Parenthood provides the opportunity to revisit old experiences and skills. While the opportunities are rarely consciously chosen, the results can be a pleasant surprise: years ago now, one of my children requested/demanded that I draw them a cat, which I then did. The fact that I did not believe I could do it and, so far as I can remember, never successfully did it as a kid was not a barrier: my fine motor skills and ability to execute on a conception had improved, and that was enough to draw a cat. (so also guitar, where I can play things I could not when I was a teen, despite playing 8 hours a day back then, having taken a decade or so off from playing at all, and being generally older.)
Math is another one of these. My own math education was typical, long on rote memorization, and using the ability to rotely memorize to quantify being "good" at math. I struggled a bit with advanced algebra and trig, more with calculus, and despite making out pretty well with statistics and game theory, never really got the hang of probability. And now as an adult math and math-thinking is simply everywhere, and it turns out that I'm good at it: the ability to visualize things in my head, honed through grad school, means I often have an intuitive sense of the answer that I can now justify with actual calculations and proofs.
Some of this was the necessity of statistics education in grad school: if you're working on the empirical side of the social sciences at all, you simply need to be able to do it, and so my courses were (from a certain perspective) seminars on examining the decisions someone made in assembling a statistical model, finding problems, and suggesting alternatives, with no real assumption that you had the ability to do any of it apart from the instruction you received in class, and with the assumption that some knowledge of the real world, as reflected in the subject matter of the paper, would aid in your ability to see how the model was constructed and provide critique, no math needed initially. And once you learn to think in this way (subject matter ---> math, not math ---> maybe some real world application one day), it becomes an easy habit to get into.
As a result of all of this, it turns out that I'm a pretty good guide to my children as they work on their math homework. The youngest will learn three or four different ways to solve a problem, and I can pretty well look at a technique I've never seen before and see how it's meant to work and guide them; the oldest is now getting advanced math homework, and it seems pretty clear that all you need to do on those is think clearly about the problem and make a decision about how you're going to find the answer, and the actual math is the least consequential part of it.
* One thing I emphasize to the older child is that math is taught as a closed loop in school, but it's not in the real world: there are a couple of problems they've had where the essential features of the answer are clear but the actual answer is not, and what we do in the real world is just look up the answer rather than guess fruitlessly forever.
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