This Math Homework Is Driving Caregivers Crazy

Math homework is often the worst PR for math education.

For the record, there are only two guaranteed paths to math virality in 2024¹.

• Post an ambiguous math expression while implying it has a deterministic answer. For example, if I posted “Does 8÷2(2+2) = 1 or 16? 😏” on Twitter right now, the engagement would melt down several entire server racks².

• Complain about your kid’s math homework.

Tweet link.

Here is the state of play:

• Currently, a majority of parents believe that math is essential for success in life. 

• Their anxieties about math are absorbed by their children through a process that is not well understood.

• A parent’s feelings of low self-efficacy in helping with their kid’s math homework correlates with low motivation and low achievement for the kid later.

This is the backdrop for your homework assignments.

Many teachers imagine homework as a means for helping students consolidate and practice skills learned in class, but that model is clearly too simple. Homework is an interaction with students but also caregivers, a message that re-awakens a caregiver’s own ideas about math, some of which are quite upsetting and negative.

We have options here. One is to stay the course. We could ask students to practice at home the specific methods taught in class (“making tens” in this case) however counterintuitive and baroque they might seem to caregivers. We could include worked examples in the practice set. We could scaffold out all of the steps of the method, blanking out certain parts of the method as in the image above, hoping that this will make the method seem more intuitive rather than contrived. We could do all of this even though it clearly makes some caregivers feel manipulated.

Another option? We could just not ask students to use particular methods on their homework.

What is 12 - 3? Just use the most efficient method you feel like you understand.

As a compromise, we might also ask students to analyze someone else’s method. 

Here is Adnan’s method. What is Adnan doing here?

This approach gives the caregiver the ability to say to themselves, “Adnan’s on something kind of wild right now. I don’t get it but I’m glad it works for him.” This approach asks the caregiver, “What do you get about this?” whereas the approach above asks by implication, “Why don’t you get this?”

Making tens is a helpful strategy that sets you up for making hundreds and thousands and so on later. 12 - 3 isn’t a particularly good showcase for that strategy, but that isn’t the main issue here. The main issue is the caregiver above feels disrespected by math class for reasons that are entirely under our control. 

Math class engages in public relations continuously. People are continuously asking, “Why are we doing this? Why are we letting this class determine so many of our social and economic outcomes?” Homework is the PR campaign for math class that caregivers encounter most frequently and the one that is most within our control. We shouldn’t waste a single opportunity to tell people that math makes sense and that they can do math—whether through classwork or homework, whether those people are kids or caregivers.

Odds & Ends

• Today is the 20th anniversary of the time I worked very hard on something very stupid and I am very proud, thank you.

• Check out the latest (and last 🥲) episode of Math Teacher Lounge. Bethany Lockhart Johnson and I discuss some of the ideas we’ve learned and loved over the last several years.

• I’ll be joining Bethany Lockhart Johnson and Jason Zimba on a webinar tomorrow to discuss the importance of big ideas in mathematics. Come hang!

• RIP to Hugh Burkhardt, one of the warmest and most prolific collaborators the math education design world has ever known.

1. “Be Howie Hua” isn’t a viable option for nearly all of us.

2. I am deleting any comments that weigh in on this question. Please do not test my resolve here.