It’s important to talk math with kids, Annie Murphy Paul says, because — wait for it — “number talk” at home is a key predictor of young children’s achievement in math once they get to school.
I’ll bet “correlation talk” at home is also a key predictor of children’s achievement in statistics when they get older.
Just don’t let them play with yellow paint. Getting yellow fingers is a key predictor of lung cancer.
Also, carving control towers and headphones out of wood will cause the cargo to arrive again.
This would be an interesting experiment to try. Take one thousand kids from different classes, backgrounds, etc. and then instruct their parents in the art of ‘math talk’. Ten years later, those kids will be better at math, right?
Well, I did ‘math talk’ all the time with my son; he just scored a 36 on the ACT math portion (really! Yes, we’re all proud of our kids…). Hey, it worked for my kid!
On the other hand…
Maybe the parents who created the practice of ‘math talk’ are parents who have the right genes for math. I had a 99th percentile math SAT score back in the day, and not only is my wife very bright, her mother taught statistics at a well-known college and her father was a professor of economics.
I really wonder if this isn’t one of those fallacies of the form “kids who are good at X spend a lot of time doing Y… If we could get all kids to do Y, they’d all be good at X!”