The 0Maths blog

Chocolate coated broccoli

Faced with getting kids to eat broccoli, few of us would try covering it with chocolate.

We know from the outset that, apart from rotting their teeth and promoting diabetes, the juxtaposition of flavours will not persuade them that there's anything delicious about broccolli. In fact, not only will they not learn to love broccoli this way, they'll learn that they're not supposed to like it - or why would we chocolate coat it?

Oddly, we do this with maths all the time, offering rewards that are unrelated to the maths, instead of making the maths rewarding. This is completely unnecessary: children are naturally wired to seek out success and learning.

What we need to be teaching kids is that maths is satisfying and beautiful in itself. We need to get them in the right mindset so they can appreciate the profoundly explicable way the universe is ordered. This starts early.