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By Mark Batho
My wife and I recently hired a math tutor for my first-grade son.
This might not surprise you, until you learn that I am actually a professional math tutor myself.
Many of the students whom I work with have parents who are perfectly capable of teaching math, but when it comes to
helping our own children understand even the simplest math concepts, we math tutor parents can find ourselves at a loss.
The relationship between child and parent is so complex that I rarely see great success when adding "math tutor" to the
mix.
In more than 20 years tutoring, I have seen many students fall behind in math for a variety of reasons.
Often it's because weak foundations make subsequent topics a struggle.
Parlez-vous math?
Just like learning a foreign language, math builds on foundations.
Languages come with vocabulary. Math comes with its own vocabulary "math facts" such as times tables and certain
key formulas, like $C=2\pi (r).
Math also has sets of rules that must always be at the forefront of students' minds, such as fraction and exponent rules. If
a student is weak on foundations, that is where the time must be spent. In a language, there's no sense learning how to
speak in advanced tenses until one can speak in the present tense. The same is true of attempting advanced math
concepts without having the basics down.
trajectory for their next class. Students are often over-confident in their abilities and are willing to take on that AP class,
especially if all their friends are taking it.
The danger is that when a class teaching rate outpaces student learning rate, almost nothing is retained, as kids tend
to shut down. Students then fall further and further behind and start to dislike a subject that might have once been their
favorite.
Everyone eventually reaches a place in their education where math stops coming easily to them.
Math had always come pretty easily to me until 11th grade, when I fell behind in an advanced class. My dad and I decided
I would switch to the regular 11th grade math class. After doing so, I started to do well again and went on to succeed in
"regular" 12th grade math, and earned an A on British Columbia's Comprehensive Final Exam.
Mark P. Batho has over 20 years of teaching and tutoring experience. Mark received his Master of Civil Engineering from
MIT in 1999 and worked as civil engineer for several years, before returning full time to his passion for teaching. He taught
at the University of Washington from 2004 - 2010 in Civil Engineering and taught the University of Washington's School of
Engineering Summer Math Academy from 2009 2012. He is the founder of Fusion Math, a math study center.