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Why is math anxiety so widespread?


Pi(e)

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I just recently got back from a math summer program where we spent 8 hours a day doing math for 6 weeks.  They don't teach at all like in school, but instead give you problems that allow you to search for patterns and figure things out yourself, so it's so much fun.  We learn about so many different fields of math, including number theory, set theory, graph theory, probability, algebraic topology (one of my favorites), Turing Machines, a bit of complex analysis, and many other things.

 

Also, it's not boring.  It's attended and staffed by some of the most quirky and creative people around.  Yellow pigs and the number 17 are a really big deal (which is why July 17th is national yellow pigs day, and also why we have an 11:17 quiet time as well as other stuff), and we also do other silly things, like talk about how to connect houses to essential facilities which include water, electricity, and chilled cucumber soup.

 

After I got back  -- I was really sad to be back --, I was rereading this book that I really like, called The Anybodies.  For the most part, the book is really fun and creative, but then I was bothered when the author had one of the characters go off to math camp as evidence of how plain and boring he was.  Because so many people seem to hate math and think it's boring.  Actually, in my experience, in order to remain in math and be much good, you need to be rather quirky and pretty far from mainstream (or just overly into math competitions), because that's just how much general society seems to be against mathematics.  I guess it's taught really badly in school, but still, why do so many people just hate math? For example, there's this great book, Math Girls, that I really like, which is actually a best seller in Japan, but in the United States, people would be scared of it.  Whyyyy?!

 

Anyway, sorry this turned into kind of a rant, but if anyone has any ideas why, or just likes math and would want to talk about it that would be awesome!

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Grumpy Alien

I get math anxiety because I find it extremely difficult. When I'm forced to do something I don't enjoy and struggle to complete, I get anxious.

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I think a lot of it comes down to how it's taught.  All too often, the early levels are taught as memorization (and rote memorization tends to be boring), and then you get beyond basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and they don't really get into the real world applications of it anymore, so people start thinking not only is it boring and hard, but also that there's no practical value to it, so why do they need to know it if they're not going to be an engineer or something like that?  Obviously, if someone takes more time to look into it, it's a lot neater and more useful than that, but many people don't.

 

Oh, and if you haven't read it already, I'd recommend reading The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow if you're looking for enjoyable, approachable book that talk about statistics.

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Many elementary school teachers dislike math.  So when they have to teach math, they dislike it.  Their dislike (or lack of enthusiasm) gets passed to the students.  Thus, the students dislike math.  By the time these students encounter teachers in older grades that chose to teach math because they like it, the students are already under the impression that math is tedious and something to be dreaded.  This is one theory I read about somewhere.  I'm sure there are other factors as well.  

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I think because it doesn't come naturally to very many people. Even science seems to be more commonly adored than math - but I think the greater percentage of people are into the artistic things - painting, photography, music, literature - or the athletic things, like running, competitive sport, etc. That's how it appears to me anyway. As someone who's always struggled with math, I can just say that it's not that I hate math...It's that I don't like being forced to deal with something I don't understand. When I had a really fantastic teacher, I did like math well enough - not like 'I could do this forever,' but 'hey, this isn't so bad, after all'  An excellent teacher really does make a difference.

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NerotheReaper

As someone with a learning disability, math is one of my weakest subjects. I have always struggled with it a lot, but I know I do have the ability to learn it. It takes longer, and with the education system at least in the United States aren't concerned about students understanding concepts they try to cram as much information as possible. So instead of having a few chapters taught very strongly and focused on, you are learning something new every week. It can be overwhelming. Plus for 99% of math in my experience it was all about memorization not on how to apply it to the real world. Plus classrooms are often crammed so the teacher can't always help students who need help, and with math it is different than teaching history or art. And if someone needs help teachers don't always help, in the sense of trying to figure out how to help the student learn not just repeating the same thing over and over. People learn differently and teachers should try to figure out how to help the students in a way that makes sense to them. 

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RoseGoesToYale

My math anxiety traces back to bullying by a math teacher in elementary school, which basically turned me off from math for years. My teachers since then couldn't figure out what in everliving hell was making me so bad at math. It wasn't until high school I got a trig teacher who was just done with everything that I realized math wasn't evil. He started each class saying "This is easy, all of this is easy", and it really was.

 

I realize now that math must harrowing to teach (and learn) in the US. The standard is basically that math happens on paper, is assessed on paper, and is learned entirely verbally and on paper, with no room for any deviation from this because... standardized testing. But in the real world, math doesn't just happen on paper with no satisfying end. When an architect does math, they get a super cool looking building out of it. When a doctor does math, they help the life of another person. When a physicist does math, people can go to the moon! But all students get out of it is more paper and more unrelated problems, and the teachers have to grade the same problems over and over again. Math has the potential to be so much more than that. Until the US allows a more creative way to teach it, students and teachers are going to be disengaged.

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SorryNotSorry

I think a lot of people confuse math anxiety and math phobia with dyscalculia.

 

Unfortunately there's no shortage of people who've never heard of dyscalculia, and even if someone was to tell them about it, they'd say such a thing is impossible.

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A mere monkey

After having the absolute worst math teacher in existence it kinda made me quit. I mean, not that I always liked math (depending on the type of math, I would enjoy it more or less), but that was the last nail on the coffin.

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I posted this video in a similar thread here, but it may be a good idea to repost it:

 

Spoiler

 

 

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No phobia here.

 

I didn't like it because I couldn't relate. The moment some topic was introduced to us, I KNEW I'd never need it ever again. That's where my brain switched off. It was a waste of time; I'd rather have practiced languages instead.

 

I don't have any data on the occurance of phobia though. Will get in touch with a friend who is a math teacher :)

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Perfectly Pointless

For me it's an anxiety based on the fact that numbers just don't work in my head. It used to take me longer than other people in my classes to learn formulas and such, and if there was any slight change in the way the question was asked, I had to learn it as though it was an entirely new formula, for example most people would be able to answer any trig question, but I only know the basic tan formula and can't do anything other than that. 

 

The other issue I have is because it just doesn't come naturally to me, I have to keep doing it or I forget very quickly. Since I dropped maths last year, I don't think I could do any maths question besides addition, subtraction, and VERY basic multiplication and division. So learning maths for me was always a chore, because I would learn something new and then forget the old stuff and have to re-learn it when revision time came around. This happened like, every year for 5 years. You can see why I get bored of it.

 

I make fun of my mathematical ineptness most of the time, but it's really inconvenient more than anything. I've noticed it more recently as I've got a job as a cashier and I frequently give incorrect change, and if a customer pays a large amount of money in loose coin change I get very stressed and it takes me ages to count it up, I'll loose count and have to start over sometimes. I also can't tell the time on an analog clock (i have to have a special digital clock on my desk in exam halls or I lose track of time and mess up my exams). If I key in the wrong amount of cash at work (I do this frequently) -say, I take £20 but tell the till I have £40, the till will balance this out as long as you give the customer correct change, but you have to work out the correct change as it thinks you should be giving them change from a different amount. I have to call colleagues for help when this happens because I can't work it out in my head, and they can work it out mentally in a matter of seconds which makes me very embarrassed. 

 

But yea, I'd say this is probably more common than people make it out to be. I would guess a lot of people avoid these situations and lie about being able to tell the time and such. I'm more of an English student myself, being an avid reader and writer. To compare my skill in the two subjects, I got a low GCSE level C for maths, compared to English Language, which I just got an A-level B grade in.

 

I have had some terrible maths teachers, though, so that probably does factor in somewhere. xD

(aand once again, I've typed a far longer reply than intended. sorry!)

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Re: giving change

 

I recommend counting the change upwards. Say the bill is 7,45 and you get a tenner. So you give them 5 pence to make 7,50, another 50 pence to make it eight and two pounds to get to ten. That's how I mimimize the margin of error :) maybe this could work for you. Or do you just lose track of where you have been in the count? Hm.

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Probably not the same reason as everyone else here but I'm Asian and I get super anxious about being asked to do maths because I've had so many bad experiences with the stereotype of "Asians being good at maths". Even now, my brain freezes up and I get nervous about trying to split a bill in a restaurant - I end up feeling the need to say, "please don't make me calculate this, I can't, I'll pay whatever is left." 

 

If I'm honest, I was never terrible at maths at school. I was kind of average / slightly below average, but my grades were fine. I got by because I studied. My biggest weakness was that I was very slow at mental maths (I find it difficult to visualize concepts and numbers without writing them down), but I was expected to be good - and fast - at maths and compared to those expectations I sucked at it. People would respond to my perfectly normal mistakes with insults and things like "You got that wrong? But you're Asian!" or ask me to calculate something or give me a heavily numerical role in group work because I'm Asian - which I would then proceed to fuck up or do too slowly and then I'd get blamed for bringing the group down.

 

I just couldn't handle it... along with my parents insisting that Maths was the most important subject, it's left lasting damage. I ended up focusing on arts and humanities (to their utter disappointment), which tbh, I was also only really average at. It just felt like less pressure because I wasn't exactly expected to excel in those.

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On 8/21/2017 at 1:24 AM, Pi(e) said:

After I got back  -- I was really sad to be back --, I was rereading this book that I really like, called The Anybodies.  For the most part, the book is really fun and creative, but then I was bothered when the author had one of the characters go off to math camp as evidence of how plain and boring he was.  

Pi(e), I can relate to that, I often find characters being pegged as "dull" to be really appealing to me and it grates.

As for maths phobia, I think one of the issues is that maths problems tend to have a RIGHT and WRONG answer - like giving change as a real world application.  It's very obvious when you've got it wrong, and that can be off-putting.

Education is also a big issue (and standardised tests certainly do nothing to help).  

 

On 8/21/2017 at 2:06 AM, Amathy said:

Many elementary school teachers dislike math.  So when they have to teach math, they dislike it.  Their dislike (or lack of enthusiasm) gets passed to the students.  Thus, the students dislike math.  By the time these students encounter teachers in older grades that chose to teach math because they like it, the students are already under the impression that math is tedious and something to be dreaded.  This is one theory I read about somewhere.  I'm sure there are other factors as well.  

This is probably very true, and the same is true of PE/sport in the early years of education, but actually I was told during my teacher training that you often teach subjects you struggled with BETTER than those you are confident in - because you understand how students could feel confused / not get it / panic.  I would certainly say that was true of me.

Another similarity between maths and PE teaching (surprisingly) is the way basic skills are not taught in an understandable way.  Students typically have been taught, say, "how to do long division" or "how to do a multiplication sum" without really understanding WHAT they were doing or why, in much the same way you might be given a racket and told to "play tennis", without ever being taught basic ball skills.  

Nowadays the idea is to teach a variety of methods to answer the same problem (like Homer's change counting suggestion)

 

On 8/21/2017 at 1:34 PM, Homer said:

I recommend counting the change upwards. Say the bill is 7,45 and you get a tenner. So you give them 5 pence to make 7,50, another 50 pence to make it eight and two pounds to get to ten. 

But fascinatingly children still panic when faced with a question in a test and do the same CRIKEY IT'S MATHS HELLLP thing a lot of us do as adults, and totally forget every single method they have ever been taught.  I think being "put on the spot" in any situation (compare practising speaking a foreign language to actually relying on it when needed abroad) has a similar effect, especially when we feel we've been "put on the spot" with a high probability of "being wrong" and "looking stupid".

Just my thoughts!  :D

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Wow, I feel like I have a lot more insight now on why so many people would dislike or be scared of math.  I'm lucky to have parents who can give me fun math problems, because I have always hated math in school, which really is just memorization and awful tediousness, which isn't really proper math at all in my opinion.
Right now I'm trying to design a mini lesson I could teach to middle school kids (around age 11), which would hopefully be fun or at least not scary and painful, and not require any knowledge of anything from school, except maybe to count.  The idea is just to teach kids how to draw stars.  First five pointed stars, then seven pointed stars, then letting them figure out how to draw more stars.  If anyone is interested, here's the trick I use for drawing a seven pointed star: draw seven points in a circle.  Start with a point, then connect it to the point two away from it.  Then connect that to the other point two away from it.  Then that one to the one two away, and so on until you get back to where you started.  Now you have a star.

 

Spoiler

WIN_20170824_124508 (2).JPG

 

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