The Link Homeschool News Network Product Guide - Professor B's Power Mathematics

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Mathematics' web site

THE CHOICE IS YOURS: MATH OR ANTIMATH!

The academic area that studies structures is mathematics. A building is a physical structure and to construct it, many “pieces” are connected. A story is a mental structure and as it develops, many pieces are connected. Do you recall elementary/middle school math as connected and flowing or as disconnected and fragmented? Virtually all people experienced the latter.

If learning mathematics requires perception of structures, which require connections, then in the same way that “disconnection” is the opposite of “connection”, our elementary/middle school experiences were the opposite of the math they were claimed to be! It is absurd to call something and its opposite by the same name. Consequently, we were unwillingly exposed not to math, but to “antimath.”

Antimath, with emphasis on rote memorization of facts and meaningless “steps” for getting “answers”, is hard to learn, but our CD ROMs bring such crystal clarity to the teaching/learning of math, that everyone who uses them cannot escape the perceptions of the connections and flow (the structures) in mathematics. In the same way that the perception of connections and flow make the learning of a story rapid, easy and inevitable, this perception releases the same experience when learning mathematics.

This misplaced emphasis in antimath “education” imposes a huge amount of practice for retention. This is why students fall behind. Math, with its emphasis on mental structures for mastery of facts and all of arithmetic, requires much less time and eliminates a huge amount of remediation.

Math is easy! Antimath is hard!

Further antimath damage occurs when students, by good discipline and excellent memory, achieve “honor student” status, but are unable to grasp the structures necessary for functioning at higher math levels. Sadly, this rote-mechanical drilling, throughout children’s formative years, conditions their minds to incompetent ways of functioning mathematically. Honor student status, with an antimath foundation, is an illusion!

Some people ask why we do not use manipulatives. We certainly do! For example, we use fingers to teach a whole multiplication table and related division facts, even to second graders (in 30 minutes). Early childhood learners, using nature’s manipulatives in our original ways, can instantly tell the number of fingers or panda bears flashed before them, without counting. Fingers have a sensorial dimension: a child can feel the number two, as two fingers are folded. The only commercial manipulatives we recommend, after training teachers nationally and internationally over 30 years (with much documentation of consistently delivering huge gains in scores) are the “cubes,” “rods” and “flats” for representing one- to four-digit numbers. Manipulatives tend to be overused. Mathematics is an activity if the mind!

All children are intelligent and your experiences in math classes will remind you of many verbalizations, by teachers, that not only failed to activate your intelligence, but, in fact, deactivated it (see website articles). Those verbalizations were unintelligent because they made no sense to us! We were forced to memorize “steps” as a substitute for making sense. It is impossible to activate intelligence with unintelligent verbalizations! Accordingly, we have created “mathematical storylines” that verbalize the flow of mathematical concepts and associated skills.

Visit www.profb.com and see many samples which show that if you speak the intelligent verbalizations in the captions pointing to the bee, your own intelligence will be so activated that two amazing things happen: you will

1. perceive the contextual connections and flow within the mathematics; and
2. comfortably learn the mathematics at the same time you teach it.

Our CDs also solve these problems:

Lighten your burden –older children teach younger siblings competently.
No preparation time-learn simultaneously as you teach.