Ten year old Quinn has got her SATs coming up next week. One area of weakness I've picked up on is her maths. She's said she doesn't "like it" but that must be as much to do with how it's taught at her school as anything else. Maths can surely be fun? I know I love it and it's always been my favourite subject at school and then, later, university.

Can you teach maths to somebody who isn't mathematically-minded though? Surely, yes, to a degree (just not degree level maybe). I've been trying to help Quinn recently but Karen has said I'm over doing it and can't expect people to understand things just because they come easily to me. I know this and have tried to keep it as simple as possible. While we've had some success with fractions and negative numbers, we're not doing so well with equations.

One question from her test paper consisted of a table of numbers and formulas. For each value you had to work out "n" for each corresponding formula. One pairing was formula 5n-2 and the value 38.

The fact it was in tabular form maybe confused her. So I told it was just like the equations we'd been talking about a few days before. At that time I thought she'd got the idea of basic algebra, but she still looked confused when I wrote down the problem like this:

I've tried equating (ha ha) equations to a balanced sea-saw. The bits on either side of the equals sign need to balance out and always be equal. From there, I explained as simply as possible that, with the above equation, we have to simplify it down to the point where we have nothing but n on one side of the sea-saw. So we then know n=??. To do this we get rid of all the number. We get rid of the -2 by adding +2 to each side. I'll say to her: look what happens if we add two more to both sides. The sea-saw is still balanced and the equation becomes:

She sees that things cancel out and that it can be re-wrtitten as:

Similarly, I'll tell her, we can get rid of the *5 by dividing both sides by 5. Like so:

The times by 5 and divide by 5 on the left cancel out to give:

To me this is simple. Maybe not entirely intuitive but certainly easy to grasp. The kind of thing I do in my head without a second thought. I can see that it might be confusing though and try to assume nothing. Another approach I took was to say we could move things from one side to the other to try and get "n" alone on one side. When you move something to the other side it has the opposite effect. Move -2 over and it's a +2. Move *5 over and it's /5. You can demonstrate this with real numbers - explaining that 5-2=3 is still true when we write it as 5=3+2.

Half the problem is getting her to start using scrap paper and a pen to "visualise" the problems. Instead she will struggle to do it in her head. The other half of the problem is that she take the defeatist's approach of assuming it must be hard and so not even worth trying to work out. As she keeps reminding me, I'm thirty and she's ten. What I showed her yesterday was this equation from my university maths course-work, from when I was twenty. This, I told her, is "adult maths". What she's trying to do is not.

Luckily she didn't ask what it meant as I have no idea whatsoever. It's amazing what you forget you once knew. One day in the future I will have no idea what half of this Domino stuff was all about. Hopefully.