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posted by mrpg on Monday November 05 2018, @02:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the pi≈3 dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday November 05 2018, @01:31PM (2 children)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday November 05 2018, @01:31PM (#757970) Journal

    I do think that they've gotten better at teaching basic math to kids. I help my kids with their homework and the books are teaching the right strategies to break problems down into easier steps. They have also introduced a weird element of vocabulary tests into the math books, which feels a little bit like English majors trying ton invade the math territory and render math, not-math. But let's be charitable and say they did studies and figured out that kids' inability to understand math ability was getting in the way of understanding the numbers.

    As adults who learned math the old-fashioned way, it's understandable why they might fear numbers. Math and numbers are used to control them and steal from them everyday. They don't know enough math to be able to figure out exactly how, but they feel it in their gut.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @02:55PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @02:55PM (#757992)

    It's a mixed bag. There's too much emphasis on understanding and not enough emphasis on doing. The result is that the students might understand, but if they can do it at all, they're very slow at things that become important as time goes by.

    There's also goofiness like repeat addition. There's that viral problem from a while ago that was something like 3x5=? and having to do 5+5+5 and not 3+3+3+3+3 or perhaps it was the other way around. This is wrong. Both of them are legitimate ways of thinking about the problem, even if it's better to think of the 3 units being stretched by a factor of 5 or 5 being stretched by a factor of 3.

    • (Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:15PM

      by hendrikboom (1125) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:15PM (#758517) Homepage Journal

      No point learning to do if you don't understand -- you'll never know in real life when to do it.
      Doing with understanding is a powerful combination.