The Words We Live By

     When raising children one happens to get into a rut of mantras that you tend to say over and over again. For most parents, this is some form of "Because I said so" in terms of motivation. I don't believe in extrinsic motivation as much as I believe in intrinsic motivation. Most of the time what we say in my house is "No Excuses, Find Solutions." This works on so many levels, and eliminates (hopefully) the need for lying in order to avoid punishment or avoidance. But today we came across a problem that this motto can't account for entirely since we really were working on solutions to... math problems.
    My daughter has inherited this odd family gene where we can DO math, but we can't show or explain HOW we do it. Sure we get the right answer but we don't know why. It's like our brain skips ahead but when you ask it to slow down and explain it, all the information disappears. So what to do when I have an child staring at a problem that she should be able to solve but well she can't.
    First we identify the real problem. She's a bit lazy. Then she resigns that she's lazy and admits defeat. So we talked about accepting that she's a bit lazy and because of that she has to work harder but gets frustrated easily. But I told her that there is a middle ground between being lazy and working harder because of it. One that in essence allows you to avoid working harder, and helps you get things done faster. She was interested.
    I talked about how math isn't a trick, doesn't deceive. Numbers are numbers and they are what they are. So if you stop looking at math like it's trying to trick you and start understanding that it is a pattern of facts then math isn't so daunting. She said okay explain... I explained that when you memorize math facts, your brain will start doing the calculations when it looks at something and you won't even realize that you are doing it! It's called working smarter. If you already know the math facts, then solving an equation is simple.
   She never understood why she had to memorize all those math facts, and to be honest as a kid neither did I. Math was always a source of stress for me. My parents were never helpful and while I usually made A's and B's in math, it was never my fondest subject. Not because I was a girl, not because I was under the impression that I would never need math, but because I never understood how math worked and why it worked that way, but my brain somehow without my help could do the problem. Then I would be asked to show my work. See I have a strong gift for logic and reasoning, so I can look at something and make a logical deduction... such as a list of possible answers on a test... but if I had to show HOW I got to that answer, I was screwed. My mother does this as well, and now so does my daughter.
    But you can't rely on this forever, and yes it tripped me up in Algebra and Calculus. So I don't want this to happen to my "I wanna be a Scientist" daughter. Working Smarter is the only way out. I am not a fan of drills and memorization in the sense that it should be a do or do not thing in terms of success but I do know the value of memorization. So now she wants to learn to work smarter. That means memorizing the math facts that she had been rejecting and that is now causing her to become frustrated.
    "WORK SMARTER, NOT HARDER" is now one of another of those words we live by.