The Number Sense

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.