Barbie caught a lot of flack back in the ’90s for declaring, “Math class is tough!” Today we find ourselves in the disorienting position of defending her. We recently got a note from an anonymous ...

On his website andertoons.com, illustrator Mark Anderson has a cartoon in which a boy is handing his teacher an assignment. “To show how well I understand fractions,” he says, “I only did half of my ...

When I was a kid learning arithmetic the only visual aid I remember is flash cards. These were useful for memorizing single-digit addition and multiplication, but is memorization really the best ...

The old way to multiply required a student to add the products of 36 x 4 and 36 x 2. The trick is to add that 0 at the end of the second product. Your fifth-grader asks you for help with the day's ...

A key part—though surely not the only part—of early-grades math is ensuring students get the basic arithmetic functions down and, beyond that, making sure they’re able to swiftly and automatically ...

IN his book On the Education of an Orator, Quintilian gives an excellent series of reasons why the pleader should be taught mathematics. His doctrine is that geometry, as he calls it, is, in its two ...