Childhood Math Adds Up for Grown Homeschoolers by Peter Kowalke

Grown homeschoolers discuss their relationship with math then and now


Math isn’t one of Zoe Blowen-Ledoux’s talents. Zoe laughs as she recalls a recent story that highlights her math skills.

“I’m helping a friend build an addition to his kitchen,” says the 22-year-old lifelong homeschooler from Lisbon Falls, Maine. “I was out measuring pieces and adding different measurements with fractions today, and I managed to write down that we needed to cut something to three inches and 4/8! My friend’s like: That would be a half, silly.”

Sometimes her aptitude with math is embarrassing, she acknowledges, noting that her math skills haven’t improved much since she was eight. A better handle on math would be nice, “but there’s so much to be learned and math rates very low on the list.”

Math is a scary subject for many home-educating parents—and with good reason. When I interviewed scores of grown homeschoolers for my documentary, Grown Without Schooling, math was the one subject that gave almost everyone problems. When I speak at homeschooling conferences, parents most frequently voice concerns about math. And when I talk with homeschooling teens, math still is an issue for all but the most diehard science nuts. Even the moderately science-minded homeschoolers I know often are math phobic. Math is a challenge for homeschoolers.

Jasmin Kirchhausen avoids math whenever possible and chalks it up to not having the “math gene.” The 25-year-old lifelong homeschooler from Chesterland, Ohio studied math from a textbook when she was younger, she says, but math was always a struggle.

Homeschooling had nothing to do with her poor math skills, she speculates; math wouldn’t be fun whether in school or not. “I won’t ever enjoy it and I didn’t ever enjoy it,” she says. “I view it as a necessity.” As a social worker for Services for Independent Living, part of the United Way network, the only contact Jasmin now has with math comes from balancing her checkbook and calculating restaurant tips.

That sort of response doesn’t surprise Lindsey Duncan, 20, who lives near Cincinnati, Ohio. She says the problem is that there isn’t always an obvious real-world application for math, which can make the subject especially hard for homeschoolers. “Math doesn’t seem to have a point when you’re a kid,” recalls the lifelong homeschooler. “You can’t see what it’s used for.”

Lindsey, who takes correspondence courses through Indiana University while building a career as a harpist and novelist, says she used Saxon math books as a teen but found the number-crunching boring.

“There were times when I really enjoyed it and then, about half-way through the problems,” says Lindsey, “I would want to throw my textbook at the wall.”

It wasn’t until a symbolic logic class in college that she found a purpose for math.

“I did a lot of logic puzzles as a teen,” she notes, “and that leads into symbolic logic. [The college course] opened my eyes to another side of math and I discovered that some aspects of math can be fun.”

Homeschoolers can’t be blamed for an aversion to math if math doesn’t make sense to them, she asserts. Part of the problem, she says, is parents who have a problem with math and pass it along to their children.

“I think it is a subject that a lot of adults don’t feel comfortable with—and they don’t know how to go about it,” she says. “I nearly killed my mother the first time I did multiplication. She gave me a formula and I asked why the formula worked. She didn’t know how to respond.”

But what if parents don’t have an appreciation for math? More important, what if their children don’t appreciate or find math meaningful? What happens to homeschoolers who shun math, people like Zoe, Jasmin and Patrick Meehan?
Patrick, who some might remember from his chapter in Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don’t Go to School, started diligently enough with a Saxon textbook. After a year of homeschooling, though, the 14-year-old unschooler began avoiding math at all costs.

“I was a teen,” admits Patrick, now 26. “I knew everything and didn’t evaluate myself at the time. If I knew what I know now, I probably would have worried.”

Yet math was not a stumbling block for Patrick, who found it boring as a teen but now calls it “delicious.” Patrick, a Seattle video game programmer who used to work for Nintendo, says he learned math when he needed to know more about matrices for programming. And he still learns math on an as-needed basis for work, he notes. In typical unschooler fashion, he’ll pick up a book if there’s a gap in his knowledge.

“I started appreciating math when I could write programs and see the power,” he says. “Programming is a great way to explore math because you get immediate visual feedback.”

His advice to parents is to not force math—and to not worry. If the homeschooler is smart, he says, they’ll learn it when they need it.

If math must be a part of the curriculum, he adds, make it something practical that the homeschooler can get his or her hands around. “The key for me was learning how to apply math instead of it being abstract. I learned in the context of computer graphics.”

Zoe takes the same approach to math. She may not know her multiplication table, but she doesn’t need it as a part-time translator who plans to make translation a career. Zoe learned algebra when she thought she would need it for college, but she says she hasn’t retained the knowledge because her major at the University of Montreal doesn’t require math.

And if there ever comes a day when she does need math? Not a problem, Zoe says confidently.

About the author:

Lifelong unschooler Peter Kowalke, 25, is producer of Grown Without Schooling, a documentary about grown homeschoolers and the lasting influence of home education.

For more stories about grown homeschoolers, visit Peter’s web site at or e-mail him at info@grownwithoutschooling.com.
This article originally appeared in the March-April, 2002 issue of Home Education Magazine.