Why I Became Interested in Mental Maths or Math

At the age of 6 years old I developed a block for mental maths, math, or arithmetic.  There

followed many of years of complete and utter bafflement about numbers on my part that is until 2002 at the age of 50!

I had come across strategies to learn useful things, that we had strategies to avoid things, to do the wrong thing. That we could change those things that were wrong for us, if we wanted to. My prime interest in NLP has always been how we can use to improve our and others learning. How if want to, can we change or improve things for the better.

In 2002 when I was training to become an NLP Master Practitioner we were learning about modelling. 

NLP is based on the models of presuppositions or operating beliefs, three of which are –

Modelling successful performance leads to excellence. If one person can do something it is possible to model it and teach it to others. Excellence can be duplicated.  Therefore by carrying out the modelling and distilling a model from it, we can teach this model to others for them to learn and benefit from.

 

People work perfectly - No one is wrong or broken.  What is important is to find out how people function, so that the function can effectively be changed to something more useful and desirable, for that person.  (When built into the way we teach we help our learners and ourselves cope with problems and problem days because sometimes we allow external factors to get us stuck.)

 

and –

 

Having choice is better than not having choice - Choose and continuously look for a way of thinking and acting for yourself that gives you the widest and richest number of choices (therefore the greatest flexibility of thought and behaviour) this will have the greatest influence in any interaction. (This goes hand in hand with the previously quoted presupposition.) Thus enabling you to enable others to learn and act effectively for them.

 

During this modelling weekend the discussions came to mental mats. I said I would be interested to know about some work one of the trainers was carrying out. The following day she asked the others in our group:

 ‘What is 7 x 5’ 

Each participant replied ‘35’ without hesitation (I was probably the penultimate participant to be asked)

But I hasten to add, the trainer also asked each participant ‘how do you know it is 35’. Withotuh exception the participants before answered with an element of ‘I see’ something. I nearly fell off my chair with excitement

Because my strategy for multiplication was:

 

Hear the question ‘what is 7 x 5?’,

then tell myself A^{id '}I can’t do this’,

repeat to myself what has been said by teacher, tell myself A^{id '}I can’t do this’, create bad feeling and panic Kⁱ Kⁱ.[1] 

This strategy was extremely effective and successful in preventing me from doing mental arithmetic for 44 years.

 

All of the others present on that day had a visual element in their strategy, which as they knew NLP they were able to name this visual element easily in their recall.

Having taught and trained the NLP Spelling Strategy (developed by Dilts [2]) since 1994 and never having been good at mental arithmetic myself I became more curious about how people ‘do mental maths’ as it is known in schools nowadays in the UK[3] in 2012. 

Initially I set out together with a colleague to model three adults and a group of seven primary school children.  I and colleague had a set of 10 random questions using mostly multiplication, with some addition and subtraction generated by I, with no particular thought behind the questions. This ‘lack of thought’ proved to be interesting later, see some comments from some of those modelled.  Interesting in that this random selection highlighted how number unaware I was.  Only the children were videoed at that point, but unfortunately the strains of the rest of school singing loudly in the hall on the day we had permission to video spoiled the sound quality on the video.

After speaking to ‘AC’ interviewed as No video no. 2 who had indicated interest in the model and offered herself as a model, two division questions which we had not had before were added.  After a brief conversation with an NLP peer involved in modelling at the NLP conference in London in 2012 when I queried the fact that no modelling of Mental Arithmetic had been carried out, I started to video participants.

I collated my notations and took these and the useful tricks and tips gleaned from some of those people videoed and firstly worked on learning with a 9 year old (in 2013) boy as a willing test subject and in September I took what I had learned into a Primary 4/Primary 5 (7 – 8 years old in September 2013) composite class along with some stories written with the aim of enabling the children to learn and other information gleaned from various sources along the way. 

The model is robust – it works.  The then 9 year old increased in confidence and willingness to ‘take a maths test’ and was happy with Maths and Physics at Senior School as he states he understands numbers better.  The class improved their ability to carry out mental arithmetic on a whole as can be seen as can be seen in my book NewTricks with Mental Maths  (there are many factors that ‘prevent’ us from learning, to counteract which I worked with some easy to carry out and effective techniques, around belief systems in the main). More on this in my published teaching book How to Teach New Tricks with Mental Maths.

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[1] NLP Annotations explained in Chapter 4

[2] http://www.nlpu.com/Patterns/patt10.htm

[3] This was 2012 in the meantime the strategy might have another name.