Sometimes you need the patience of a saint to teach a new math concept to one of your children. I have given the exact same set of directions, 30 times for one page of homework, because there happened to be 30 problems on the page. For whatever reason, writing the steps down for your child to follow just doesn’t seem to help. When I’ve tried that method, the child usually just gives up.

I have a 4th grader in public school who refused to do multiplication problems the way I showed her, because she didn’t think that was the way her “teacher” had shown her. I let her check her work with a calculator and then she changed her mind when she realized they were all incorrect.

My teenage son has always gotten upset and emotional when learning new math concepts. When he was about seven, he cried about math for the first time and it hasn’t stopped. His words then were, “Why didn’t you warn me that I was going to have to learn to multiply the numbers, too?”

I decided to do some research to find out why math is so difficult for children, after John and I had a conversation about teaching math last week. I did some research and found some real physiological reasons. I’m hoping that this new knowledge will increase my patience with my children as they struggle with new math concepts that seem so simple and obvious to me.

Some studies were conducted to compare the functioning of brains in children compared to the functioning of brains in adults, while they worked through the same math problems. Steps were taken prior to the testing to make sure the individuals had similar IQ’s and abilities. Researchers used electro-encephalographic (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain activity of the subjects during the research.

Researchers determined that despite children and adults having similar behavioral profiles, their cognitive processes are partially different when they compare numbers using the numerical Stroop paradigm (NSP).They found that in children ages nine to 11 calculations were occurring predominately in the frontal cortex, when adults were using parietal lobes.

“A further study also reported larger prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate activity during mental calculation in children than in adults [37]. These findings suggest that the neural networks underlying magnitude processing undergo developmental changes. The following results also suggest that frontal control processes play a larger role in the NSP in children than in adults. The improvement of the ability to respond effectively is probably related to the development of executive functioning and behavioural inhibition, usually associated with the prolonged maturation of the frontal lobes.”

This may suggest that math is being taught at a level of abstraction that is too far above the developmental levels of students. Combined with the learning disabilities that exist in some of our special needs children, is there any wonder that we are all getting frustrated with math?

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