20150905 THE CHANCE I MISSED:

I could have become a math hater. What a thought!

If you thought that my experience with two kids was not nearly enough to draw such conclusions, you are not getting me. I am not here to criticize US education or better it. I was just playing the game of my life, collecting the facts, deliberating, producing hypothesis and, most importantly, deciding what to do next. With my first American child I was afraid to do anything. I let his country raise him us much as I could. I could not teach him English. Not even baseball. I accepted the fact that I was good for nothing, and hoped that modern, advanced, professional and well-funded US school would compensate him for my failure to be an American dad.

I was more prepared and proactive with my second child. Still I missed the early signs, because I was not expecting another occurrence of the same problem. There was one important distinction: the boy was cocky, the girl was seriously scared, and this made me mad. When I realized that school did it again, I interfered very aggressively. I have no way to prove that it was me who turned the tide - you need statistics to make such claims - but the outcome was good.

I had one more child to waste or spare. She was three years old. Did I have to wait and see? I preferred to act, assuming, that US school was a factory of mathematical disabilities.

I had a powerful reason to believe it was. As I was piecing together their teaching, I realized I hated it. And then: being exposed to it slowly, day by day, I almost certainly would have become a math hater. I've never liked being taught this way.

The kids don't need numeracy any more? OK, teach them something equally or more challenging. Those who failed to understand multiplication, what can they learn at all? The hallmarks of reform math: "written and verbal communication, working in cooperative groups, making connections between concepts, and connections between representations" (quoted from Wikipedia) is simply not math, and not a substitute for it. Or "students' discovering their own knowledge and conceptual thinking" - come on, how much math, and especially conceptual thinking, can they discover on their own? Discovering such things, by the way, is not a knowledge at all. Like many pieces of reform math, it's a government-sponsored and enforced belief.

Most importantly, why do I have to assume that my kids are hopeless and allow teachers to scare them off mathematics? If school does not give them a chance to learn, I will. Who else?