As a math tutor, I'm routinely summoned by frantic parents, "My son/daughter has a big test this week....can you please come to help them study?" Sure. That's my job - or at least one of them. But all too often I'm disgusted by the test material. Schools and "certified" teachers torture these poor kids with [...]
Wowsers! (Read the graphic above.) All my math students (and their parents!) whine that the questions I give them are too hard....that they can't do them. I fire back, "I'm not hard....your school teachers are just TOO EASY." Most any adult will tell you that they learned the most in life when they were thrown [...]
Recently, on one of the forums I read, a new homeschooling mother waxed confused that the second, sequential math book she bought was front-loaded with "review" - with a whole lot of stuff they had just covered in the previous book. Veteran homeschoolers laughed because we've long since known that usually the beginning 15% of [...]
While I've been casually *teaching* my whole life and directly instructing my own children for the past 5 years, it's now just about a year since I started teaching math privately for pay. I wouldn't say that I went into it with any preconceived notions but have nonetheless learned a whole lot and quite frankly, [...]
John, age 8.5, just hit his one year mark/anniversary since he started Khan Academy's math section. As you can see, he's completed 382 of the 432 skills on the website. There used to be about 300 skills, but Khan keeps adding more and more! In fact, John was most displeased the other day when he [...]
John is chugging along with Khan Academy. As you can see, now he's completed 320 of the 415 *skills*. If one goes too slow with this, well, that's not good in its own right, not an effective way to learn math, but also he or she will fall behind because Khan keeps adding skills! Two [...]
I just signed my daughter up for IXL Math, an online math application. Ads for it are everywhere but that's only because it's a little expensive ($10 a month) and because the people that run the website are smart enough to let affiliates market it for them. First of all, my 8.25 year old son [...]
I'm a former competitive mathlete; I currently teach accelerated math classes to some of the brightest kids here on Long Island; I work with individual students for *school math* tutelage and for SAT preparation; my son started algebra at age 5 and calculus at age 7; so it goes without saying that I know more [...]
More than a few people have told me they are having problems doing Khan Academy... So I made another screen-capture tutorial. Hopefully from the video others who haven't even tried it yet can see how terrific the PRACTICE section is. Now Khan is a flash website AND it experiences very, very high traffic. So yes, [...]
Wow, right? One of the cool things about mental math is that it's easy to practice. Recently I've taken to asking him to square numbers while I'm driving in the car. Of course another cool thing....is the outrageous MIND EXPANSION it cultivates. Now go buy or borrow the book and get started! Also....if you want [...]
