By Holly Finn, Bing parent
There’s Singapore Math, which a whole nation and Jeff Bezos swear by. It starts with concrete, hands-on learning and moves to pictorial lessons, then to the abstract. And in global rankings of math achievement, Singapore has ranked highest or near highest in the world since the method was introduced. There’s Maya math, too, an ancient grid-counting system so sophisticated it helped Mayans become some of the world’s most advanced mathematicians and astronomers. Yet it’s so simple it can be learned in preschool. Of course, there’s also the kind of math you and I do every day when we weigh the cost of living on the peninsula versus everywhere else on the planet (a lot of subtraction).
Dr. Deborah Stipek came to Bing for our Distinguished Lecture this spring to talk about none of these. Instead, she focused on what she calls “Playful Math,” and the importance of teaching it to the very young.
First, she said, learning math early is good for your brain. Between 3 and 5 years old, brain development in the prefrontal lobe—which controls executive function—undergoes a big growth spurt. So, during this period, “it’s possible that engaging in math activities is helping grow the architecture of the brain.” And training in logical thinking offers social and emotional advantages, encouraging little people to see and call out inconsistencies when they clock them.
Second, said Stipek, learning math young sets you on a successful academic path. And she should know: She holds a doctorate from Yale in developmental psychology and is the Judy Koch Professor of Education, the Peter E. Haas Faculty Director of the Haas Center for Public Service and the former I. James Quillen Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University.
Turns out, skills entering kindergarten are probably predictive of skills many years later, in grade 8. If you’re in the highest—or lowest—quartile as a toddler, you’re likely to be in that same quartile as a pre-teen. “Entering school with high levels of skills actually helps you gain more as you go through.” And the reverse. If you’re behind at the start—exhibiting persistent problems in math, for instance—you’re less likely to finish high school (-13%) and even less likely to go to college (-29%).
The key to getting on the right path from the start seems to be a blend of “child-centered” and “teacher-directed” mathematical learning. Stipek showed videos to explain: A teacher using a shower curtain, for instance, teaches categorization, addition and subtraction. She divides the curtain into a grid and asks students to take off their shoes and arrange, sort and count them. Like Mayan math, but with Crocs.
“This isn’t flash cards,” said Stipek. “These kids didn’t know they were getting a math lesson. They were doing things with shoes.” That’s the key to Playful—you might say Stealthy—Math. It doesn’t feel obvious, onerous or overwhelming. This is a relief when you consider “math anxiety,” which, research shows, is pervasive ’round the world—and may be passed along behaviorally from one generation to the next. (Check out the “The Math Anxiety-Performance Link,” among many other articles about fascinating studies, on Stanford’s DREME website.)
Learning math really can be as simple and fun as playing Chutes & Ladders, Dominos, War. Although these days “we avoid calling it war,” says Stipek. “We call it compare, double-compare—nice and neutral.” Whatever you call it, much of this is basic stuff. Not rocket science, just math. It’s stuff you can do at home—you probably already do—and everywhere else. Count the kiwis when you put them in your shopping cart. That kind of thing is a low-stress way to sharpen your child’s mathematical chops.
Bing teachers do this every day, of course. Consider snack time. It looks like simple nutrition, but it’s ripe with math. There’s one-to-one correspondence: counting how many children are at the table, and how many plates are needed. There’s estimation and counting: How many pieces do you think this orange will have? How many seeds will this apple have? There’s more/less: Do I have enough cups here for everyone, and which of these clementines has more segments? There are shapes: What shape is your plate, and what other circles do you see in the classroom? And there are part/whole relations as well: Do children want a whole or half a graham cracker?
Playtime provides even more opportunities for the mathematical mind. Playing with Duplo blocks: How many people are riding on your train? During woodworking: How many pieces of wood did you use? How many nails? At storytime: The class tallies votes for which book to read (counting, data analysis). Plus, maps are everywhere, as are manipulatives that encourage conversation about shapes (Magformers, tangram). And when a Twos child tapes together many strips of paper and wants to measure them—that’s math, too.
“I don’t see this as a zero-sum game,” said Stipek, explaining there needn’t be a battle royale between Singapore and the United States, or anywhere else. The bottom line is to start early and often, with playful but purposeful lessons that stretch your child: “Kids are much more engaged and interested when they’re working at that outer edge” of their knowledge. This holds in math, English, science, or anything else.
Not long ago in the Financial Times, a legendary interviewer who’d recently become a math teacher and was struggling, asked the just-voted “best teacher in the world” about the level of student engagement with various subjects they’re taught. Interviewer: “I ask if it’s different in maths, but it turns out it isn’t.” Best teacher in the world: “At my school, children love maths.” They do, they can, if the topic is taught (as well as learned) with delight rather than anxiety. It’s up to us to make that happen.
This will take patience. In nationwide studies of classrooms, teachers spent 71 percent of their time talking (2 hours, 19 minutes a day) and 9 percent of the time listening to the children (18 minutes a day). But math, like every other subject, demands reception as well as broadcast, a to-and-fro that makes it natural and fascinating. And fun.
Great. So if we can make math playful and purposeful, and do it early, we can enhance performance. But things get real when you get to standardized tests, right? When should we start to focus not just on knowledge gathering and retention, a parent asked, but on the time it takes for a child to complete the inevitable standardized tests? The answer from Stipek: “Never.”
“Being fast is totally irrelevant,” she said. “This is not about speed. It’s about applying what you know in novel situations.” It’s about math as a fun but crucial building block for critical thinking in daily, ever-changing life—which sounds about as ancient as the Maya. But also, perhaps, brand new.
About the Author
Holly Finn, speechwriter and ex-journalist, is the former Marvels columnist of The Wall Street Journal, where she wrote about how science and technology are changing us. She was also the editor of How To Spend It at the Financial Times and is now on the communications team at Facebook. Best, she’s mom to Aves (East AM).
It takes a village—or a cross-disciplinary posse. In 2014, twelve top scholars from across academic disciplines and more than 40 doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows across the United States formed the DREME network. Their goal? Advance the field of early mathematics research and improve young children’s opportunities to develop math skills.
Today, Development and Research in Early Math Education (dreme.stanford.edu) is chaired by Deborah Stipek, professor and former dean of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford, and is going strong. DREME’s resources are a treasure trove for professional educators (not to mention parents!), including ours at Bing (prek-math-te.stanford.edu). From online teaching modules to articles, activities and videos, the site explains the nuances of early childhood mathematical learning, and provides thoughtfully designed, playful learning activities to encourage it.
Watch a video of Ben learning math using simple pirate coins, and some pretty advanced thinking. Expert written commentary running alongside gives an even greater understanding of the subtleties of preschooler reasoning. See Ethan talk about one-to-one correspondence, while demonstrating his understanding of the concept of fairness: one rock for each family member. (Yup, morals sneak in with math.) And check out Charlotte, from an impoverished New York City neighborhood, who puts the lie to limits on learning as she deftly figures out equations. Her interviewer, too, shows top-class skill: listening so well she gives the young girl that greatest of luxuries: time to think.
As Bing teachers will tell you, and the DREME site makes clear, teaching math is intimately connected to teaching everything else—and best done with imagination as well as intent. Herbert Ginsburg, a Columbia professor whose research is featured on DREME’s site, puts it even more plainly: “In a sense, math education is literacy education.”