Cognitive: Yasmine's Reflexion blog on earliest maths experience.

   First I can say that mathematic is universal and almost the same everywhere no matter where you come from. Coming from a different country they have different method to teach math but it all have the same outcome.  When growing up from what I remember is that in primary school ( we do say primary school back in France, which includes 1st,2nd, 3rd grade etc..) a little different than here, we were taught math sometimes with tool that could help us better understanding it. We had plastic sticks that is called " batonnets" that comes in different color. And that was helping us with sorting colors and numbers. Basically lots of colorful small thing that could fit on our table to help us with our maths counting. Growing a little further we started doing the maths without the colors sorting thing as they assumed that we learn that before we moved the next level class.  On the one hand the teacher were awesome, they were taking their time explaining things to us making it fun to learn. On the other hand I started loosing interest in math because of one of my teacher that weren't really nice and patient when I reached high school.  She was never patient with those that didn't have the math brain to pick quicker what she was teaching and she was rather focusing on those that were making it easier for her. I eventually became very discourage about math and that has a big influence on my school because I felt like I was was incapable to do any math or any other math no matter how easy it is. I ended up understanding that as I was growing, i have had those problem in math because my teacher made me loose confidence in myself.  I can say that so far my math experience has been on and off good depending on the instructor.  Coming to America has made me realize that a lot of thing that I was capable of doing.  I think we can encourage the young children, seeking for solution, support them no matter what and redirect them instead of giving up on them when it gets difficult.  They need us.  From my own  math experience growing up, I wouldn't like to see any child feeling the way I felt when it comes to math.