I use Youtube videos, Mathletics, and old school ways to help kids have ah-ha moments. I praise them for how smart they are. It is weird, my students are excited for math and say they love it. Whereas, I used to cry during math class.

I’ve always turned people onto math by telling them about simple graph theory problems, like the non-planarity of U6 or K5. It’s a problem which is simple to state (“Can you connect each dot to every other dot without crossing lines?”), and the lack of numbers, initially, takes away from the intimidation people feel when they encounter math problems usually.

But sadly, grade school kids are at an age where the kind of math they’re learning isn’t terribly interesting. It’s tricky to find anything beautiful about basic multiplication tables, even though they’re so necessary to learn.

Traditional maths teaching involves rote-learning a bunch of algorithms (such as multiplication) and tables, then doing endless quantities of dogwork practice.

The algorithms as taught are entirely opaque, giving no insight into what’s going on, no way to sanity-check if the answers are right as you go; it’s horrible and bureaucratic – like copying large quantities of numbers from one part of the page to another, only with hard, fiddly transformations along the way that are easy to fuck up, which is discouraging as hell.

Most students learn to hate it with a passion; of the few that show aptitude for it, a disturbing percentage can only work by rote methods, and have very little insight into solving novel problems or being able to spot errors.

It’s a bit like teaching kids to read via ‘sight words’ and never introducing them to the concept of phonics. Most would do very badly at memorising thousands of arbitrary strings of letters – and most of those that managed would be completely stumped by new words, regional dialects, phonetic spellings or the very concept of etymology.

This is one of the big things that the common-core maths curriculum seeks to correct.

In common-core, less emphasis is put on formal pen-and-paper methods, and more on mental maths strategies, alternate approaches, visualisations, and giving kids a lot more insight into what’s going on, how to tackle the problem and why it works, rather than just drilling them on what to do.

From what I’ve seen, it could be a real game-changer.