Unschooling Math

Jack, 3rd grade, was making chocolate milk.  I was standing next to him making cappuccino.  He noted that the suggested serving is 2 spoonfuls, and there are 38 servings in the container.  But said that he uses more than that, so the amount of servings it says is not the amount for how he makes chocolate milk.  I asked him how many servings it would be for him.  I thought it wouldn't be too tough for him to divide 38 by 2.  But he didn't want to. 

I did the math and told him it was 19.  This is something that I learned about unschooling.  As a homeschooler/educator, I was always trying to get the kids to be independent and figure things out.  But in unschooling, they always read to the kids and do the math (showing them how they do it if the kid wants to know).  And how will they learn if you always do it for them?

But the way it works is that the child sees that you know how to do it.  And they can't do it themselves, but they see you can do it.  And eventually they want to do it and are motivated to learn it.  But in the meantime, until they want to, you read things to them and do their math for them.  It's a bit of an attitude adjustment.

Back to our 38/19 servings, it turned out that I was assuming he was using double, and Jack said the math was harder because he uses about 5 spoonfuls.  So he was explaining to me about how using more gives you fewer servings.  This is one of the things I remember being SO confused about in math class.  The fractions are always going in the opposite directions.  Cutting things in half makes more; using double ends up giving you half the amount of portions, on and on until it used to make my head spin.  But here Jack and I were just chilling, and he was explaining to me how he was thinking about it.

He wasn't interested in "learning" or "doing" math.  It just came up and we were just talking about it.  Back when I was homeschooling, I would have taken the opportunity to do some actual math problems with him.  I would have tried to get him to do them or tried to get him to understand some of the concepts.  But in unschooling we were just chatting. 

It was something that came up organically and naturally, and these types of mathematical situations come up frequently.  (Something that I found hard to believe before I unschooled math; math was the very last secular subject I let go of.)   The kids actually enjoy pondering these things, thinking about these issues, playing around with them mentally.  It seems like they kind of carry these math "problems" (i.e. real world situations) around with them as they go about their day, and they think about them a bit, then do whatever, play, think about it some more, etc. 

It's a lovely relationship to math.