A Taste Of My Math Book

Along with providing invaluable feedback on the early draft of No Kid of Ours is Failing at Math (How Parents Can Help), Vicki was also on the lookout for material within its pages that she felt would be suitable as back cover blurbs. I'd asked her to keep an eye out for paragraphs or small sections that she thought would provide a good hook for the reader if displayed on the back of the book. To her credit, she came up with three of them, and I thought now would be a good time to share them with my blogging audience, keeping in mind that the book is in draft form and anything shown below may still change.

From the 1st chapter, entitled "Why You Should Read This Book", comes:

• As a reader of this book, you’re more likely to fall into the “sheer terror” category when it comes to thinking about high school Math than you are to join me in finding it “quite thrilling.” I get that. The good news is that this book is written for any parent, whether they love Math or cringe at the very mention of it. In fact, I think that it’s entirely possible to create an environment in which your children will grow up to be very comfortable with Math… even if you never have been! But it probably won’t just happen on its own. There’s much work for you to do to make that a reality, and that’s what this book is all about. And if you do your job really well, then by the time your children hit high school Math they’ll be just fine, whether you can help them or not.

Next we get a couple possibilities from Chapter 4, which is titled "Getting Smarter, In A Flash":

• But the loss of marks due to silly mistakes such as getting the wrong result when multiplying two numbers isn’t even the whole story. Compounding the problem is the fact that kids who don’t have the basics down by the time the Math gets harder end up spending ridiculous amounts of time doing what should have taken a fraction of the time. That disadvantage shows up both with homework and on tests.
• Kids who are slow at adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, for example, will naturally have more Math homework because every question simply takes them longer. I’m certainly not anti-homework, by any means, but I also don’t believe that it does any good whatsoever to have a student working that slowly. It wears the child down, turns him off Math, and can even encourage him to skip some of the assigned questions if he thinks that he can get away with it.

If nothing else, those little snippets should at least provide you with some sense of what the book is all about.