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Submitted via IRC for chromas
Think you're bad at math? You may suffer from 'math trauma'
I teach people how to teach math, and I've been working in this field for 30 years. Across those decades, I've met many people who suffer from varying degrees of math trauma – a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics.
When people share their stories with me, there are common themes. These include someone telling them they were "not good at math," panicking over timed math tests, or getting stuck on some math topic and struggling to move past it. The topics can be as broad as fractions or an entire class, such as Algebra or Geometry.
[...] One of the biggest challenges U.S. math educators face is helping the large number of elementary teachers who are dealing with math trauma. Imagine being tasked with teaching children mathematics when it is one of your greatest personal fears.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @02:45AM (13 children)
Not really. As somebody who has been a math tutor for years and is currently working on a masters in teaching math, there's limited evidence to suggest that there are people out there that are "bad at math." There are some who have learning disorders or intellectual disabilities that negatively impact their math ability, but those individuals are much smaller in number than the people who are "bad at math." And they usually can learn it, if the material is properly presented and they're given adequate support. There is a point where some people just can't keep up without a lot of extra help and effort, but you're talking about something beyond calculus. And at that point, there's no reason for most students to study it as it's just not relevant for most people.
Most of the people who are bad at math, aren't, they've been on the receiving end of poor quality instruction or have been victimized by improperly trained and generally inept teaching.
An individual of typical intelligence or even somewhat low intelligence without an LD shouldn't have any issues getting through at least algebra and the pieces of pre-calculus relevant to every day living. Or should be able to do so with some extra assistance.
I've worked with people that are "bad at math" and only rarely have I had a student that might be bad at math. Most of the time there's an obvious explanation that comes back to either an LD or poor quality of instruction. Rarely, is it the case where I can't identify the likely presence of some sort of impairment that is more appropriately dealt with by a special ed professional.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Monday November 05 2018, @03:02AM (8 children)
When learning difficult fractions, I struggled: unfortunately I had a male teacher who spent his time looking down the tops of the girls who'd developed early and I got ignored.
Then I got to learning X over y when I couldn't do 1 over 2? With a teacher who just said "Ask your neighbour for help" because he was almost retired and couldn't be bothered teaching....
I had some good teachers and some crap teachers. For math, I had too many crap teachers.
Trauma? Yup. But a good tutor helped me some: enough to get me by.
A good teacher makes all the difference, but to me schools should go back to teaching math and reading above all (with reading the most important...too many kids are going to French class who can't fecking read. Stupid.
If you can read, you can teach yourself history, languages, science, even math. If you can't read, why are they teaching you French? So you can speak it but not read it? Stupid.
Too much stupidity in the people running the school system.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @05:25AM
Keep thinking about it. You'll figure it out.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by cubancigar11 on Monday November 05 2018, @06:13AM (5 children)
I had the shittiest female teacher who just couldn't be bothered with teaching boys, so she would routinely make all the 'trouble-makers' i.e. all the boys stand outside for the whole class. I never noticed that gender side of it, and so I never complained about it, and my parents readily believed that I was just a bad student. Fortunately I had dedicated mother so I never flunked, like a lot of the other boys. When I reached 16, my father told me something that made me actually like math and I ended up being an engineer. He said, "Math is not a different thing, it is just a language in which God has explained about the universe."
It is so important to have good parents. I, of course, still suck at probability, but it is because I have realized that learning math is a process - you have to solve and solve and you will keep solving but since I haven't solved a math problem in decades, I suck at it. But I still love it. It is how universe is.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday November 05 2018, @04:32PM
Wait, is *this* where your disdain of women comes from? Yer Freudian slip is falling off...!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday November 05 2018, @07:44PM (3 children)
You too with the group punishments? Anybody else here? What time period was it?
For me it was during the late 80s, when I was in elementary school. They made the boys sit with our heads down on our desks during recess instead of standing in the hall during class.
Azuma's response to your comment is hilarious. She will never admit that anti-democratic evil lurks in feminism outside of her Emmanuel Goldstein-like "TERFs."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @10:53PM (1 child)
It called Military Training, or Football (or other team sports). If one makes a mistake all are punished (and some time praised). The goal is to get the team to control selves and work together, supporting the "weakest" to improve. Generally it works well, but sometimes its just makes it worst. se: "You cannont handle the truth!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:03PM
Yes, military training for boys and perks and privileges for girls. Sports team mentality for boys during math class. Maybe we need to implement group punishments for girls and treat them like they're on a sports team and prepare them for the military instead if we want cisfemale programmers. You just keep sowing the wind, feminist; the whirlwind is coming. You are nothing more than a transparent bigot. Roe v. Wade is going away, and you have nobody except your own self and 53% of white women to blame. You will understand this after you discorporate and spend some time in hell preparing to come back as a black boy in Africa, South America, or the Middle East, probably destined to be killed when he reaches "military age" for no other reason than being assigned the male at birth.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:21AM
I ignore her. She is like a leaking trumpet.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @10:13AM
I went to a high ranked private school and that is what they mostly taught - reading and writing. Even the non reading and writing classes, you were expected to read books outside the textbooks, many primary texts. Eg., reading On the Origin of Species for biology class, then write a term paper comparing it with Lamarckism in the context of scientific thought of the time.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Whoever on Monday November 05 2018, @04:04AM (3 children)
So, let's start with the assertion that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
In my personal experience, what made the difference was not the quality of teaching, but the attitude of the teachers. I started doing well in school when I dropped many subjects (as was normal in the UK) and I found myself with a set of teachers who didn't care whether you played rugby or not. When teachers tell you that you are smart and can achieve good results, you are more likely to succeed.
Being told by teachers (mainly a couple of teachers) for several years that we (my class group) were a bunch of poor students did not help academic performance. I think that my later success at math was due to my personal belief in my abilities. Having achieved very mediocre results at "O" level (national exams taken at around age 16 in the UK), I surprised many teachers by achieving the highest overall results of my year at "A" level (national exams taken at around age 18, just before leaving high school). Those teachers still didn't acknowledge my success because I didn't play rugby.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @04:31AM
The teacher's attitude is a part of the quality of teaching that the teacher provides the students. I can't remember who said it, but it really is true that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. It doesn't matter how much you know and how good your methods are if the students get turned off by a shitty attitude. It's actively demotivating. Now, having a good attitude isn't necessarily enough, but if you've got a good attitude, the students are more likely to seek out additional resource and ask questions to try and bridge the gap.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @10:19AM
I had a university math professor ask me "Are you retarded?" while handing back calculus tests.
He was a really good teacher. I thought it was funny.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Monday November 05 2018, @02:33PM
There is no such thing as "being smart". Any sort of intellectual achievement requires a lot of work, and you won't find enough time to master everything. So it's worthwhile to focus on things that really interest you. But if teacher is being a jerk who is convinced that math is some sort of magic inaccessible to mere mortals you'll never learn anything from him without suffering a disproportionate amount of stress.