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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, it's really quite early for your son to feel so overwhelmed by math. The beginning stuff should be review. Have you sat down with him and gone over the material they have covered, to see what exactly is bothering him?[/quote]

OP here - DC got very frustrated with homework and got most of the problems wrong. This has not been the case in the past. MS itself has been a bit of a transition, so this has just compounded it. Unfortunately, I can’t really help as this level of math is many years behind me in memory. The teacher is being supportive and believes they are in the right place and urged patience.[/quote]
Sorry if this is awkward.. but I have to wonder how is it possible that an adult cannot really help due to the math being "many years beyond"? They haven't started doing any remotely complicated algebra, and are likely doing basic word problems with variables, which should be... solvable for adults with common sense. Genuinely curious as to what topics and problems are assigned that it is beyond you and your child, because something doesn't make sense here. If you can give specific examples, we can help point you in the right direction in terms of what you or your child should study and/or how they should think about the problems.[/quote]

One of the books that really did change my life was Liping Ma's "Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics". She asked a short series of questions covering relatively basic math to elementary school teachers selected as being highly interested in the subject. US teachers did badly. For example, half of them couldn't divide by fractions. Only one out of twenty-six or so could come up with a mathematically correct example illustrating the concept of division by fractions, and it wasn't even a good example. This suggests to me is that these "basic math" problems are, in fact, a *lot* more difficult than us mathy people realize. And also that the math instruction of anyone who grew up in the US is not likely to have been very good.[/quote]

0r the instruction was fine, but not everyone is cognitively able to learn and retain the ideas. [/quote]

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