My Own Self-Education

On the WTM boards, I've noticed a lot of talk about a math curriculum called "Life of Fred." People talked about how it's so funny and how it explained math in a way that made sense. I was sold. I tried talking Corey into buying the entire set for only $600. He wasn't convinced. He suggested I try to see if the library could get any through interlibrary loan.

What an awesome idea! Even though our library can only do three ILL at a time, they did manage to get the three I asked for. And I went with the secondary levels of math: pre-algebra, geometry, and advanced algebra. I was hoping these books would help ME understand math a little better. It is no secret that I have always struggled with algebra. I remember that even the concept of working both sides of the equation was frustrating for me. Ok, sure if you do it on one side you have to do it on the other. But it took me a long time to realize "WHY".

My lack of math skills has made me nervous for homeschooling the upper grades of math. I picked a curriculum (Math U See) that would be as helpful as possible. Someone else teaches the lesson and explains the hard stuff. But even though the curricula is fine for us now, I know I would be useless if the kids have any difficulties with trigonometry or such.

People on the boards have recommended that I invest in my own self education when the kids are little. It would be a better use of my time than planning out super detailed 1st grade lesson plans.

So when I started reading Life of Fred, I didn't think it was all that funny. Quirky and fun? Yes. Making me laugh out loud? No. Fred is a five year old math professor at Kittens University. He lives in his office and the books are a narrative of his life. I love the author's note to the teacher in the front of the book: "This book wasn't written with you in mind. Instead it was created for those who will be learning algebra from it. There are a thousand banal, look-alike algebra books which present the material as it has always been presented.

And those copycat books get boring. As a teacher, you only glance at those books to find out what the next topic is. The students look at those books only to find the homework problems you assign and maybe look at an example to figure out how to do the 40 almost-identical problems in the problem set.

Why do so many of those ordinary algebra books have the definition of the real numbers in the first pages of the book? Answer: because all the other books do that. In contrast, this book defines the real numbers when the students naturally need them, which is after they've encountered square roots."

So far, I love this series. I love that it's not like regular textbooks. To me those textbooks are useless for learning math. I can read them and follow the examples, but they never helped me understand math. I'm not even finished with the third chapter and already so many things are making sense. For example, I learned WHY you add when you have subtract a negative number (8-(-7) is the same as 8+7). Yes, I realize this makes me extremely stupid. In high school they told me that you just add them and so that's what I did. I never understood why until now.

I could go on with these kinds of examples, but I'm afraid of admitting anymore of how stupid I am. Suffice it to say, I really want these books. Math isn't so scary anymore.