Try-It-Out Tuesday: “2 + 2” Replaces “Once Upon a Time” with Bedtime Math
When Laura Bilodeau Overdeck’s first daughter was old enough for a bedtime story, the ritual didn’t end with “happily ever after.” Instead, Overdeck added one tiny postscript, in the form of a math problem. It started out small — counting ears and legs on stuffed animals, for instance — and grew in complexity as her daughter got older. Overdeck (who has a degree in astrophysics and is married to a mathematician, it should be noted) continued the tradition with her second child, but didn’t realize that she was sitting on something more than a quirky family habit until her third child came along.
Jealous of his older siblings and their bedtime math challenges, the young son came into Overdeck’s room one night and started yelling that he, too, wanted a math problem.
“It made us realize we have a culture in our house where math is not this dry tedious thing,” Overdeck said. “In our house math is playtime, it’s leisure.”
It was a culture that other friends wanted to replicate in their own homes, so after a year of getting requests to put pen — or in this case, math problem — to paper, Overdeck launched Bedtime Math. She describes it as “a movement to get people to think of math the way they think of the bedtime story,” which in its current form is a website and a daily email. However, Bedtime Math the book hits bookstores this June, and Overdeck is excited for the possibility for growth.
“I think its time has come,” she said. “I recently learned that among U.S. undergrads, there are more kids majoring in leisure studies than all physical sciences put together. Who’s going to cure cancer? Who’s going to put a better antenna on the iPhone?”
Despite these lofty goals, Bedtime Math is not a lecture. The daily emails Overdeck creates center around a fun fact — a recent one told the story of how rubber bands came to be invented — and transition in to word problems for “wee ones,” “little kids,” and “big kids.” Overdeck doesn’t put age or grade brackets on the problems because she knows that there might be older kids struggling with basic math and young kids tackling problems that are meant for older grades. She also has readers who don’t fit into any grade at all.
“We have adults on our website who don’t even have kids and they just do it as a brainteaser,” she said. “We had an 80-year-old guy call our office and say he loves doing the math problems. They just want to keep their brain going.”
Overdeck doesn’t have any formal teaching training, but her career path has uniquely situated her to run an organization like Bedtime Math. The daughter of a public school teacher, she went to The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to get her MBA in order to help reengineer public schools. Instead, she got “sidetracked” into consulting for telecommunications companies — but this “sidetrack” afforded her an inside look at product development and the challenges that arise when companies ask consumers to adopt something new.
“I think the number one hurdle — and I remember hearing this — is people’s inertia. It is very hard to get people to break a habit or start a new habit,” she said. “We’re essentially asking them to start a new habit. It’s very hard.”
And yet, Bedtime Math has gotten an overwhelmingly positive response. Over 25,000 people have subscribed to Overdeck’s nightly emails, and 200 libraries have used Bedtime Math to put on math-themed pajama parties, complete with tangrams and dominoes. Overdeck suspects the success is tied to the fact that kids love anything that feels out of the ordinary — and once the kids are hooked, the parents are happy to follow along.
“Within days I had people write and say that their kids were bugging them for the math problem,” she said. “If a kid wants to do math, no parent is going to say no.”
