Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @10:42PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @10:42PM (#758238)

    Get over yourself.

    There are life skills: Tying your shoes, adding money to your checking account, having friends, and evening having a conversation.
    There are deep thought skills... mathematics in one of them.

    You can be ass and not get it.

    I meet a college professor. many, many years ago at party... He had friends that would help get him dressed, made sure he ate, drove him to school, appointments and events... He was basically a non-functional human. Now they would take him parties, put him in corner, put a drink in hand and then seed the party with questions about CHAOS THEORY. That was the "coin" that brought out this man, this mind. He would light up and talk theory and patterns, problems left unsolved and go and go. He got me to think about the math world is left behind for computers. and actually write some fractal programs for the IBM PC (8086) in BASIC, taking an hour or so to graph the image on the green screens.

    YES, their are people that do basic math all the time in their with LARGE and small number of digits. Just because you assume others have the only skill you have for basic numbers is a DIV-0 eror on your part.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:34AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:34AM (#758400)

    Knowing your 10x10 times table isn't a deep skill it's routinely done by grade school students. If you haven't done it by 4th grade there's something wrong. People all over the world routinely learn and use basic arithmetic on a daily basis.

    I'm sorry that you're suffering from such an obvious intellectual disability, but that doesn't change the fact that this is a necessary life skill.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:38PM (#758568)

      Go and look up school house rock and why it came to exist

      Mean sit down and shut up