there’s lots of cool ways we can solve this problem, that’s the big picture lesson that allows for both success and enjoyment in mathematics.

If math is that I kind of have no clue what’s going on, but I’m exactly imitating what the teacher did on the board, that’s not a class where your curiosity is burning and being stoked. But instead if we present it as, look, there’s a bunch of ways to solve this problem, what do you find interesting? Which way do you like to do it? And also the chance to share that with your peers, that’s also very empowering. And so I agree with you that we don’t always present it that way in math teaching and learning today.

Emily:

So if you had a magic wand and you could fix some aspect of our current math education, what’s the one thing that you would do?

Shalinee:

Can I have two things with my magic wand?

Emily:

I guess so yes, it’s magic, so I guess we’ll be flexible.

Shalinee:

Okay, well if I only have one thing, I’ll start with belief. It is completely… It would be scandalous, unacceptable child abuse to think that children walk into an elementary school, we sort out the reading kids, and we’re completely content with the rest leaving elementary school illiterate. I mean, it would be front page of the New York Times. If we found the memo, it would be there’d be a whistleblower. I mean, it would just be absurd. The way I’d say it simply is that when children can’t read at a population level, we get very angry at the adults.

In contrast, the idea that kids could go to kindergarten through eighth grade and come out, the vast majority of them failing any math test you give them, including the NAEP or these well-regarded math tests, so thus they’re enumerate, is completely acceptable. And instead of blaming the adults where we say, “Let’s not be mean to the kids because they’re not math kids. It’s okay, they love ballet and soccer.” You’re like, what? How is that related to what we’re talking about? And so I think the first is just belief and we just don’t have it collectively. Parents don’t believe yet enough in their kids. Teachers don’t yet believe enough in their students. Governors don’t believe enough in this. We just don’t have enough belief. The first is just let’s believe.

If you give me a second one, I would say that it’s what I talked about earlier, which is we have to pair understanding with memorizing. And the best way to understand really anything but especially math, is simple pictures, concrete context, just make it feel real, not abstract and theoretical. What’s a negative number? Well, think about sea level is zero and then you dive into the ocean, that’s a negative number. And then you climb a mountain, well that’s a positive number. Okay, I’m not talking about things that are extremely elaborate, but bringing pictures, real context. As you get to your level of mathematics, Emily, you would start using graphs a lot to explain.

Emily:

Yep.

Shalinee:

We just need pictures to be a part of mathematics. And right now what happens is we have abstract symbols that are shorthand for pictures, and that shorthand for pictures we need. You can’t draw a picture at the SAT, right? So if you’re taking the SAT, you need to be doing more abstract mathematics. So I’m not against in high stakes context, abstract mathematics, but you have to pair that with understanding, and the simplest path to understanding are pictures.

Emily:

So do you think we should be teaching kids algebra with pictures when they’re like seven?

Shalinee:

Yes. I would love to teach… So we can hide algebra and present it to children. Let’s say algebra is often taught in ninth grade or eighth grade, sometimes seventh, sometimes 10th, and it can be a very abrupt change in the brain. It’s kind of like this whole idea that we’re presenting of solving for X. So we can smooth that out for kids and hide algebra all through elementary school and middle school, by presenting it with pictures, and make it engaging, make it fun. And so yes, we should be doing that.

Emily:

So when kids learn to read, there’s this benefit for them. And I remember teaching my daughter to read, and when she got frustrated just being like, “Just wait because at the end of this, I promise it’s going to be so fun.” And I was right about that, and now reading is recreational. What is the equivalent for math? How are we telling kids at the end of this what are you getting? It’s not the Twilight series, it’s not the Crown of Thorn and Roses, or whatever is the thing you like to read. What am I getting?

Shalinee:

Yeah, I think it depends what age kids are. I have thirteen-year-old twins, and there’s a great article in science about one of the ways to motivate adolescents is to remind them that the adult world is trying to rip them off and that you’re on their side, so this is a schema that I use at home to engage with my kids. But even when they were in elementary school, I would present to them the truth, which is that if you’re numerate, you can navigate the world.

I remember we’d go to the farmer’s market, I’d give them each $10 bucks and I’d say, “Go buy some fruits and vegetables. But by the way, you’re a little kid and people think you can’t calculate the change, so calculate the change before you hand over the money to make sure you get the right amount of money back.” The version of that that goes through the entirety of life of at the minimum numeracy is how you navigate the world around you, and those who are numerate are going to take advantage of you. That’s one of the benefits that I definitely bring home, which is don’t be the fool.

I think the other benefits that are in the realm of fun, sit often in the space of science. If you think of also economics, just all these fabulous applications of mathematics that are so interesting to the world around you and I think that with reading, we think the Twilight series is reading, but if reading is learning phonics, learning what words mean, being able to read with fluency, and then you get to read science fiction, to me, I think that the parallel would be you can actually understand an economics podcast and have a lot of fun reading it. You can actually read the New York Times coverage on inflation and actually understand it. It’s basically the access point to understand the world around you.

Emily:

More ParentData, including advice for parents for how to get your kids pumped for math, the benefits of a family game night, and my own regrettable decision to pull myself out of the math game after the break.

Emily:

So you have some advice in the book for parents about how to engage their kids. What is that?

Shalinee:

Yeah, so I think the first thing that I would say to parents is believe in your own kid, period. Just believe in your own kid. Have the expectations that your child can succeed in mathematics. I had an interesting experience myself, where one of my kids was really interested in piano and musical instruments, and at one point he was playing multiple musical instruments. I had this definition of him in my own head where I was like, but he’s not that musical. And yet, he was there pushing forward. And I was like, our family’s not that musical. This crazy, this craziness going on in my head. I just had this moment where I was like, I am terrible. I’m thinking these thoughts. If I’m not saying directly, you’re not musical, I’m implying it. And so that version, whatever’s going on in your head, well our family is not math people. My kid’s not a genius for math. Just stop. Stop the internal monologue and just believe in your kid.

I think the second thing is just don’t panic math is all around you. And the simplest thing I would say is play board games or card games. There is not a board game or a card game out there that doesn’t have a dimension of mathematics, and there’re very fun, and they’re already sitting there. You know the public health messaging of read to your kid for 20 minutes a night something they love? Have board game night, play board games and card games with your family all the time.

And then the last thing I’d say is that utilize resources when your kid falls behind. The biggest difference between kids who feel… So I don’t know, Emily, if you’ve had this experience. I did. Through the course of high school and college, I felt successful in mathematics, but in middle school I fell really far behind and I just got super lucky. My teacher tried to help me and my dad jumped in as my tutor and I caught up. And one of the things we see in the Zearn data is that kids can catch up when they’re behind. But I think one of the structures in our society is that we believe that when kids fall behind, they’re revealing their math ability so there’s no point in catching them up.

Well, that is absurd and nonsense. We know kids can catch up. We have a really cool fixed effect model analysis of 600,000 students, that show that kids can catch up. I’m telling you at a population level, kids can catch up. And the difference between the kids who catch up and the kids who don’t, is an adult intervenes and gives them the resources and support. And so as a parent, intervene and help your kid access those resources and support. And if you don’t have them, ask your teacher for help. You’re welcome to go to Zearn.org. It’s free. There are other wonderful free resources online, but don’t give up, ask for help.

Emily:

It’s interesting. I did not have this experience in middle school. I had this experience in high school, so I was very far ahead in math and at the end of… I had finished BC Calculus by the end of my sophomore year in high school, and I thought that I was really great at math, and then I ended up in a class with two other students. My high school had made this special class, we were going to learn multivariable calculus. One of those other students, David Speyer, is actually a tenured math professor at the University of Michigan now, so he was really, really excellent at it. It’s very hard to be a tenured math professor. He was really, really excellent at math. And I was very good at math, but not anywhere near as good as David Speyer.

And I basically, at that point, decided, you know what? Calculus was kind of the end for me. And I never really seriously thought about being good at math again. I took statistics. It worked out fine, but now if you said, “Are you especially good at math?” I would say, “Not particularly.” It’s not exactly that I think it’s David Speyer’s fault, but I do feel at that point there would’ve been some value to somebody being like, “Hey, you actually are quite good at math. Maybe you’re not as good as David Speyer, but you’re really quite good.” Which is just to say that I think this value of realizing that this could happen to your kid at various points and the intervention could matter.

Shalinee:

Yeah, and I think this comparison is really vital. So you’re an amazing writer. You’re a New York Times bestselling author. Imagine if instead of David Speyer, the person you were in class with had won multiple Pulitzer prizes, would go on to win multiple Pulitzer prizes. You might think, well, maybe I shouldn’t write because that’s what it takes to write. That’s just silly, but math is full of that because in the meta math narrative, and this is one of the points that I really want people to understand, even amongst the highest performing math students, a student who took BC Calculus her sophomore year and went on to be an economics professor, she still is looking to select herself out because it’s this sorting myth that there’s the math genius. And so up until that point, you’re in the game and then you meet David Speyer, and you’re like, “I’m out. I’m out of the game.”

Emily:

It’s done. It’s over. Oh well.

Shalinee:

Yeah. Other disciplines don’t have this narrative.

Emily:

Yeah.

Shalinee:

And this narrative holds back children, it holds back our whole country. It holds back the world from creativity, innovation. It’s just not good. And so that’s why I would say when you only gave me two options, I picked the first, which was believe.

Emily:

Yeah. So how do you want people to use the book and who should be using it? I mean of course, when one writes a book, the answer to who should buy it is all people, so it should be all people. But specifically, how do you imagine all those people using this book?

Shalinee:

Yeah, so one thing that’s fun, and I’ll come back to this, is friends with advanced copies have been sharing that they’ve been giving the book to their middle schoolers and I hadn’t considered that, so I want to come back to that. But what I was hoping is that adults who are in charge of and love kids, would read the book and kind of go through three steps.

The first step is to really confront all these myths in math learning. Because if you don’t confront the myths, then it’s, yeah, math sucks, it’s really painful. You’re going to freaking do it. That’s the takeaway. And that’s just terrible. That’s not the takeaway. Math is beautiful and fun and full of dopamine hits of problem solving. So the first thing that I want you to do in the first section of the book, is let’s excavate a lot of those math myths and bin them, let’s put those in the trash and I think we can continuously do that.

And the second is the methods that make math fun, and to really explore those methods. And so those are things like making an easier problem, understanding what’s going on, not memorizing. Actually, the enjoyment of mathematics sits in the way in which we understand it. It’s basically a language, and it’s a really fun, and interesting, and universal language.

And then the last section of the book is what you should do, what are you going to do about it? And really here, I’m thinking most about parents and educators, and thinking about what they can do to support kids. And if there’s one action I really want parents, educators, and everyone to really think about is all kids fall behind at some point in math, all of them. The ones who continue in the world of mathematics and enjoy it, got some additional boost, some support. That could have been an emotional support, that could have been someone who just helped them think about what slope really means. Whatever it was, it wasn’t massive, but they got some additional support, they caught up, and then they kept going. And so when kids struggle in math, it doesn’t mean that it’s the moment now we sort them out of the math pipeline, and it doesn’t represent their fundamental ability. It’s just part of learning. In every other discipline of learning, we allow kids to catch up when they fall behind. In this discipline, we don’t.

My concluding chapter is talking about from sorting to teaching. What if we took the billions of dollars and the millions of hours of effort we’re putting behind math teaching and learning, and we didn’t orient it to sorting out the math kids, but we just oriented it to teaching every single kid math? What might happen?

Emily:

I do think part of the issue, and maybe this is a reframe, is that when we teach math, it is you learn this and you move to the next thing. You learn this, you move to the next thing. And that’s to some extent true in English language arts, but in a much less direct way. You learn to read. And then once you know how to read, then you’re reading more interesting things. But it’s somehow the most fundamental piece is there, and it’s easier to say everyone’s doing that, and then maybe you’re better or worse at engaging with James Joyce, but that’s a little bit subjective.

Whereas in math, you’re moving up the ladder, you add, you subtract, you multiply, you divide, you do fractions. So it feels like you have to either keep going or you fall off the ladder. There’s no tree branching. If reading is a tree, where we can all get up to the limbs and then we walk our way out, and maybe some of us are going a bit higher, but we’re all kind of there, math is it’s a ladder, and when you’re done, we just throw you off into the pit of despair.

Shalinee:

Maybe. I think there is a nature of math that is cumulative. So if you’re struggling with addition, it would be pretty silly to present calculus. So there is no question of that cumulative nature. I don’t know. If you’re struggling to sound out words, I don’t know if I’m bringing you Shakespeare’s sonnets. I don’t know that they’re that different, but I am not a reading expert.

But here’s what I’d say, which is the idea of math as a lot of discrete skills, is a very dangerous myth, so let me give you an example. In seventh grade, we find, particularly post pandemic, a lot of seventh graders in the app are struggling with decimal division.

Emily:

Okay.

Shalinee:

Okay?

Emily:

Dividing a decimal, like 0.2 divided by two?

Shalinee:

Yeah, perfect. And in seventh grade we are not teaching decimal division. Those ideas are taught in fourth, fifth. That’s sort of when you’re supposed to master all that. But for example, I talked about negative numbers earlier. Negative numbers is one of the things that we really want to master in seventh grade. And so when kids are sitting and learning negative numbers, but they’re struggling with decimal division, that interferes with the new learning.

I’ll give you a simple problem, that this is actually in the Zearn app, 1.4 divided by two, can present struggle for students. So now what? Do we not present negative numbers? Because you have to learn all of this decimal division. Well, here’s what shocking finding of how fast kids can often catch up. 14 divided by two, what’s the answer to that question?

Emily:

Are you asking me? It’s seven.

Shalinee:

It’s seven.

Emily:

It’s seven.

Shalinee:

And then we put 1.4 divided by two back in front of them again on screen. The vast majority of children answer 0.7, boom, you’re back into negative numbers. It is the case that kids do have gaps, they fall behind, they have misunderstandings. That’s completely true, but it’s not the case that becomes a roadblock to the learning in front of you. It just isn’t. And we show that over and over. There are billions of math problems completed on the app and we just keep showing that over and over. Now, that doesn’t mean that when a child is struggling with decimals, we’re just like, “Move on. It’s fine.”

Emily:

Yeah.

Shalinee:

But it means the solution to helping that child struggling is often a 30 second solve, a five-minute solve. Back to the mathematician I was citing, where kids are 10 to 20 minutes behind, it’s pretty tight these solutions. And that’s because while it’s addition, subtraction, fractions, while it moves like that, it’s just all base 10. It’s actually just one thing happening.

Emily:

Yes. So I want to end by asking you about something that you say in the introduction. So you talk little, the very first part of the book, about transferring schools in sixth grade, and being put in the honors math class, and feeling quite lost. I’m just going to read it. “After our first test, Mr. Snyder said, you did well. If you try your very best, you could be just as good as the boys.” And you write about this as the moment of inspiration, of thinking I can, but you also note that isn’t perhaps how you would want someone to talk to your own child in today’s world. But there’s this piece of it that I found very striking because it, in its own weird way, expresses a kind of, you can get there but you’re not there yet, which feels so important, and I think actually quite hard to communicate to our kids, that you can get there, it’s going to take work, but I believe that you can do the work, different than I believe you’ve already done the work.

And that’s just, I think for parents, for teachers, that message is hard because you’re trying to tell someone you believe in them, while also telling them they got to put more in to get there.

Shalinee:

Yeah, and I think our present culture somehow is making this harder.

Emily:

Yeah.

Shalinee:

This is a silly story, but blew my mind. So last week with my thirteen-year-old twin boys, we went to our first rock concert. A lot of their friends had gone to see Taylor Swift and they’re not Swifties, so we saw Maroon Five.

Emily:

Okay.

Shalinee:

And Adam Levine, who’s the lead-

Emily:

Shout out to the 2000s.

Shalinee:

Totally. Totally.

Emily:

Okay. It’s cool.

Shalinee:

Exactly. I wanted to enjoy the music as well. And so Adam Levine at the end, who’s a bit older than you, Emily.

Emily:

Yes.

Shalinee:

He ends the concert and he’s like, “For all the young people out there, I just want to tell you that one path to success in life is to work as hard as you possibly can,” and then he added some expletives to that, and I just was like, I hope my kids are listening. But so scary to think that if we can’t present to children that the input of greatness is hard work, then the only other possible input of greatness is genetic ability.

Emily:

Yeah.

Shalinee:

So I agree that I wouldn’t want my kid’s math teacher to say some gender insensitive things to them, but being told in that class where I was, in my view in last place, that I could be in first place if I worked hard, I just thought I would just be in second to last place. I just didn’t have those kinds of expectations for myself, but that the only difference between where I was and where I could be was hard work, it really blew my mind, and I do hope that adults are sharing that lesson with kids.

Emily:

Yeah. When I was in high school, my physics teacher told me that girls didn’t usually do well in the honors physics class. It was not a comment about me. It was one of his opening speeches to the class was like, “Girls don’t usually do well in this class.” And I remember going to the female chemistry teacher and complaining about this and saying he said this, and she was just like, “Well, I guess that you’ll have to do the best then. Why don’t you work hard and do the best?”

It was totally just like, I’m sure that you can achieve that. But it was so different from how I think that would be presented now, and for probably good reason. But this idea of if you put in the time and you work hard, that is a huge part of what you can achieve, in some ways feels like the belief part of this conversation, just stated in a slightly different way. That I believe in you. It’s not that I believe you can do it, just sitting on your butt and never trying, but I believe that you can put in the time and that you can get there.

Shalinee:

Yeah, I mean, one of the chapters in the book is Practice With Purpose, and it’s one of the key messages which is like, okay, yes, we can present mathematics differently so that it’s interesting, creative, makes sense, our learning is durable. We can do all that. But then at the end, you got to practice.

Emily:

You got to do it.

Shalinee:

You just got to do it. You have to build those neural pathways. You have to build a math mind and there’s nothing, there’s no shortcuts. You’ve got to practice.

Emily:

Shalinee, thank you so much for being here. Congratulations on the book. The book is called Math Mind: The Simple Path to Loving Math, and everyone should go by it immediately.

Shalinee:

Thank you, Emily. It’s been a pleasure.

Emily Oster:

ParentData is produced by Tamar Avishai, with support from the ParentData team and PRX. If you have thoughts on this episode, please join the conversation on my Instagram, @profemilyoster. And if you want to support the show, become a subscriber to the ParentData newsletter at parentdata.org, where I write weekly posts on everything to do with parents and data to help you make better, more informed parenting decisions. 

There are a lot of ways you can help people find out about us. Leave a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts, text your friend about something you learned from this episode, debate your mother-in-law about the merits of something parents do now that is totally different from what she did, post a story to your Instagram debunking a panic headline of your own, just remember to mention the podcast too. Right, Penelope?

Penelope:

Right, Mom.

Emily Oster:

We’ll see you next time.

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Amanda
3 months ago

I love math and think I had an absolutely outstanding math education in K-12. So I’m really sad to see math education getting worse across the board in the US, where common core and its derivatives reign supreme and tie teachers’ hands. My 6yo just finished 1st grade, where his math class was either him trying to explain how he knows the answer to 7+2 to kids who can’t do it, or trying to teach himself math on an ipad. It’s the saddest thing ever. I am very against young kids having electronics in school. It’s no substitute for a teacher actually teaching him. But the teacher spends her time putting them in groups and telling them to explain easy problems to each other. All the individuation is on screens, which I think is scandalous. I am actively looking into where to move where we can have a school that teaches kids the way I was taught: minimal screens, maximal human engagement, customized by ability.

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