The First Day

Sometime in July 2023..

Whenever I ask elementary schoolers what their opinions are on math, chances are that they like it but they would not want to actually sit down and do it. So, I didn't really expect much interest to be shown to the math problems I would be doing with the kids at the Boys and Girls club.

They showed me to a group of 9-10 year old's who were just playing in their games room. Standing in the corner of the room, with my bag of pouches filled with little pieces of math problems, I was just wondering what I was going to do. How was I even going to get them to do the problems.

I got the opposite reaction! The group I was with did not seem to mind doing the problems. At first, I thought the pieces of paper with the math problems could be used as a competitive game, but they seemed to like doing it casually too. As we did more problems, there was definitely a common struggle in addition. Especially, long addition. A girl I was helping and I also had some miscommunications because of different languages, so that did make it harder to explain the problem.

Soon, they transitioned to another room and I thought that this is where we would stop. But, in the next room, a group of boys who had not done the math problems yet, said that they would like to do them too!

In the end, I found myself with two of the kids who were the most interested, we were adding and subtracting decimals, which I would say was a great ending to my first day! A day full of standard addition, which was the common challenge.

But, every day of volunteering has left me with new thoughts and learnings.

So, here are some learnings from that day:

• Kids who are in elementary school and early middle school are interested in learning. They want to know more. So, while the curiosity is still there, I think it's important to work with them and build confidence in any subject, but especially science and math.

• Emphasize fully understanding concepts over just quickly learning them and moving on to the next thing. Most of the kids I met had learnt about standard addition, but had not fully understand how to do it. I also definitely need to emphasize understanding concepts for me too, because it will benefit me more on the long-run.

• When someone is trying to just learn something by memorizing how to do it, I think they try to create patterns that are actually not there. When I was doing addition with one of the kids, I showed them how to carry the number on top using the '1' of '10' as an example. But, as we tried other numbers, they kept on carrying the '1' even though those other numbers did not even have a 1. I also do this, especially when studying for a test. I just try to quickly memorize, but that never ends up working.

Thank you for reading, and please let me know any feedback/ comments you have!