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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 cubancigar11 on Monday November 05 2018, @06:13AM (5 children)
I had the shittiest female teacher who just couldn't be bothered with teaching boys, so she would routinely make all the 'trouble-makers' i.e. all the boys stand outside for the whole class. I never noticed that gender side of it, and so I never complained about it, and my parents readily believed that I was just a bad student. Fortunately I had dedicated mother so I never flunked, like a lot of the other boys. When I reached 16, my father told me something that made me actually like math and I ended up being an engineer. He said, "Math is not a different thing, it is just a language in which God has explained about the universe."
It is so important to have good parents. I, of course, still suck at probability, but it is because I have realized that learning math is a process - you have to solve and solve and you will keep solving but since I haven't solved a math problem in decades, I suck at it. But I still love it. It is how universe is.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday November 05 2018, @04:32PM
Wait, is *this* where your disdain of women comes from? Yer Freudian slip is falling off...!
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Monday November 05 2018, @07:44PM (3 children)
You too with the group punishments? Anybody else here? What time period was it?
For me it was during the late 80s, when I was in elementary school. They made the boys sit with our heads down on our desks during recess instead of standing in the hall during class.
Azuma's response to your comment is hilarious. She will never admit that anti-democratic evil lurks in feminism outside of her Emmanuel Goldstein-like "TERFs."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @10:53PM (1 child)
It called Military Training, or Football (or other team sports). If one makes a mistake all are punished (and some time praised). The goal is to get the team to control selves and work together, supporting the "weakest" to improve. Generally it works well, but sometimes its just makes it worst. se: "You cannont handle the truth!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 06 2018, @04:03PM
Yes, military training for boys and perks and privileges for girls. Sports team mentality for boys during math class. Maybe we need to implement group punishments for girls and treat them like they're on a sports team and prepare them for the military instead if we want cisfemale programmers. You just keep sowing the wind, feminist; the whirlwind is coming. You are nothing more than a transparent bigot. Roe v. Wade is going away, and you have nobody except your own self and 53% of white women to blame. You will understand this after you discorporate and spend some time in hell preparing to come back as a black boy in Africa, South America, or the Middle East, probably destined to be killed when he reaches "military age" for no other reason than being assigned the male at birth.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday November 06 2018, @05:21AM
I ignore her. She is like a leaking trumpet.