Why Is My Child Stuck in Math While the Class Moves On?

Is my child bad at math?

Maybe you have heard it said that some kids are not math people. Maybe you have said it about yourself. Jacqueline Wedner has taught math for thirty years. She has been a classroom teacher, a math coach and a math specialist. Grown adults still tell her, “I hated math in school.”

Wedner was the teacher in that opening story. It took her years of practice to change how she taught. She moved from teaching steps to teaching what the numbers mean.

We do not see math people and non-math people. We see children who have built different amounts of math so far. To us, being stuck is not a sign of a missing math brain. It looks like a missing step underneath.

Wedner names one reason that step goes missing. Children get moved on to the next year’s math “no matter what,” she says. Many of them are not ready, she adds. Some children get a new idea after two tries. Others need far more practice than a daily textbook page gives. When the page turns anyway, the gap stays. The next skill gets built on top of it. To us, that is a practice gap. A math struggle is a skill to teach, not a limit to accept.

Where is the gap hiding?

A math struggle often shows up in one place and starts in another. Wedner’s advice is to walk backward. When fractions will not stick, she goes back to cutting shapes into equal parts. When place value will not stick, she goes back further still.

There she looks for a skill called unitizing. It means seeing a group as one thing. Five fingers make one hand. Ten ones make one ten. The number 14 is one ten and four ones. If your child counts every finger to add five, look here.

All of this rests on number sense. That is a feel for how numbers work, not a list of steps. The boy who added from the hundreds had it. Number sense is one of the core skills of math. It grows with practice.

Wedner also checks often. Partway through a unit, she gives one good task. She sorts the work into three piles. She calls them got it, almost got it, and don’t got it. The third group gets ten minutes of help at a time, across the week. She teaches the words first, like regrouping. Then she checks again. Try these three things at home.

• Ask your child to explain how they got an answer, even a right one.
• When a step will not stick, try the step that comes before it.
• Keep practice short, and come back to it across the week.

What helps a child who is scared of math?

Some children arrive at math already afraid. Wedner describes children who walk in tense. They are thinking, “I’m bad at math, I hate math.” She treats that fear as part of the work, not a side issue. She makes math fun first, and she talks back to those messages.

Young, Wu and Menon scanned children’s brains in a 2012 study. Math worry went along with the brain’s fear response. That is a picture of a feeling, not a measure of ability. At home, answer the fear first. Start small enough for your child to win, and name the effort you saw.

Wedner starts with objects a child holds. She teaches in three steps: real objects, then pictures, then symbols. Teachers call this CPA, for concrete, pictorial, abstract. The tool matters too. Base-ten blocks glue ten cubes into one rod. The rod does not come apart. For a child still learning tens, she uses linking cubes instead. They snap into a ten and pull apart again. The child builds the ten with their own hands.

Maybe you are here because reading is hard too. Wedner was not talking about reading in this interview. Trouble with reading and trouble with numbers are different things. A child might find one hard, or both, or neither. When reading is hard, we look at math too. To us, her method fits any child whose class moved faster than their practice. Here is how a reading struggle shows up in math class.