How fast should you accelerate your kid in math?

We thought we were accelerating fast enough. Turns out we weren't.

One of the biggest take-aways we got from a math camp our kids attended was:

“It’s okay to go faster. Realistically, you should be going as fast as your kid wants.”

So we asked our kid if they wanted to do even more math and they said, “yes”.

“It is the obvious which is so difficult to see most of the time. People say 'It's as plain as the nose on your face.' But how much of the nose on your face can you see, unless someone holds a mirror up to you?”

―Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

Oh. Okay, then. So we did more math.

How did you initially decide to accelerate?

For a few years we had been doing math outside of school because our kid loved spending time problem solving math problems.

So we supported them by finding material on which we could work through together.

Some types of problems came easily so we steered the material to the types of problems that took longer to figure out.

They enjoyed it and we enjoyed working with them through it.

As you can probably imagine, that meant that we found ourselves “ahead” of the math instruction at their school.

Though we didn’t set out to “accelerate”, we had “accelerated”.

img src: Eileen Pan

Parent-Led (Home/After)schooling

Parent-led homeschooling is the approach that puts parents in charge of the education decisions for their children.

Which is how we started our after-school math sessions even thought we didn’t know there was a formal name for it in the homeschooling world.

We, the parents, were looking at various curriculum and then choosing what to give the children, how fast to work through it, and how to judge that they had masted the curriculum.

Obviously we didn’t ignore our child’s preferences in what they were learning and how it was going, it was more that we were the ones driving the decisions.

We did this until we came back from camp and realized that we should ask outright if they wanted to do even more math.

As fast as the kid wants to go

The other side of the coin of the parent-led homeschooling approach is child-led learning (child-initiated learning).

This approach puts the child in charge of the education and gives the child more freedom in choosing what to study, how to study, and how long to study the subject.

So when we asked our child if they wanted more math we started taking the child-initiated learning route and worked better to understand what they wanted to do, when they wanted to do it, and how often they wanted to do it.

They said they wanted even more math, so we accelerated even more.

Though sometimes that means slower

Now that we were in the child-led learning territory we worked on letting go of outcomes (we need to get to X by Y) and focused more on the the joy of the process.

Which meant that sometimes the child wanted to slow down because they weren’t getting a particular skill that made it hard to keep progressing.

So we helped them go back and work through various problems, videos, and textbooks to strengthen the skill set that needed some work.

And once it was stronger, the child chose to continue and went back to the faster pace they had been going on before the slowdown had occurred.

Have you asked your kid?

Next time you finish doing math with your kid, try asking them if they want to do even more math going forward.

You just might find that you’re kid is craving even more math.

And if they aren’t or want less math, that’s okay too. You’ve learned something that will help your and your kid!

Try it soon and let me know how it goes!

Until next time,
Sebastian