IF tutoring has taught me anything, it’s that despite our pleas (parents, educators) to children about how much math they should study and learn, Math as a subject really just is another thing that competes for a child’s time. This makes sense, given that the list of possible distractions now available to humanity has only multiplied (I’ll spare you the mentions of what your kids are wasting time with or ruining their minds upon).
We just sound utopian to these kids at best. Overbearing at worst.
To be fair, I say it too. I tell kids to study. But most of my time outside of tutoring I spend putting the burden of proof on me. To a child, I need to show that this stuff has some real teeth. And it’s not just the career doors that it opens up. Archimedes didn’t do it for the career, but even he had a nice one.
So during a brainstorm of putting the burden of proof upon myself to justify math, I realized that I’ve never heard anyone in education ask this question:
How do we force “Math” to compete with itself for a child’s time and attention?
From there, I realized I’d have to boil math down into something far more compressed than the typical high- and middle- school curricula, bastions of practice examples of important (but mundane and largely uninspired) methods on repeat. There is so much wasted time there, as time gets lost (or more importantly, mis-targeted) in this nightly Procrustean Error.
Besides: if math is going to survive as a studyable discipline in schools, it has to compete for our attention: otherwise, the kids will figure out that the computer really can just do all the work, and even show all the steps (or just look it up on Yahoo Answers, a tutoring website subscription, or some other cache of solutions). Most of my students now use these methods, often ad-hoc, haphazardly. After all, it gets the job done, eh?
Seeing these patterns recur in my clients from 2005 through 2020 helped me to form this more precise version of the same original question:
How Do We Condense a Year’s Worth of Math Into One Month?
So that launched the project.
Then, as time went on, I realized that I had so many courses, in so many formats, that I’d be wasting all my time if I didn’t make these courses good. I mean, like, seriously good. Like an inspired leap forward for math education, and all that. Even though condensing math courses into a month’s worth of lessons and homework would take a lot of thinking to do, to make those lessons really absorb, I was going to need to write and deliver math in a way that’s much easier to relate to.
Math must become, perhaps not catchy and cool–which fits neither its purpose nor historical pedigree–but rather truly deep: a way to see reality that, historically, has produced all sorts of leverage or clarity to those possessing the vision. Astronomy, Chemistry, Physics, and their Applied Sciences all have their origin in this kind of mathematical exploration, a conversation concrete and philosophical at the same time.
So that got me motivated, to answer this more precise version of the same original question
How Do We Condense a Year’s Worth of Math Into 100 Problems
Thus even the homework had to feel like “high conversation”: problems that teach you as you explore them, revealing unexpected ways of seeing things you thought you once knew as merely physical.
While any Math in a Month tutoring programs customize around the skills and needs of our clients, I still employ tactics from the curriculum that my books and online lessons are based upon:
- 20 lessons total. Two cycles of ten, with each cycle following a theme to the next level of advancement in Math skill (and advancing years up the curricular scale).
- Max 2 hours of math per day. That’s that.
- 5 Homework Problems per lesson. 100 Homework Problems for the entire year.
And the rest has just been taking the time to craft the product. I hope you enjoy it. It represents the summa cum laude of a lifetime of my work, from the earliest ages of counting, thru the decades of high school and college math tutoring I now make a living at.