Frustration
There are few thinks more frustrating for a parent than having their child come home from school in pain because they cannot or will not learn math. If you have a child who is having difficulty in math, what can you do about it?

The problem is often compounded because many of these students are bright and good in school. They just do not get math, do not understand math, and may even have math anxiety which creates greater stress and frustration. Very often these students think that the failure is theirs, that they are just not smart, that they are missing the “math gene,” or that they were just not meant to learn math. Many parents think that their kid’s teachers just did not know enough math, that they did not care enough, or that they have not motivated or given enough time to their students to really teach the subject. It is easy for both the learners and the teachers to play the blame game.

At EnableMath we take an entirely different approach to this issue. We believe that the failure of most students to learn math is a result of the technology of education that they are using, ink and paper, chalk and slate. Math is a visual language and to understand it you have to picture it. If your child calls herself a “visual learner” then she is telling you that she learns from images, and today math is taught verbally. For students who are not good at creating their own visualizations, for students who have problems translating text into images, for students who cannot easily manipulate images in their minds, math is an opaque subject.

How can we help these students?
We developed EnableMath to visually represent the concepts in math, to make those visualizations dynamic so that they move and change, and to make those visualizations interactive so that they students can play with them. We suggest that you have your child play with our visualizations. We use a consistent set of these visualizations, so it would help them to start at the beginning. Go to Topics and start from 1. Whole Numbers and have your child work through the concepts (the blue triangles on the top right of the screen).

We also strongly suggest that you explain the problem to your child. They are not stupid, they are not bad students, they are not dumb in math. They can learn the subject if it is presented using a new technology for learning. They need to get help drawing pictures of concepts in their minds.