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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: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @03:43AM
Calculators are dangerous. This is a really good example of something you shouldn't be doing without having the ability to estimate an approximate result. If you can't estimate an approximate result, how do you know the result is correct? You could have entered a wrong number. On rare occasions I've had my TI calculator give me wrong answers due to memory corruption. And the problem wouldn't go away until I reset the calculator. If I didn't have a roughly back of a napkin estimate for what a reasonable answer would be, I'd have no idea that it was off.
Calculators more generally speed complex calculations up, but they don't care about what the result is and if you're not there to sanity check the inputs, then you have no way of knowing if the result is correct.
I'm not personally completely against the use of calculators, I'm against the use of calculators without having a basic grounding in whatever you're using it for.