They Learn Either Way

When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me
one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the
college – that my job was to teach people how to draw.
She stared at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they
forget?”
~Howard Ikemoto

When your daughter was four, she wanted to “help” in the kitchen. She wanted to do what you did–break the eggs, follow the recipe, get soap suds on the dishes. Did you let her help or did you get dinner cooked on time? Either way your daughter learned something: she learned how to crack an egg and she learned that cleaning up a broken egg on the floor is not the end of the world. Alternatively, she learned that it was more important to you to have a meal on time.

When your son was seven, he wanted to follow you around the yard picking up palm fronds. (Note to Northern readers: That’s what we do down here rather than shoveling snow.) Did you let him help, even though the job took twice as long? Either way your son learned something: that any chore can become a game if you have the right attitude. Or he might have learned that getting the yard picked up is more important than having fun with huge leaves.

When your children were in middle school, did you tell them to do their homework–even when you knew that homework was a series of endlessly repetitive, insipid worksheets seemingly designed to lessen your child’s love of reading specifically and more broadly her love of learning altogether? Don’t you wish you had played Parcheesi instead?

I am now going to subject my gentle readers–both of you; you know who you are–to a painless math lesson.

Which of the following is more likely to help your children understand simple probability and love learning math?

Column A:

1) A worksheet with rows of 1 + 2; 3 + 5; and 4 + 6 problems* arrayed like endless lines of soldiers marching meaninglessly across the page.

2) An equally insipid worksheet about rolling dice: “If you roll two dice, what is the probability of the sum of the dice being seven?**”

Note: Kids who already know what 3 + 5 is will have no trouble doing the worksheets. Kids who don’t know what 3 + 5 is will not be able to do the worksheets and won’t learn anything. Worksheets of this type are the very definition of “lose/lose.”

Column B:

Parcheesi

Rolling dice is intrinsically fun. (Don’t believe me? Go to Las Vegas. You’ll see adults–lots of them–rolling dice.) A kid who rolls a five and a three will determine what five plus three is with a lot more interest than that same kid doing a worksheet.

Probability is more fun to learn about when playing Parcheesi with your family than when doing a worksheet about dice. With any luck at all, your children will learn–after playing enough games of Parcheesi–that going to Las Vegas is a losing proposition. Playing Parcheesi with your kids is “win/win.”

Full disclosure: playing Parcheesi with the kids won’t get dinner done or the lawn cleaned up. But it may teach them how to add, how to make investment decisions, how to have fun with the family, and how to stay away from gambling.

How do our children ever forget that learning is fun? How do they move on from all those great experiences–helping with dinner, helping in the yard, playing board games with the family? Teachers and parents tell them to “sit down and shut up,” in short, to do work sheets.

Here’s an analogy that never appeared on the SAT: doing a math worksheet is to playing Parcheesi with your family as looking at a billboard of two people kissing is to making out with a loved one.

* Answers next week. 🙂

** One out of six. There are six ways to get a seven (1 and 6; 2 and 5; 3 and 4; 4 and 3; 5 and 2; and 6 and 1) out of 36 total possibilities. Six out of 36 reduced to one out of six.