On Math and Rigor

Let’s chat about math and rigor. The homeschool world is an interesting place when it comes to math education. In many ways, it seems as if there are two approaches — “we learn math through baking and every life experience!” and “rigorous” or “advanced” math.

Our family falls into an “academic homeschoolers” category regarding core subject areas. I look at state and national standards and generally know the track we are moving on. I want my children to be able to take whatever math courses they are interested in in high school. They may choose a calculus or statistics route or just want the bare minimum required; regardless, I want their choice to be an option for them. This means we need to use a math curriculum that generally follows math standards.

For more on our general approach to math, check out this page.

A little background information: I loved math as a student and took math through AP Calc in high school. The Husband has an engineering background (Bio Med from GA Tech) and took advanced levels of calculus and differential equations in his undergraduate studies. We are all for math education.

That said, we are not pushing our kids through multiple levels of math a year to rush them to “advanced” math. Why? I don’t think most kids benefit from moving through math quickly. Sure, some kids are all about math and eat it up — cool. Most kids, however, want to finish the math lesson and have time to do whatever it is they enjoy doing.

I don’t see the need to push for “rigorous” or “advanced” math in elementary school. We want our children to have a solid math foundation with a deep conceptual understanding. Math does not have to feel hard for it to be a quality foundation. What is the deal with “rigor” anyway? Why are we pushing young children into early math? What is the end goal?

Our Homeschool Math History

We’ve tried so many things, and I am sticking with Math With Confidence + Beast Academy Online. You can read about my math curriculum thought process here. An incomplete list of math programs we have tried:

Singapore Dimensions PreK-1st
Singapore Earlybird K
Singapore Primary 2022 K-2nd
Math With Confidence K-3
Beast Academy (online & paper)
Miquon Math
Life of Fred
Mathematical Mindsets K-2nd

Ultimately, I swang between Singapore math programs and Math With Confidence. Initially, I was concerned that MWC wasn’t a good fit for my oldest. He has an engineering brain, and I drank the Kool-Aid about the “rigor” of Singapore math.

Here’s the thing, though: through working with my own kids and with consulting clients, I have found that many (not all) students have had better retention of skills, conceptual understanding, and mental math coming from MWC than from Singapore. I value MWC's spiral review, ease of use, and built-in games. We pair MWC with Beast Academy online for a combination approach. We use MWC as our spine and daily lessons. My kids love Beast Academy and do that for independent work time several times a week. I do not try to sync the two programs or schedule Beast into our lessons. Beast is merely available for them to choose as an independent school activity.