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If you've ever had to help your child with math homework, you really appreciate their teachers, who do it every day. "Math anxiety" isn't something only kids experience.
Maybe you haven't seen an algebra formula in years, and weren't that comfortable with them when you were a student. Maybe you're a skilled mathematician, but don't know how to explain what you're doing to a child. Whatever the case, math homework can leave parents feeling every bit as frustrated as their children. Homework doesn't have to lead to unpleasantness, though.
What I've learned through my own experience—as a teacher, a researcher, from helping my own children, and now watching my daughter work as an elementary school mathematics teacher—is that communication is (excuse the pun) the common denominator when it comes to making math homework a positive experience.
The National Science Foundation (NSF), where I work, is dedicated to research. We support scientists across the country who study learning and education systems. But we're also teachers at heart. On lunch breaks in the past, a group of us gathered to help our NSF peers with their own questions about how to help their kids learn math.
Do Soylentils have better tips, things that have really helped their own kids learn math?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday May 13 2017, @03:34PM
It's the teachers. Seriously -- many, many studies have shown it. As someone who taught secondary math and physics for a few years, I chatted with primary school teachers from time to time. I also encountered a lot of teachers for elementary and middle school math during certification, also at workshops and such. Many of them will just admit it openly -- even to another teacher they barely know. The fact that I taught high-school math and physics seemed to make them feel like they needed to "confess" they were "never good at it."
Primary teachers have math anxiety and pass it to students. As you point out, the very fact we have a term "math anxiety" is potentially a big part of the problem too. Why single out math that way? Now teachers "name" their own "disorder," and just accept it as if it's some sort of clinical condition. What's perhaps even worse is that they often propagate stereotypes: studies have shown that female teachers (as most primary school teachers are) who have high math anxiety tend to endorse attitudes with students that reinforce the stereotype that girls are worse at math. We often have debates about girls don't go into math-heavy STEM fields or whatever -- but to change that, we need to break the ridiculous cycle of "anxiety."