In my years of teaching and tutoring, I have helped hundreds of students. Some had small problems they needed help with while others were basically starting from scratch. At Transformative Tutoring, we believe that every parent should spend a little time doing math with their child. Sure, your child gets a grade at the end of each year and perhaps has to pass an EOC exam, but what does that all mean?

Understanding Grades and SAT or ACT Scores

The best way to understand what that letter grade or SAT/ACT score means is to spend a little time actually having your child do some math with you. You might be surprised to find out that your teenager, who got just a B in Algebra 2, Precalculus or Calculus, is still adding and subtracting by counting on their fingers. (I would estimate that over 20% of high school students that have completed Algebra 2 still count on their fingers when not allowed to use a calculator.)

Students Are Growing Up in a Cashless, Digital World

Today’s children, in fact all of us, live in a digital age. Most middle class children rarely use coins and bills the way we did when we grew up. We had to know that four quarters made a dollar, but today’s children cannot buy anything with a quarter, so they don’t really care about quarters. Today’s children might have digital currency such as gift cards, debit cards, prepaid cards or iTunes credits, but they rarely handle cash. As a result, they use math for about 45 minutes a day about 180 days a year, exclusively in math class.

Compounding the problem for this digital generation is that calculators can do all their dirty work. In fact, you don’t even have to have a calculator anymore, just ask your smartphone something like, “Hey Siri, what’s 315 divided by 3.875?” As soon as most children find these error-free paths of least resistance they (ab)use them and shut their brains off entirely to the world of math. Before you know it, math doesn’t make any sense to them and they become incapable of thinking mathematically.

Beware of the Tools for Avoiding Math Homework

When a struggling math student hits high school there is often no easy way out and their struggles worsen. Did you know that every answer to every math textbook problem is available online? Most high school kids do! Now, they can breeze through their homework using sites like Slader, which has used crowd-sourcing to categorize every problem and answer, often with full solutions so students can “show their work.” Textbook publishers have tried to stay one step ahead by creating online homework assignments where the problems insert randomized numbers so that no two students get exactly the same question. However, in the great arms race to avoid doing math homework, once again there was a counter-attack in the form of an app called PhotoMath. Simply take a picture of any math problem and it will solve it for you, no thinking required! I have even heard reports of students using this app in their classroom to cheat on tests!

The SAT has a No Calculator Section

Eventually, the day of reckoning for all college bound students arrives, and that is the day of the SAT or ACT. These tests require students to know what they are doing and to actually understand and apply the math skills, formulas, strategies and concepts that they have, or haven’t, been using all of these years. Sadly, the arrival of that first SAT or ACT score is often the first day that a parent actually becomes aware of the magnitude of their child’s struggles with math. Now, they have a big problem on their hands, not much time to fix it and a jam packed schedule. Yes, there were B’s (many teachers require a student to be completely incompetent AND disrespectful to get a C grade these days, so a B should be considered a serious warning sign, especially if your child is well liked by their teachers) along the way that tried to serve as warning signs. Yes, there were some below average PSAT, PSAT 8/9, or EOC scores that tried to be the harbinger of the peril ahead, but these signs often were not obvious enough to raise enough concern to cause someone to take action.

Spend 5 Minutes Doing Math Together

So, today, and for the next few days, I beg you to sit down and spend a few minutes doing these problems with your child and without a calculator (20 of the 58 SAT math questions do not allow a calculator, while all 60 of the ACT math questions do allow a calculator) and see with your own eyes if your child needs help with arithmetic, Algebra 1, Geometry or Algebra 2.