Home School Online

While most homeschool  moms are thrilled to be teaching literature, they aren’t necessarily so excited about teaching math to their homeschooled students.

For many students, math produces feelings of dread and anxiety. In the classroom and on tests, kids fear being humiliated if they come up with the wrong answer or don’t know how to solve a math problem. They feel pressured by their teachers, parents, peers, and time constraints. Math anxiety is a common and sometimes serious problem: it causes students’ minds to go blank and their reasoning skills to be blocked by anxiety or even panic.

Use Technology to Overcome Math Anxiety

One way to present math in a non-threatening way is by using the computer. Time4Learning offers computer-based instruction that can help reduce or solve math anxiety.

Specifically:

• Lessons are student-paced, allowing students to repeat lessons as many times as they want until they’ve mastered a skill.
• Lessons are presented in a sequential order in small chunks. Each lesson within a chapter builds on the last, which helps reinforce skills.
• Students have access to one grade above and one grade below, allowing them to flip back to lessons from the previous year if they don’t fully understand a concept.
• Lessons are taught by animated characters in a highly visual, interactive manner. This helps bring the material to life and lets students engage with the material instead of memorizing it.
• Activities provide alternative explanations, so if a student answers a question incorrectly the first time, the activity then will explain it in a different way.

Technology can open doors in a way that textbooks can’t, by creating an interactive learning experience that brings the material to life. And since computers have endless patience and don’t judge, fear of humiliation becomes less of an issue, and a can-do state of mind replaces resistance.

eady to end math anxiety?

When your kids develop a solid math foundation, you’ll be amazed to see the grades improve and the stress disappear. You might even hear that math is fun!

But, when a student has weak math basic skills, math appears confusing and difficult. You’ll likely hear no enthusiasm to learn math or that math is boring. You might even notice that your child starts to develop “math anxiety” and their confidence suffers.

Time4Learning.com is the answer. Build confidence and success in core reading and math skills for kids, PreSchool to Eighth Grade.

Henry Cate’s homeschool blog just reminded me of one of my pet peeves, the totally messed up status of higher ed in this country.  I’ve talked before about how parents really don’t seem to care or understand much about education, it’s the accreditation that they focus on.  Colleges get more and more expensive and I feel, less and less academic. The LA Times Article says:

At Pomona College, a top-flight liberal arts school, this year’s sticker price for tuition and fees is a hefty $38,394 (not including room and board). Even after adjusting for inflation, that comes to 2.9 times what Pomona was charging a generation ago, in 1980.This kind of massive tuition increase is the norm….

The article goes on to point out that the money goes to tenured professors, administration, and sports. Currently, 629 schools have football teams — 132 more than in 1980. And all but 14 of them lose money, including some with national names.

The travesty of high tuition is that most of the extra charges aren’t going for education. Administrators, athletics and amenities get funded, while history departments are denied new assistant professors. A whole generation of young Americans is being shortchanged, largely by adults who have carved out good careers in places we call colleges.

Reading to do….Andrew Hacker  & Claudia Dreifus, “Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids and What We Can Do About It.”

How about some innovation so we design a first rate college experience for under $20K?