The Number Sense
A farmer has
10 cows. All but six wander off. How many cows remain? Tim has five marbles,
which is two fewer than Jen. How many marbles does Jen have?
Do problems
like these make you cringe? Do they remind you of word problems that brought
you to tears when you were in school? We might have been pretty good with
numbers, but throw some words into the mix and we were lost.
Remember
struggling to memorize the multiplication tables? Oh, the twos, threes, fours
and fives were all right, but the sixes, sevens, eights, and nines scrambled
many a brain.
In his 1997
book, The Number Sense: How the Mind
Creates Mathematics, Stanislas Dehaene writes that the reason so many
children have trouble memorizing tables is because we do not have “digital”
brains like a computer does. Our brains work by association. That is, we make
sense of the world by associating new ideas to those we have already
assimilated into our memory banks.
That doesn’t
mean that children cannot learn math concepts. As Dehaene notes, four-day-old
infants can “decompose sounds” into smaller units to actually count syllables.
Researchers, using very clever tests, have tested babies and found that even
newborns can perceive differences in color, shape, size and number. We come
into the world as pretty smart cookies. So what happens?
One problem
is adults. Kids have their own way of understanding mathematical concepts. Young
children perceive the world differently than adults do. Their brains are
wide-open and willing to try new things. Everything is a wonder – even math.
Math is just another world puzzle to decipher. Kids jump into exploring math
concepts just like splashing in puddles. They love getting their brains wet.
Then
well-meaning adults begin to teach children the math system they have assimilated. Children who
cannot easily understand these models become anxious. Children need to wander and
we want them to stick to the path. Children also pick up non-verbal signals
from the adults they love. If Mom or Dad is intimidated by or “hates” math,
children will assume the same attitude to numbers.
Dehaene
states that he is “convinced that children of equal initial abilities may
become excellent or hopeless at mathematics depending on their love or hatred
of the subject. Passion breeds talent – and parents and teachers therefore have
a considerable responsibility in developing their children’s positive or
negative attitudes toward mathematics.”
It’s up to
us folks; can we be good models for our children? Can we learn to love math and
encourage our little ones to love it too?
The farmer
has six cows left (all but six wander
off). Jen has seven books. Five is two fewer than seven. Children know that
cows and books are wonders of the world.
Math can be too.
