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1. Do they seem to have been taught a different method for something you remember? Not a problem: get them to #teach you theirs, and encourage them to try to understand yours. See if you can spot similarities. Why do both work? Can you find reasons why one may be "better" than the other (there are no right answers here, but just being more familiar doesn't count)?
2. Are they doing something you don't recognise, or maybe you do recognise but never got the hang of it? Get them to #teach you as much of it as they can. Work together on it. Admit that you don't understand it YET but don't use this as an excuse to not engage. Learning new things is a positive thing. Not understanding something is a prerequisite for learning something new.
4. That's not just in front of your children, either: stop doing it with other adults. Better still, challenge other adults to stop doing it. If you want your child to succeed in #maths you MUST genuinely have a positive attitude towards it, not just fake it in front of them.
5. Model mathematical #positivity at all times - not just when they're doing homework! Ask #mathematical questions about everything (look for patterns in things & try to explain them, essentially).
5 : Well, that's how Feynman's father got Feynman to become Feynman, but that's also how my father (a very knowledgeable man with depths in many topics) discouraged us from learning anything from his troves of science... which as adults all my siblings regrets, but too late.
So I'd advise taking this advice with a grain of salt, actually.
@lienrag You advise _against_ modelling positivity towards mathematics?
No, I say that "ask questions about everything" has to be handled with care. There are times and ways when these questions will be received as entering a relation, and others when it will be just another chore.
I really liked your point 9 though.
I just tought of a better formulation : one chould care, when asking questions, to stay in a dialogic conception of education, and not to stray into a banking conception of education.
@lienrag I think I agree, though it's tough to get that across to the target audience in a tweet-sized block of text!
@lienrag I'd like to think that, read alongside the rest of the thread, the idea of learning & questioning together rather than rote practise is implicit.
It's not necessrily rote practise the problem, it's the ability to put oneself in the child's mindset.
Feynman's enjoyed his father's questions and the relation they provided; it's the joy and the relation that made the questions pedagogic, not the questions by themselves.
Again, I speak from experience, the same sorts of questions asked at the wrong moment are just discouraging the kid.
@lienrag yes, I'm trying to encourage co-discovery rather than "answer this question I already know the answer to".