This book is anything but a standard Math text. Its purpose is to explain why
Math is valuable and pertinent to our lives and how you can shift your thinking to become terrific at Math. I have two groups
of readers in mind here – the young person, pre-teen to teenage, who is really wondering what Math is good for and how
learning it can be easier, and the parent who is looking for ways to explain – even to small children – what it’s
good for and how learning Math can be fun.
All the fun and power that Math offers is presently relegated to the lucky
ones who just happen to think in the way that’s aligned with the way it’s taught in schools and textbooks. I am
not one of those people. Since you’re reading this book, I guess you aren’t either! Or perhaps you are, but your
son or daughter isn’t. I’m here to say, this is not an intellect problem, not at all. It’s just perspective.
Math is very special and has long been the realm of the elite. It’s time to shift that perspective and take out the
mystery.
Reading this book by itself will NOT make you good at Math. Reading this book
WILL change your thinking so that you can learn Math much more easily. But even when it starts to make wonderfully clear sense
to you, there’s still only one way to be good at Math – practice. But the best way to practice isn’t learning
by rote. It’s by creating games that you love to play. That’s some of what you’ll learn here.
When I was growing up, everyone told me that I was a very good student. I could
read well, write well, think clearly. And I was fine with addition and subtraction. But when the day came that we had to start
multiplying numbers, I encountered my first experience with feeling lost in the classroom. That was probably because we weren’t
actually taught anything concerning those first problems I saw on the blackboard. They were just there.
1 x 1 = 1
1 x 2 = 2
2 x 2 = 4
2 x 3 = 6
What in the world did it mean?
Eventually, the teacher taught us that multiplying was adding groups of numbers,
rather than just adding individual numbers together. But it was too late. I had already spent the morning trying to figure
it out and had decided that I didn’t understand multiplication. And believing that I didn’t get it caused it to
be true. I survived, but I never caught up. Not until I changed my perspective.
No one seemed to have any idea of how to explain Math to me in a way that made
real sense to me. So, after struggling with numbers from elementary school through my first two years of college, I decided
to find a way to cause it to make sense to me. Incredibly, when I finally hit on the secret, I changed from Math dummy to
Math wiz in an instant. It was all perspective.
