"I can tell she doesn’t have a lot of confidence when it comes to math. It’s understandable, of course, if all she’s ever experienced with math is difficulty, failure, frustration... anyone would feel the same! One of the first hurdles we have to tackle is to build up her confidence and show her that she really is capable of understanding math. We have to show her that it’s not her fault! She’s just never been taught math in the way that will make sense to her. So we’re going to take some steps back to some earlier skills and start filling in those gaps. By teaching her those fundamentals in a way that makes the lightbulb go off... that’s when she’ll start to realize that she is capable, that she’s not broken, this is within reach. And that’s when progress can really begin to take off."

"So the first thing I noticed is that she’s definitely counting on her fingers. Really, though, using her fingers isn’t the real problem, the real problem is that she’s doing math one-at-a-time. That’s a really tedious and difficult way to do it! Whenever I see a student doing math one-at-a-time, whether it's on their fingers, using tally marks, dots, tapping, or even counting in their head, that tells me their entire understanding of math really only goes so far as knowing the order that the numbers come in, and that addition goes up and subtraction goes down. That’s essentially a kindergarten or early 1st grade understanding. What happens,though, is that they use that basic knowledge to COPE with any new skills introduced and to at least get through the work, like they’re in survival mode, but there’s no new learning happening. By third or maybe fourth grade, when multiplication and fractions become so important, the whole thing starts to fall apart and their coping strategy just doesn’t work anymore."

"We’ll also spend the last 15 minutes or so looking at his homework with him. Homework is NOT our first priority, but we do want to look at it with him primarily so that we can make the connections between what we’re working on in our Mathnasium work and what they’re doing in school. This helps us to have an immediate impact in his classwork even if we’re having to fill in gaps from two or three years ago. But the most progress and the most benefit is going to come from filling in those gaps and giving him a new way to approach math with new confidence, and it’s our Mathnasium work that will do that."

"The reality is, memorization only works consistently for a very small number of kids. We aren’t robots! Humans learn things conceptually, by making connections to past knowledge and understanding how the pieces fit together. The way math is being taught in elementary schools today actually has a similar goal to Mathnasium’s approach, they want the child to have a conceptual understanding of the skills, because that’s the foundation of problem solving and critical thinking in a way that memorization can never be. Unfortunately the schools aren’t really very good at achieving that goal, and it ends up just being a frustration for the parents, who can’t help their kids either. And of course it’s not the teachers’ fault, they are doing everything they can in the system they’re in, but a classroom of 20 to 30 kids makes it impossible to customize the learning for each individual. But that’s exactly what we’re able to do here at Mathnasium, and that’s what makes us so successful at it."

"Algebra is a big brick wall that a lot of students can’t break through. It’s the culmination of all of the skills that they learned until now. Prior to Algebra, they work through math sort of one topic at a time: fractions this week, decimals next month, multiplication first, division next... and a lot of students can piecemeal their way through one thing at a time. But once they get to Algebra they have to do all of those things at the same time as part of a brand new algebra skill! If they didn’t learn and retain those skills the first time, if they just sort of crammed for the test and then forgot it all, well now they’re in real trouble. They have to RE-LEARN the old skills, which the teacher doesn’t have time to re-teach, AND try to learn the new Algebra skills. It’s a recipe for disaster, and we see it over and over again."

"You know, the dynamic between parent and child, and between teacher and student, they’re very different. We get math teachers that bring their kids to us! Not because they can’t teach the math, but because the relationship just isn’t the same. Math really is taught differently now than it was 20 years ago, but an even bigger problem is that we all remember how we were doing math in high school, the quick algorithms and shortcuts. But you can’t START with the shortcut in elementary school, you have to learn the concept first, and that’s very different. And, of course, being able to DO math and being able to TEACH math are very different things."