Textbooks make math feel like a ladder to climb, rung by rung, working systematically from one topic to the next. But that’s an illusion. Learning math is more like taking a meandering nature walk. Kids need to wander around the concepts, notice things, wonder about them, and enjoy the journey.

Most people believe the goal of math is to get right answers. So we give our children a page of math problems to work, then we check their answers and tell them what they got wrong. When we focus on right answers, we can make our children feel like a failure at math.

Instead, we need to focus our math lessons on thinking, playing with ideas, reasoning and figuring things out. And when we make mathematical thinking our goal, the right answers will come along as a side-effect, a natural result of making sense of the math.

—Denise Gaskins