By Bonnie Rochman, TIME
For many parents with young children, the bedtime routine is a firmly
entrenched system involving a warm bath, a good book, a kiss and a hug. Toying
with that equation borders on sacrilege, but Laura Overdeck thinks it’s time to
make room for a math problem alongside the nightly story.
In February, the high-tech consultant-turned-stay-at-home mom launched
Bedtime Math, a website devoted to creating the sort of cachet for
arithmetic—before the final tuck-in—that reading has. “You hear so many people
say, I’m just not good at math,” she says. “But you never hear people say, I’m
just not good at reading.”
Overdeck began by emailing about a dozen friends a word problem with
varying levels of difficulty, ranging from calculations appropriate for their
preschoolers to upper-elementary students. Within a week, her list of
subscribers had tripled. Nine months later, 20,000 people have signed up to
receive the free daily emails. “It’s just exploded,” says Overdeck.
That’s heartening news for educators who bemoan the state of science,
technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in the U.S. In 2009, American
teens ranked 31st place in math and 23rd in science, behind Asian powerhouses
Japan and China and European countries including Poland and Slovakia in a
global skills survey.
Bedtime Math isn’t the only program trying to turn the tide. Let’s Play
Math encourages mathematical game-playing. Living Math extolls the beauty of
arithmetic to parents and teachers. Math for Love offers professional
development for teachers on how to spice up their approach to numbers and
introduces kids—including my own—to the joy of math. For a parent whose palms
grew sweaty just walking into geometry class, realizing that math could be
something other than anxiety-provoking was nothing short of groundbreaking.
“Through games, math becomes something that kids do for fun and not some awful
arduous task,” says Math for Love co-founder Dan Finkel. “Our goal is to change
the culture around mathematics.”
Overdeck, who studied astrophysics at Princeton University, first
recognized the need to incorporate math into kids’ lives once she realized that
she and her husband, who majored in math at Stanford University, were doing
something with their daughter that none of their upper-middle-class friends were:
math, starting from her second birthday. “In our house, math is a fun thing
that kids seek out,” says Overdeck. “Everyone knows they should read a book,
but nobody knows they should be doing math with their kids. People don’t do
math recreationally yet all the politicians are scratching their heads,
wondering why we’re falling behind educationally.”
The challenge is even greater for girls; women make up 48% of the
workforce, but represent just 24% of STEM workers. Overdeck, 42, can see for
herself the point at which she says little girls start to believe they’re no
good at calculations. “Every email I get about a child who has a math block
comes from a parent with an 8-year-old girl,” she says. “A lot of studies show
teachers are not comfortable with math, and teachers are mostly women.”
She’s trying to change the paradigm, promoting the math problems she
writes to teachers and principals in addition to parents. She’ll often draw on
the interests of her own three children—ages 4, 7 and 9—so there are frequent
calculations about stuffed animals or vehicles.
Making math engaging and applicable to daily life is important when it
comes to connecting with children, says Overdeck. When kids go to school, they
are often bored by dry worksheets when they should be exposed to fun, real-life
examples of the way math works in everyday life. After Hurricane Sandy, for
example, one day’s problem challenged preschoolers to identify which license
plate numbers entitled New Jersey residents (Overdeck is one) to fill up on
rationed gas on odd-numbered days. Older kids were asked: “If 1 pump can fuel a
car in 6 minutes and the station has 4 pumps, how many cars can get filled in
an hour? Bonus: We saw another car line that had 100 cars in it. How long will
it take the last car in that line to get gas?”
(P.S. Mom and Dad, if you’re struggling to unravel that gas-station
riddle, the answers are: 40 cars and 2 ½ hours.)
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