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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @05:36PM
Nice string of ad hominems you've got there. God forbid you actually make a valid point.
And yes, people are refusing to learn their times tables. There's only 144 entries in the 12x12 times table and 100 in the 10x10 table. If you literally learn one per day and don't take advantage of the commutative property of multiplication it would literally take less than a school year. That's a school year, it's not even a calendar year. Are you seriously telling me that there's this epidemic of people who can't learn through some method 1 of these facts a day who isn't profoundly disabled?
This is basic arithmetic here, it's something that people should be using on a more or less daily basis. It's not a high standard to meet and people in countries not called the USA are just expected to be able to do it because it's not acceptable to not be able to manage it. This is a bar that's only somewhat higher than what other animal species can achieve.