Meet Math for Love

It's always a pleasure to introduce our clients and readers to the educators, psychologists, learning specialists, and other practitioners we love! Today we're delighted to introduce you to Dan Finkel, Co-Founder of Math for Love. Dan talked to us about how to foster a love of math at every age, how math and creativity go hand in hand, and how you can help your child learn math even when you don't know all the answers.

Dan Finkel

KIRAN: Tell us about Math for Love!

DAN: Math for Love is a company I founded with my wife in 2010, devoted to transforming how math is taught and learned. We’re tiny, and that serves us: we can turn our attention to just about anything that we think will positively impact mathematics education or outreach. Since then we’ve: taught math and math pedagogy to teachers and students; developed summer and supplemental curricula; created math board games, visual flash cards, and a children’s book; hosted a math/art show; and written numerous puzzles for the New York Times, TED-Ed and others. It’s pretty exciting, because anything we think that could make a difference, we can just try to do.

KIRAN: Let’s start with some nuts and bolts! What advice do you have for parents helping their kids with math homework?

DAN: In his book Arithmetic, Paul Lockhart wrote that “adults tend to confuse familiarity with understanding.” I think the key is to get out of the mode of “I need to get my kid to get the right answer as quick as possible” and also away from feeling like you, as the adult, need to know the answer right away. If you can model curiosity and comfort with not immediately knowing, that’s a much better way to help.

So your kid says, “I don’t know how to do this,” and you can say, “I don’t know either - let’s see if we can figure it out together!” Or: “I’d love to help. Let’s see if we can understand the question. And then maybe you can tell me if you remember anything from class.” What to avoid is panic. If you see something unfamiliar, it doesn’t mean it’s wrong or bad. Get yourself in a nonjudgmental, curious frame of mind.

[For more great tips on how to help your child with math assignments at home, have a look at Math For Love’s blog post “Math Conversations at Home.”]

KIRAN: Is there anything parents and other adults can do for kids who feel uninspired or limited by their in-school math curriculum?

DAN: It depends a lot on the age. For kids whose math identities haven’t hardened into place yet, I think board games and card games are enormously useful at home. Games combine fun, play, and choice with the repetition that helps kids sharpen their skills. (I think I was in fifth grade when I realized that playing cribbage all the time had made me better at adding single and double digit numbers than anyone else in the class.)

For older kids, you need to address the issue. If kids are having trouble with specific skills and that’s holding them back, then doing some kind of program that addresses that can help. If they just don’t get the point of bothering with math, then looking to books or videos that share some of the excitement and beauty might help. Books by Simon Singh like Fermat’s Enigma or The Code Book were thrilling to me in high school. There are great stories to tell from math history! And YouTube channels like VSauce, Veritasium, and Numberphile can be great for sharing the excitement of specific mathematical ideas.

KIRAN: Lots of people talk about how math is not taught "well," especially in elementary school. What do you think is meant by that?

DAN: I suspect people say that for different reasons. If you think about how math was taught when we were young, it was pretty obviously flawed. And by that, I’m not even pointing to any particular technique or pedagogy. There’s just a cultural understanding that most people don’t like math, or are afraid of math, or were hurt by math. Math anxiety is widespread. You generally don’t talk about math in detail in public without warning your audience first. Clearly, something went wrong.

Today, I think that people talk about math being not taught well because either they see it being taught in an unfamiliar way, or because they see their own kids having a bad time with it. The unfamiliar part shouldn’t, perhaps, bother us if the familiar way messed up our generation in the first place. I think there are some really positive steps forward in how math is being taught right now, and sometimes there’s pushback that comes too quickly. On the other hand, not every innovation is being applied well, in my view, and there are still plenty of math classes that aren’t succeeding in teaching kids math well.

The fundamental problem, I think, is that there’s not a widespread understanding of what good math teaching looks like. Most teachers didn’t have positive experiences with math as students, or if they did, those experiences were rare, or worked for them but not the others in the class. You essentially need everyone to get a taste of true mathematical beauty and power and elegance. Everyone needs to take one in-person class with a great teacher, and see the scope of the subject. But getting to that place is incredibly challenging, and even after you have a sense of what’s possible, it still take work to move your own teaching from what was the status quo when you were a student to something more.

KIRAN: In your experience, are there different kinds of math learners?

DAN: The notion of learning styles has been debunked at this point. Thinking of particular students as, say, a visual learner or an auditory learning or a kinesthetic learner is almost certainly a waste of effort, and possibly harmful. That said, I think every student has natural strengths and weaknesses when it comes to learning math. Some have good memories, some are good at connecting disparate ideas, some ask great questions; some can handle the technicalities well, others mess up the details but have a clearer sense of the big picture. But whatever your sense of the student, you never want to use it as an excuse to avoid them learning in a certain fashion. Rather, you want to help them address their weaknesses and develop their strengths. And also, certain teaching tools, like good visuals, are just about universally helpful.

KIRAN: Let’s talk for a moment about what to do for kids who love math. First of all, how do you even identify that your child may be predisposed to love math if you yourself don’t feel comfortable or familiar with the subject?

DAN: It’s hard. I think you may need to recognize that you’ve been traumatized by your math education, and that it’s not your fault. One of the great pieces to check out is Paul Lockhart’s A Mathematician’s Lament, which will help you see that the problem isn’t with you, but with the way you were taught. (Though I should warn that it’s quite a radical document, and a little short on solutions.) Another good thing to check out is my TED Talk.

KIRAN: As a teenager, I was lucky enough to have a mom who supported my love of literature by giving me books she thought I would like (and extra lucky that she knew my taste very well). What can the parent of a math-lover do to support and nurture them in a similar casual way? Any tips specifically for parents or other adults who aren’t math-lovers themselves?

DAN: I mentioned some books and youtube channels above. The Mathical book awards are a good place for books for all ages. Another great resource for games is Kent Haines gamesforyoungminds.com website, which has recommendations of good math games by age.

I think the main thing is for grownups to do a little reflecting on what they feel about math and where it came from, and pay attention to where there may be math in what they do that goes beyond arithmetic. There’s mathematics in humor, in metaphor, in shape, in structure. Being able to be numerically literate means you can open a newspaper and read a graph, double a recipe, follow an argument, and deal with uncertainty. Find something that you’re interested in, read a pop math book, go check out some puzzles—open yourself up to being surprised by the subject.


KIRAN: At Math for Love, you talk a lot about the relationship between playfulness and math learning. Tell us a little bit about that.

DAN: The best mathematicians I knew in grad school were the ones who could play with complex and potentially technical ideas. When you’re playing, you tend to be relaxed, creative, and curious. You make different kinds of choices and see what happens. And your play belongs to you in some fundamental way. That’s exactly how we want kids to interact with mathematics.

In some more fundamental way, play is evolution’s solution to the problem of how to create intelligent, flexible animals. Play is a kind of engine of learning that’s hardwired into us. It’s truly one of the least used, most useful tools we have when it comes to teaching math.

KIRAN: That segues nicely into a question we had about very young learners. Lots of attention has been given to helping parents understand how to support literacy in young children (reading, telling stories, singing songs and rhyming). How can we bring the same focus to math? Should we?

DAN: I think the answer is yes. I’ve been working with an organization called earlyfamilymath.org to try to provide resources for the analogous campaign for math. I think the fundamental point is to play. Probably the line I’m most famous for is: “what books are to reading, play is to mathematics.” Beyond that, I think noticing the math around you, talking about it, and wondering about it are incredibly powerful for young kids. 

KIRAN: We all know about the beauty of the local library–are there similar locations or resources for families who want to nurture or enrich their children’s math education? What resources does Math for Love provide for those families?

DAN: We have our games, our lesson library (mainly for teachers and homeschoolers), our puzzle page, and our blog. For example, here’s an article I wrote about doing math outside on walks. All recommended! We also produced a ton of free stuff with earlyfamilymath.org including math readers, puzzles of the week, and games for focused practice. Some other great resources to check out are mathhappens.org, jrmf.org, mathanywhere.org, and our “websites we like” page.

I hope that in the future libraries will also offer great math resources and experiences! We’re looking to pilot some programs now.

KIRAN: Let’s circle back to formal math instruction for a moment. Singapore math, Chicago math, TERC math, Eureka math… so many math methods! What's helpful about those structured approaches and what might they be missing?

DAN: I tend to be a bit textbook-agnostic. There’s something to recommend all of these approaches, and almost any program or textbook you use will have its benefits. Just having a structure and a plan is useful. But they tend to be missing something too. Typically, curricula fail to invite students into the subject as the owners and agents of it. There should be a sense of autonomy and power; students should be invited to make choices that actually matter. It’s a rare curriculum that does this at all, to say nothing of doing it on a regular basis. This is one of the reasons we put energy into building a supplemental curriculum. Our feeling is that if kids could experience that sense of agency even occasionally, it would help the rest of their math experience fall into place.

KIRAN: Zooming out a bit, what, if anything, do you think AI means for math learning and math education?

DAN: I think that remains to be seen. From the student/cheating point of view, automatic math solvers have actually been around for a while now. More and more they’re going to force people to decide what they actually want students to learn in math class, and why. Do you need to teach kids mostly technical calculating protocols that computers will be better at? What’s the actual goal? On the positive side, AI might enable better interactive math learning tools. I tend to be skeptical of computer-based solutions to education problems, though. And the younger the kid, the less they should be learning on the computer anyway. 

KIRAN: You’ve already given us so much wonderful information that can be applied to all math learners. Do you have any additional tips for homeschoolers in particular?

DAN: There’s such a range of things you can do and reasons to homeschool in math. I’d probably put a plug in for the Beast Academy books. 

KIRAN: Thank you so much for chatting with us! Where can folks find you and the amazing resources Math for Love provides to kids and families?

DAN: Thanks! We’re at mathforlove.com.

Our free lesson library is at mathforlove.com/lessons.

Our games are available at mathforlove.com/games, and at Amazon and selected stores.

Our puzzle page is at mathforlove.com/puzzles.

Our blog is mathforlove.com/blog.

Early Family Math has even more resources at earlyfamilymath.org.

I also highly recommend signing up on our mailing list if you’d like more resources and ideas: https://mathforlove.com/join-our-mailing-list/