Is This the Way Math Should be Taught? A Math Teacher Praised for Self-Published Digital Books

In these days of electronic books, websites, and self-publishing, anyone has a chance to broadcast their message and be successful in it. You don't have to be a university professor or a celebrity. You might just be a math teacher turned homeschooler-housewife, like is the case with Mrs. Maria Miller - an author of a series of math books in electronic format that her audience keeps praising.

The Math Mammoth books have been written for a real need, says Maria: to help parents and teachers teach math in a way that makes the children really understand it, and not just memorize it.

She got the idea for the books several years ago, while tutoring homeschooled kids. She noticed how much trouble the mothers had explaining the why's and wherefore's of math.

But it hasn't been just homeschooling folks who buy her books. A lot of parents - and even grandparents - want to help their children, and need self-teaching materials. Math teachers are buying them as well.

The feedback for her books has been very positive. Both parents and teachers mention the ease of use, or the fact kids are understanding the material so well.

Using electronic books brings several advantages. One customer comments, "I don't have to take them to the copy store (which is 30 miles away) to make copies of the worksheets. I just print off what we need one week or even one day at a time. They don't get lost or spilled on or trampled by the baby!"

Besides this, parents and teachers feel one of the main strengths of Maria's books are the explanations and the understanding of elementary mathematical principles delivered in the books.

"My kids are getting an understanding that they have never had before. I love that the teaching comes from so many different angles of the concept being taught," says Dee Webber, a homeschooling parent.

"I use visual exercises and models a lot, make students write out patterns, or sometimes discover the rules," says Mrs. Miller.

None of that is new. But maybe the difference between Math Mammoth books and others also lies in the fact that each book focuses on a few topics only, such as multiplication or fractions.

As we know, the typical US curricula suffers from the "mile wide, inch deep" syndrome where math topics are not given enough attention in any one stretch so that students could truly learn them.

"I sometimes feel that parents and teachers feel quite confused by all the various curricula and methods out there," says Maria Miller. "I've tried to take that confusion out from teaching math, and to create something that is very clear, focusing on understanding the concepts while not forgetting practice for computation."

Maria Miller started selling her ebooks in 2003 on her website www.homeschoolmath.net. Over the years she has refined and revised the books, and finally last year started selling them on a new website www.mathmammoth.com.

During year 2006, she also sta 10F4 rted writing math worksheets for SpiderSmart, Inc. tutoring company, and these worksheet collections have also been made available to the public in the Math Mammoth "golden" series.

Even more recent advancement is the offering of black-and-white hardcopies at www.Lulu.com/mathmammoth.

Future plans include translating these popular books into Spanish, and offering them at a companion website www.mamutmatematicas.com.

Please see the Math Mammoth website at www.mathmammoth.com for more information.



Author Information

MARIA MILLER
Math Mammoth