How I learned algebra

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I was in low track math. I remember when I realized it. I was in the front row, on the far right, and did not understand anything going on in algebra class. We had a tiered system in our school. I was in the highest track for most classes, and the lowest track for math. I remember wondering what the school would do with me when they realized that I couldn’t even keep up in dumb-kid math.

Amazingly, after that, I was moved up for geometry, into a higher track, presumably because in a class of 1500 students, I was in the top 10%, but I was in special ed math. Something was wrong.

But something was really wrong in geometry. I was so lost that I still have nightmares about walking into class and having no idea what people are talking about.

I never needed math again until I founded my first start-up. The guy who funded it hired a CFO-type person to show me how to build financial models. Using algebraic thinking. I realized that not only was he assuming I knew how to do math, but he was assuming I knew how to use Excel. So I hired a college student to teach me how to use Excel.

Excel is amazing. It taught me how to think algebraically. And as I got better at Excel, the formulas showed me how to think in terms of possibilities, and the columns and rows taught me how to look for patterns in business models to evaluate feasibility.

I’ve founded three start-ups and each time, my Excel skills have improved because it’s fun for me. I love building financial models, and in my last company I put an investment banker on my advisory board specifically so he could help me get better at using Excel.

So I am starting to believe the people who say that kids learn math when they need to know math. I’m believing the people who tell me that it’s okay that my son can’t do long division. My son has a goat business. It’s time to get the goats pregnant, and he can’t pay to rent a boy goat until he can figure out how much money he needs left over to feed the moms and the babies over the winter. So I know that somehow, he’s going to learn math this fall.

 

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Things I’m not teaching

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Suddenly, so many traditional school subjects look totally insane to me. Here is a list.

Language Arts.
Kids learn languages themselves if you just put them among a bunch of kids that speak the language. The only reason we don’t do that is because classrooms are like antiquated, face-time-oriented  9-to-5 jobs where if you are not there you don’t count. So people can’t put their kids among kids who speak another language.

Spelling.
There is Spellchecker. I know, because I’m a terrible speller. The words like you’re/your and two/too are words you pick up if you read. Words like corollary (I needed Spellchecker for that) are words that if you misspell in a handwritten note, people will excuse the misspelling. So all that time you could spend learning to spell, you could just spend reading. Also, to learn to type you learn to spell. And kids should learn to type before they learn to write a sentence.

Cursive.
This is actually fine to teach – for art class. I bought calligraphy pens for my son. Many kids with Asperger’s love to write by hand, so I thought he’d love calligraphy. I imagined him have a signature worthy of the US Constitution. It turned out that I was right about loving lettering, but not the cursive. He took my Jelly Roll pens and wrote block letters. Fine. No cursive for him, and it’s still artistic.

Geography.
If the kid is on the Internet all the time, the kid is already a world citizen. Anyone who makes a friend with someone in another time zone will want to have a sense of where they live. They will look on a map. The terrible geography of US students comes from being stuck in a classroom, overly focused on US history and US current events, instead of out in the world, reading International web sites, meeting people and traveling. Normal curiosity can lead to a knowledge of geography tantamount to a year’s worth of the topic in high school.

Home Economics.
There is a resurgence of home economics classes that mirror the trend that men take care of kids at home more and also, homesteading and eating local are hip, so homemaking follows, in the hipster category. The thing is that if your kid is home all day, the kid can make lunch for everyone, tend the garden, and do the things that actually need to get done at home instead of making up assignments at school.

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Kids homeschool themselves

This is a guest post from Kate Fridkis, whose family did homeschooling when she was growing up. She blogs about body image at Eat the Damn Cake and she blogs about homeschooling at Skipping School.

As a fourteen and fifteen-year-old homeschooler, the last thing I wanted to do was sit around the house with my mom all day. What kid wants to do that?

And people always whispered to me, “I could never do what your mom is doing.” They said, “So she has a degree in education?” No, not exactly.

The idea that being a homeschooling parent means being an expert on every school subject and walking your kids, day by day, year by year, though everything they would otherwise have learned in a classroom is a huge misunderstanding of the way homeschooling works.

When they’re very young, kids need a lot of attention and support. They need to be watched, in case they try to jump off the top of the stairs, to see if they can fly. But education doesn’t really need to be nearly as structured and guided as people imagine it does. Kids learn from being alive. And once kids develop interests, they can pursue them doggedly, on their own, for weeks at a time. For years.

But most adults don’t trust kids, even their own, to have the “right” interests. Adults worry that kids are always wasting their time. Or doing things wrong. But adults don’t seem that good at picking subjects for kids to learn. Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about how science and math get picked over, well, everything else. But even people like me, who haven’t been knighted by the Queen, can see that even the people who get A’s in science and math haven’t necessarily learned why science and math are important. So who are we, as adults, to tell kids what they should be learning and when they should learn it?

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The visitor

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This guy emailed me. He said his in-laws live near our farm. He’s CEO of a homeschooling startup. So I took a chance on him and invited him and his family over for lunch.

He hung out with me in the kitchen and told me his company helps schools do project-based learning and “experiential” learning.

I said, “That sounds like homeschooling to me.”

He said, “It is. But not every family can do that.”

I went nuts. I told him that every family that is in a school rich enough to indulge in his software package has the means to homeschool. And, I said, “Why is a family that believes in project-based, experiential learning sending a kid to school anyway?”

He said, “Not every parent can afford homeschooling.”

I said, “That’s total BS. Every family with two college grads for parents can have one parent work and one homeschool. They can make enough money. If they choose.”

He was silent.

So I said, “This reminds me of the families that say they don’t have enough money for the mom to take maternity leave. It’s messed up values.”

He said, “My wife didn’t take maternity leave.”

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