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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: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday November 05 2018, @05:27PM
Sounds about right. I had to retake pretty much all my advanced math courses in college twice (should've gone to a tutor way earlier).
My problem was that, the book would explain some way to solve for whatever/simplify whatever, and it would make sense. Couple example problems, okay I think I get it.
Then the assignment/test problems would be 3 times as complicated to solve, and half the time my efforts at simplification wouldn't actually get anywhere. Sometimes you can't tell if the simplification will actually work until you get to the last step and everything collapses and cancels out.
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That, plus fairly frequently I wouldn't "get" the crucial logical step of how you connected one concept to the next. "Okay, so we do blah blah blah...but why?" And the teacher would give you an explanation that made sense to them, of course, because they know how the entire puzzle fits together. But they teach you one concept at a time, which literally involves lying to the student a lot of the time to keep the complexity down for the moment, then they yank the rug out from under you later "well actually that assumption you've been working on so far is something you have to work out for yourself each time."
And yes, fortunately programming has very little to do with advanced math unless you're writing a graphics engine or some other from-scratch project. Libraries--and not having too much pride to use them--are great.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"