Numbers for Parents is an 8 week exploration in mathematics geared towards adult learners, particularly parents of elementary and middle school students. There is a ‘cliff’ in math education that leaves many students without the prerequisite conceptual math skills needed to be successful in Algebra. This program addresses this prealgebra cliff by focusing on the conceptual and mental math skills that Darren has identified as missing in his students after 15+ years of tutoring and teaching mathematics.
This program follows a slightly different trajectory from traditional prealgebra sequencing. Instead of experiencing division as a computational process (long division), we instead focus on the conceptual aspect of division. We will learn a set of mental math tricks for identifying when one number is a factor of another. Our goal is to understand the ‘Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic’, which tells us that prime numbers are the most basic building blocks of the natural numbers. Along the way, we will review a series of mental math tricks to build number sense (the idea that numbers can be decomposed and recombined in many ways) and build confidence by discussing our own math stories.
The full Numbers for Parents program is 4 distinct modules, each module is an 8 week course. In this first module, we will spend the first 4 weeks sharpening our computational skills (the how) and the second 4 weeks exploring the conceptual side of division (the why).
Ready to get started?!?