How To Turn Your Child Into A Math Wiz!

There are no excuses today for any parent not to help their children with homework whether it’s math or English. Long gone are the days when a child would come home and parents were at a loss when asked to help with math homework. Not today! This has been made possible by online learning sites that abound the internet and available at the click of a mouse.

Parents freaking out, when it comes to helping their children with their homework is, unfortunately, still a common occurrence. Despite the availability of hundreds of sites, many of which are free, it remains a mystery why only a tiny percentage (less than 3% in a recent survey, source Pro-Games Corp Feb 2010 Parent’s Survey) of parents would be bothered.
Private tutoring has been the way children were given the extra help needed to boost their understanding of math, the dreaded subject, which has always counted towards securing better places in universities. Despite the high hourly rates tutors charge parents have no other option as it is the only ‘way out’.

Since the eighties, places for universities became more competitive. Some companies introduced audio cassettes, which contained pre-recorded lessons, as an alternative to a tutor. This was followed by video cassettes in the late eighties. Due to the upfront cost between $4000 and $10,000 these programs were not affordable to many, despite themselves.

Today, such types of programs abounds, but made more affordable. It has been the ‘gold rush’ in the last five years. Many educational companies shot up like mushrooms after the rain. Most of the educational sites have been created to do just one thing: make a killing selling on line education.

In their rush, they forgot one thing: no thought was given to the users and their specific needs. When it comes to learning, everyone is different. It’s not enough just to go to a site and get a chapter, read it, or watch it (depending on the medium), and ‘eureka!’ It unfortunately doesn’t work that way. Still, most of the sites online today are doing just that. Why, because they have been created to simply ‘sell’ and make money.

With today’s technology, it can be a child’s play to shoot a few lessons on a particular topic and post them on a site and get paid for viewing it. Most of the sites I have reviewed, and I have visited and previewed quite a few, all have one thing in common, they aren’t systematic. They show or teach a lesson assuming that the viewer ‘knows’ or has the basics to understand what is being taught.

The reason, in most cases, why one seeks help on line is not to get a quick fix solution but to make sure that principles are understood to the extent that one is able to solve problems related to such topics all by one self. The aim is supposed to be to learn and being able to apply what is being learnt. In two words: complete understanding. This can only be achieved by going back to the basics and revise all lessons related to the problem topic up to what is being taught currently. Not many sites are geared to fulfill such requirements.

It is a fact that nothing beats the classroom teacher when it comes to understanding. In a 35 to 40 minutes classroom period a teacher makes use of the whiteboard, uses examples to elaborate the lesson being taught in order to ensure understanding. Still, at the end of the period there are many who would not understand or wouldn’t be bothered to ask questions due to peer pressure. Those are the kids who find it hard to cope with their homework and have to seek help from parents or friends. They manage to get over that hurdle once, twice but what about later when the lessons get harder and there’s no one who is able to help? Or, when they hit the next lesson which is normally related to what wasn’t fully understood… It all starts then to snowball, and six months down the tract, it’s all too much hard work; and as a result they give up.

This needn’t happen. Wouldn’t it be great if those kids could go back in time, six months, a year or even two years, and ‘see’ their teachers teaching them the topics and lessons they haven’t fully grasped, work their way up to the present time and tackle the homework they are currently doing, and all this could be achieved within three to six short months?

By: Richard Pidial

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Richard Pidial is a teacher educator & CEO of www.mathlearningsite.com Have a peek now on how it all started and watch some free lessons that would give you an insight on learning teaching math online.