It's Okay To Make Mistakes Doing Maths

© Beverley Paine

Mistakes in maths seem to take on more importance than any other subject and consequently 'failing to get it right' is a much bigger deal. It is hard to relate to mathematical errors as approximations, which is what we do with other areas of learning. Spelling and maths are two areas that parents and educators tend to get paranoid about, worrying that if they are not learned at a certain age in a certain way then all is lost.

Instead of fretting over our children's endless fumbling with maths and focusing on the mistakes, we need to use the mistakes as a brilliant way to unlock what learning is occuring and how. By examing and analysing our children's mistakes we will learn what basic concepts and understanding is missing or needs more work.

Treating mistakes as a natural and important part of the learning process and accepting that they will happen and that making them is not 'failing' is an attitudinal shift that can really boost a young learner's confidence.

With my own children I sometimes used a story-telling approach to find out how the child had worked the problem in his head, and how they had arrived at that answer. Often they didn't really know. It seemed to me that in many cases my children had 'guessed' the answers to the problems on the page, which resulted in more right answers than wrong. Because most of the answers were right, when they got a wrong answer they weren't able to identify straight away why they got the sum wrong. Talking through the process helped them to see how their minds were working to solve problems. As they grew older they were still able to accurately 'guess' an answer to many mathematical problems and this led them to explore how the processes they'd used to arrive at the answer - right or wrong - after getting the answer!

I saw this as them beginning to acknowledge and trust their innate mathematical abilities - in much the same way they did as very young children. Back then they never questioned their ability, they just got on with working things out, having a go, making adjustments, with the focus on the game, or activity, rather than the mathematics.

Maths was like breathing and eating and learning to talk and walk - something you did in order to achieve something else. It took me a long time to appreciate the natural learning happening in this area of their lives!