Mailbag: When/how did you get started?
Mailbag: When/how did you get started?
Andrew J. Asks: How old were your kids when you did this? Were there any prerequisites in terms of their development?
The origin story is my favorite part of reading fiction and non-fiction.
So when Andrew J. commented on a previous post asking: “How old were your kids when you did this? Were there any prerequisites in terms of their development?” I realized I could indulge in my origin story.
Before we had kids - educational culture
My spouse and I come from cultures where education at home and school is important.
This meant that our parents and family expected us to study, focus on school, and be serious about learning.
When we decided to start a family, placing a strong focus on educating our future child(ren) was something we agreed on and decided we would take seriously.
Before we had kids - sports, hard work works, fundamentals, and learning to become better
Growing up, my spouse and I did sports in addition to school.
I grew up swimming; my spouse played field hockey, tennis, and crew.
We both participated in sports in college.
Early in our relationship, we discussed whether sports had been a net positive or negative and what we had taken away from the experiences (we did enough sports that excluded other potential activities in middle school, high school, and college).
In addition to the physical benefits, the three main benefits we both experienced were learning that “hard work works”, “fundamentals matter” and that it was important to “learn how to become better.”
Before we had kids - our jobs didn’t exist when we were young
What we now “do” for work are jobs that didn’t exist when we were growing up.
Which meant that the jobs our potential kids may have jobs that didn’t exist when they grew up.
So we talked about how to best prepare kids for an eventual future that we couldn’t see.
We had kids - the initial plan
We were fortunate to have to healthy kids and started our plan, which consisted of:
we don’t know the future
we don’t know the kids
we value education
we know “hard work works”
we know “fundamentals matter”
we know it’s important to “learn how to learn”
We had kids - first step: learn about the kids
When I was a teen, the movie Runaway Bride came out which is an “American screwball romantic comedy film directed by Garry Marshall, and starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere”.
One of the key moments of the movie (spoiler alert, but then again it came out in 1999), is that the Richard Gere character figures out that the Julia Roberts character says that her “favorite type of eggs” are always the same type of eggs that her romantic interest had.
So the Rirchard Gere character makes her a bunch of different types of eggs and has her try them to figure out what she actually likes.
That scene has stayed with me since then and it lives rent free in my head.
So when we had kids, we decided we were going to do as much exploring as possible to figure out who the kids were and what their likes were.
It was painful and at times expensive since it meant doing things and trying things that my spouse and I didn’t like or had experienced before, but it meant that the kids got as many life experiences as possible.
Second step: double down
As we discovered more about the kids, we would double down on anything that they showed interest.
Not in an intense way, much more of a “hey, I noticed that you liked this thing X, I found some videos/books/articles/toys related to X. Do you want to play with them?”
As they went from babies, to toddlers, to small children, to children in nursery school, to kids in elementary school, etc there were a gargantuan amount of new experiences and things to try.
We shared what we liked and told the kids that just because we liked those things didn’t mean that they would like them or that they SHOULD like them.
And we said the same thing with dislikes.
Third step: be okay with discarded interests
As the kids tried more and more things some things would stick for a day, some for a week, and a few for a few months.
We learned about dinosaurs, biology, airplanes, rockest, math, poetry, opera, tv shows, movies, jobs people did, construction sites, and more.
We were lucky to have a good public library near us as well as the “Epic” (https://www.getepic.com) library app.
So we went through a couple of thousand books learning and figuring out what they wanted to learn more about.
As is the case with children, just as we had thought we knew what they liked, they would change their mind and now the “fun thing” was totally new.
Thankfully, we could return library books or the digital versions of books and start a new subject.
We also donated a bunch of toys that were no longer of use so that other kids who were interested in these things could get use out of them.
Fourth step: developmentally ready
To Andrew’s question: “Were there any prerequisites in terms of their development?”
We tried our best to stay within kid-friendly topics and let their interest guide the exploration.
We saw human biology early but didn’t get into the “birds and the bees” territory.
We saw war, holocaust, nuclear weapons early (avid interest in world war II), but didn’t show videos and kept it more of a high level over view and microscopic overview.
When we got to subjects normally not given to kids, they were surprisingly uninterested in finding out more.
One thing we did do was try to push the envelop in giving them higher-level material than they were ready for.
The idea being that if someone gets a 100% on the test, it’s unclear if they would have gotten a 101% on the test or 175% on the test if there had been higher level material.
Which meant that sometimes we frustrated them with material that was too high level for them but did give my spouse and I a good gauge of where their actual level actually was located.
Fifth step: kids change, and that’s okay
In addition to discarded interests, kids change and that’s okay.
One of our kids was a (very) early reader while the other wasn’t.
Then a few years later the early reader refused to keep progressing and stayed at the same reading level for about a year.
The other kid had the opposite development - no early reading and then in the span of a year shot up several grade levels of reading levels.
We gave them as many books as they wanted from the subjects they wanted from the library, but they weren’t ready and that’s okay.
Sixth step: college is not the goal, life is the goal
We live in a part of the United States that is hyper-fixated on “getting into a good college”.
This means that most kid/pre-teen/teen activities are all done with an eye towards getting into a “good college”.
It’s exhausting and causes anxiety (both in parents and kids) like you wouldn’t believe.
Both from sports and lived experience, we realized and decided early that the goal of raising our kids is that they would be happy and feel fulfilled in their life after college and so college wasn’t the goal.
Being able to get good at something for the sake of it and having it help you learn how to achieve worth-while self-set goals was the main goal.
So rather than focusing on “we need to get good at XYZ [sport/academic discpline/instrument, etc]” the focus was “we need to find something you care about and do lots of that.”
I’m an alum interviewer for my college and it’s very easy to see when talking to potential candidates the difference between those who would do their activities even if no college existed and those who are doing it for the sake of college.
Seventh step: Where are we? Here. What time is it? Now.
A bit of self-help seeped into this as we went along given we tried coaches for some things and self-coaching for other things.
The one phrase I always come back to from the self-help reading I did was
“Where are we? Here. What time is it? Now.”
Another phrase from the self-help reading that stuck with me was
“How you do one thing is how you do all the things”
To Andrew’s question of “How old were your kids when you did this?”, we started immediately and continue to this day.
We continue to show the kids new things and continue to help them figure out what they like and don’t like and how to get better and doing the things that they like.
Next step: Math-o-clock
The kids liked math and we’ve continued to give them more math. Do we have high hopes for them? Yes, of course and we’re excited they’re excited. Would we be sad if they decided to leave math. Yes, but then we’d also be excited that they discovered another thing to focus on.
Where are we?
Here.
What time is it?
Now.
What are we doing?
Math.
It’s always Math-o-clock.
That’s all for today :) For more Kids Who Love Math treats, check out our archives.
Stay Mathy!
All the best,
Sebastian Gutierrez