The Mathnasium Philosophy:
Children don't hate math
They hate being confused and intimidated by math
With understanding comes passion.
And with passion comes growth - a treasure is unlocked.
(Source: mathnasium.com)
Do your kids hate math? Well, they don't. They may think they do, but what they really hate is "being confused and intimated by math."
That's what Larry Martinek (pictured at right, teaching), the creator of the Mathnasium Method, believes, and after talking to him, I'm inclined to believe it as well. Larry was a math teacher for 30 years, so he knows quite a bit about how difficult it can be to get kids to learn even the most basic mathematical concepts. At one point in his career, he decided to start doing things differently: teach math so that it makes sense to the students, rather than to the teachers. Radical idea, right? It's so basic, but somehow not obvious at all. He starts with skills as basic as counting, and uses seemingly simple concepts to show children how they can start solving math problems on their own. Even calculus is just an advanced form of counting. (As someone is something other than a math person, I'm going to take his word for it.)
Peter Markovitz and David Ullendorff had an idea for a chain of math centers, but they were businessmen, not teachers. Larry had become known in Los Angeles as "The Math Guy", so the pair approached him. At first they were skeptical, but after watching him work with students and seeing the incredible results, they committed wholeheartedly to what is now called the Mathnasium Method.
At Mathnasium centers worldwide, students are able to "drop in" whenever they like, although the sessions are usually an hour or more. The company must be doing something right, because there are now over 200 locations, not only in the United States but as far away as Thailand. (For locations, visit mathnasium.com.) I spoke to Larry about Mathnasium and his philosophies about how children learn math. Here is part one of excerpts from our conversation; part two will be posted next week.
Brett Singer: Tell me a little about your background
Larry Martinek: I've been a mathematics teacher in the LA area for the last 34 years. I started teaching inner city middle school in 1974 [and I] made a transition because I realized most of the kids I was working with were significantly behind grade level and the work that I was doing with them was all catch up work, trying to fix them instead of teaching them grade-level material. So I got involved in teaching teachers how to get kids off to a good start so by the time they got to middle school they were actually ready for middle school work. That work became so successful that I spent the better part of the last 18 years as a teacher trainer, and as a crisis teacher – I go into situations that are very difficult [and] straighten them out.
B: Why do you think the kids were not working at their grade level?
L: There are a number of reasons [for that]. Probably the most significant is that most elementary teachers were liberal arts major and were not math or science majors in college and there are very few classes in college on how to teach math. So when kids get into the classroom, the teachers work pretty much directly from the book...if the kids have difficulty, the teachers don't have the techniques [to] get them up to speed in a hurry. That is, during the school year that they're in. So if they leave a particular grade with gaps, say, a third grader, the fourth grade teacher has got to teach fourth grade curriculum and typically doesn't have time to go back and [repeat] the third grade material. That happens all the way up and down the line, and as a result the kids end up getting into middle school with significant gaps in their knowledge.
B: Are there classes in how to teach topics other than math?
L: There are definitely extensive classes in the teaching of reading. But since most teachers have a degree in liberal arts, they pretty well cover their liberal arts subjects in their other courses, if not directly how to teach them, in the content of the courses, whereas they did not take nearly as many courses in the content of math or the teaching of math. This is true also by the way of science; science teachers have a similar complaint. Science teachers lack a deep background of knowledge in the elementary years; they know what science [the students] are capable of learning but the system doesn't prepare them to deliver it.
B: How long has Mathnasium been around?
L: I met the two partners in April of 2002. We opened the first Mathnasium in October 1st of 2002. I ran that for 14 months and in January of 2004 we started franchising. We just opened our 200th franchise worldwide. We have about 140 domestic franchises and about 60 international. Because I discovered that my kids were so far behind in those early years, I started writing my own material. Being in middle school, we didn't have material for my seventh graders, [who] were really developmentally third and fourth graders. And what they needed was material that reflected where they were so that I could bridge the gap. If I taught them strictly seventh grade material but they were only fourth grade in maturity, there's little chance they're going to understand what's going on. Since '74, I haven't stopped creating material and that is the body of material that we use at Mathnasium.
In the middle of all that I became a father and at about age 4 it became obvious that my son was logically precocious and by 5 it was obvious that he was going to be a very strong math student. He started asking me things at age 5 and 6 that were way beyond his years, so I had to come up with different ways to explain things and in the process of doing that I created an entire new generation of material that took the standard math ideas and rephrased them in ways that make sense to kids. In fact that gave rise to what is now Mathasium's corporate mission statement, which is "To teach children math in a way that makes sense to them". That phrase "to them" is so important. For many, many years my son and I wrote material to the point where we had about 6,000 pages of curriculum that started Mathnasium, and we've added several thousand more in the years since we've been open. We have this very substantial library of material that we use to help kids, kids that need to get caught up, some kids that need to keep up, and some kids that want to get ahead. And we have the material to help all of them.
The Mathnasium method...requires that our instructors have multiple ways of explaining things, so that if the child doesn't get something one way, we can explain it to them a different way until we can hit on something that triggers something in the kid, so we can know that we've actually transmitted the information.
B: Who goes to Mathnasium?
L: Our core program is from second grade to SAT I, which would be roughly 10th or 11th grade depending on the student. We always have a pre-K through first grade program, and also a higher math program, which is algebra II, trig and pre-calculus. (Note: the grade level for these courses varies, but is typically 11th or 12th grade.) The main body of our enrollment is between 3rd grade and 8th grade, those very critical early and middle years. For so many kids, that's the make or break time...if they learn the foundations of math well at that point, they're going to find that math is actually fun as they move through the years, instead of growing up to be one of the people who go off and say "I hate math".
B: If a kid says to you, I hate math, what would you say to them?
L: As they say very boldly on our web site, it turns out that kids and adults really don't hate math. What they hate is the frustration, the intimidation, the embarrassment that is associated with not being able to do the math. If a kid says they hate math, I'm not going to tell them something. What I'm going to do is sit down and teach them something. In the Mathnasium process we do a very in depth assessment of kids, and from that assessment we're able to figure out exactly what the kid needs next. If I can teach that student the next thing they need to learn, the universal response is "Wow. That's cool." Because for many kids this will be the first time in years that they've actually understood what's going on in a math situation. Think about it: a kid who is two or three years behind has not experienced success in the classroom in many, many years. And when you give them that initial success, it turns out within the first two or three visits that almost every kid who comes in with that "I hate math" attitude, that all dissolves when we give them that feeling of success that comes from actually accomplishing the next thing they need to learn. It's really quite an amazing process. We get phone calls from teachers, parents, saying, "What did you do to my kid?" All of a sudden their attitude has changed, and the reason their attitude has changed is that they've been experiencing, finally, success. Once the kid emotionally buys into the process, we have a great chance of succeeding and getting the kid caught up to where they should be.
B: So there is an element of this that can breed confidence?
L: Absolutely. Success breeds confidence. The kids don't feel confident because they haven't been successful. That's the most common experience I've had with kids.
B: Is there spillover into other areas of academics?
L: Absolutely. All the way back in Plato's time, Plato said, "Did you ever notice that those that are quick with computation tend to pick up everything else quickly?" When the kids get the confidence, they get this can-do attitude, they benefit more from their time in their math class, and it definitely spills over into their other classes. For some kids, all of a sudden, they really feel they can do it.
Next week, more from the interview, including how No Child Left Behind may not be the best thing for kids, how a recent government study recommended methods very similar to Mathnasium's, and how math is important to many professions, such as carpenters and plumbers.
image: Mathnasium
