The Fraction Is Not the Problem

At TOUCH Young Arrows I tutored children from lower-income families. Mathematics. The thing I love most.

And I had to learn fast that the syllabus is not the engine. The story is.

The second question

A child who cannot get past a fraction problem is rarely stuck on the fraction. They are stuck on whether they are the kind of person who can solve fractions.

The teaching that lands is the teaching that addresses the second question first. Everything about the first question — the common denominator, the diagram, the worked example — only becomes usable once the second one has an answer they believe.

I am not always good at this. I fall back to the syllabus when I am tired, and the session goes flat, and I can feel it going flat while it happens. What I can claim is that I notice when I am being lazy about it.

Why I keep doing it

Two of my interests happen to sit in the same room here: mathematics and education. Sitting with a kid on a Saturday doing sums is the most direct version of both I have found.

It also grounds me. You cannot spend an afternoon inside the circumstances of these families and keep the abstraction that "lower-income" is a category. It is a mother rearranging her shift. It is a kid who is fine, actually, just behind. Taking a small amount of weight off that is a real thing to do with a Saturday, and it is smaller than I would like it to be.

What changed in how I teach

I stopped being monotonous about the syllabus. A lesson should tell a story and it should meet the student as a person, not as a position in a topic list.

That sounds soft. It is the opposite. Story-first teaching is harder to prepare, harder to improvise, and much easier to check — you can see, in about ten seconds, whether the child is inside the story or outside it.