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Charlotte Mason Math: Wrong Answers and Slovenly Teaching

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
"Playing with the kittens" painting by Emile Munier, public domain

The second place where a surface-level reading of Charlotte Mason’s books can lead to misunderstanding involves the treatment of wrong answers. Mason wrote:

“… quite as bad as these is the habit of allowing that a sum is nearly right, two figures wrong, and so on, and letting the child work it over again. Pronounce a sum wrong, or right — it cannot be something between the two. That which is wrong must remain wrong: the child must not be let run away with the notion that wrong can be mended into right.”

 — Charlotte Mason, Home Education

Does this call to mind images of your own childhood schoolwork? It does for me: laboring over a worksheet or quiz and then taking it to my teacher to be graded. Right was right, and wrong could not be mended. In such a performance-oriented setting, mistakes can take on the flavor of moral failure.

Is this authoritarian approach the way Mason wants us to teach math to our children? Where is the summa corda — the joyful praise — in that?

No. Please, no. Very definitely no.

Mason wanted us to avoid slovenliness in our teaching. In this passage, she warned against several forms this might take.

Continue reading Charlotte Mason Math: Wrong Answers and Slovenly Teaching

Gratis Games and Playful Math News

Posted on by Denise Gaskins

Get your free copy today!
Do you want to help your children learn math?

Teach them to play.

Grab a free copy of my Let’s Play Math Sampler: 10 Family-Favorite Games for Learning Math Through Play, which contains short excerpts from my most popular titles. It’s a great way to get started with playful math. 😍

As a bonus, I’ll add you to my Playful Math News email subscription and send you monthly tips and activity ideas for playing math with your kids.

From time to time, I’ll even throw in a free sample of whatever I’ve been working on — an early draft of something that will eventually show up in one of my books or printable activity guides.

For example, check out this fun freebie I sent last April:

Don’t miss out on all this mathy goodness. Sign up today!

Get the Games Book Now

Celebrate Fibonacci Day with Playful Math Carnival 176

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
Fibonacci Spiral

Fibonacci Day is November 23rd (11/23 in the American date style), and this year it falls on a Saturday.

But that’s no excuse not to celebrate!

We can do math on the weekend, you know. Or we can just play in advance of the day itself. In fact, we could take a whole Fibonacci Week and not run out of interesting math to play with.

Sonya Post has our back with lots of great ideas:

One Way to Play: Fib Poetry

Long-time readers know I like to get students thinking creatively about math, and I’ve written before about the value of math poetry.

So when Sonya included the Fib in her carnival post, I couldn’t help myself…

Fib:
A strange
Way to count,
Adding syllables
Until the words breed like rabbits.

For the rules of Fib poetry, and lots of other mathy fun, don’t miss this carnival!

Go to the Fibonacci Carnival post –>

And Here’s My Monthly Bleg

The Playful Math Blog Carnival wants you!

The carnival is a joint effort. We depend on our volunteer hosts to collect blog posts and write the carnival each month.

Classroom teachers, homeschoolers, college professors, unschoolers, or anyone who likes to play around with math — if you would like to take a turn hosting the carnival, please speak up!

Email Denise to Volunteer

 
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Image at the top of the post copyright © Romain (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons.

Charlotte Mason Math: The Trouble with Manipulatives

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
“Mother Playing with Child” painting by Mary Cassatt, public domain

Two passages in Charlotte Mason’s writing about math are in my opinion widely misunderstood. The first relates to the proper use of manipulatives.

Mason believed strongly in the importance of physical objects and oral work (mental math) in early math education. In her priorities, the use of written calculation fell in distant third place.

“A bag of beans, counters, or buttons should be used in all the early arithmetic lessons, and the child should be able to work with these freely, and even to add, subtract, multiply, and divide mentally, without the aid of buttons or beans, before he is set to ‘do sums’ on his slate.”

 — Charlotte Mason, Home Education

Continue reading Charlotte Mason Math: The Trouble with Manipulatives

Charlotte Mason Math: Finding Time for Big Ideas

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
“Woman and Child in the Grass” painting by Renoir

“Teachers have seldom time to give the inspiring ideas, what Coleridge calls, the ‘Captain’ ideas, which should quicken imagination. How living would Geometry become in the light of the discoveries of Euclid as he made them!”

 — Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education

The Captain ideas are the great Truths of a subject, the things that make our minds wake up and pay attention, that energize our thoughts and make us yearn for more.

In math, living ideas are the big principles that tie together many branches of the subject. Things like:

• Proportion — where two quantities are connected so they scale up or scale down in tandem. For instance, if we double the number of cars in the driveway, that automatically doubles the number of tires.

• Transformation — how we can change things while keeping important attributes the same. Like, if we shrink a square, its area will change, but the angles stay the same.

Continue reading Charlotte Mason Math: Finding Time for Big Ideas

Oh, Internet, Thou Fickle Friend!

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
photo of a grumpy cat at the computer

Whew! I just finished going through ALL of my massive Internet Math Resources pages and fixing the links that had broken since the (too long ago) last time I checked.

Way too many broken links. Pages lost to the ether: fun old hobby sites of a teacher who retired and lost their school-sponsored page, sites that have set up a payment wall, and sites that still exist but have been rearranged, breaking all the old connections.

Many I was able to fix, some I had to delete.

But still, there are plenty of great links left, so if you’re looking for an interesting way to play with math, head over and explore:

Hopefully, everything works now.

Until the next time…

 
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Image at the top of the post copyright © sliper84 / Depositphotos.

Charlotte Mason Math: How Shall We Teach?

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
Woman withchildren painting by Dorothy Kate Richmond, public domain

Even in Mason’s day, testing drove much of educational policy, but we must not allow ourselves to fall into the trap of teaching for a test. Just as we do not study history in order to win a trivia contest, so we do not study math merely to produce answers on an exam.

“Arithmetic, Mathematics, are exceedingly easy to examine upon and so long as education is regulated by examinations so long shall we have teaching, directed not to awaken a sense of awe in contemplating a self-existing science, but rather to secure exactness and ingenuity in the treatment of problems.”

 — Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education

Remember Mason’s twin goals of rightness and reason. Even if you use a math book that focuses on memorizing rules and cranking out answers, you and your child can look for the ideas behind the rules: “Why does this work? How can we know for sure?”

Not just because the book says so, but because you search out and discover the innate sense of it. That is the essence of mathematics.

Continue reading Charlotte Mason Math: How Shall We Teach?

Charlotte Mason Math: Our Educational Tools

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
"Woman and Children" painting by Elizabeth Boott Duveneck, public domain

“Therefore, we are limited to three educational instruments––the atmosphere of environment, the discipline of habit, and the presentation of living ideas. The P.N.E.U.* Motto is: Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life.”

— Charlotte Mason, Principle 5

This principle is the key to a Charlotte Mason education. Most of her books consist of drawing out the meaning and implications of this motto.

When we think about applying Mason’s educational principles to math, we must focus on providing the right atmosphere, developing appropriate habits, and presenting living ideas.

What is the mathematical atmosphere of our home or classroom? Is math a natural and welcome part of life? Or does it exist only in schoolbooks and in some nebulous “future” for which our children must prepare?

What about the people in our children’s lives? Do we adults enjoy and use math, or do we dread and avoid it? Is our mathematical worldview positive, eager to learn and grow, or negative, seeing math as a chore to endure?

Continue reading Charlotte Mason Math: Our Educational Tools

Podcast: The Beauty of Math in the Charlotte Mason Paradigm

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
painting by Dennis Miller Bunker, public domain

I have a new podcast interview, and I think you’ll enjoy it!

Check out Cindy Rollins’s The New Mason Jar (Season 7, Episode 93) on your favorite podcast app, or listen on the website:

Go to the podcast ❱

Here’s a couple of excerpts…

Continue reading Podcast: The Beauty of Math in the Charlotte Mason Paradigm

Don’t Miss Playful Math Carnival 175 via The Beauty of Play

Posted on by Denise Gaskins
photo of math art painting

Della Parker hosted the Playful Math Carnival with a delicious spread of math delicacies. Check out all the mathy inspiration, games, and hands-on activity ideas:

The blog carnival is like a free online extravaganza of mathematical play, a virtual map to articles by teachers and bloggers all around the world.

I love how there’s always something new to learn. 💖

[By the way, we still need carnival hosts for 2025. If you have a blog or website and would like to volunteer for a month, read the details at the carnival’s home page.]

Go Visit Playful Math Carnival 175

 
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Image at the top of the post copyright © Della Parker / The Beauty of Play blog.