SoylentNews

Think You're Bad at Math? You May Suffer From 'Math Trauma'

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

upstart writes:

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

• Re:I've observed it Re:I've observed it (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @02:56PM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @02:56PM (#757993)

  3) Multiplication doing Addition repetitively.
  4) Division doing Subtraction repetitively.

  I never really realized this until more than ten years after I took multivariable calculus. I knew it in theory, but I never applied it to common mental math problems:
  5%: take 10%, then divide by 2.
  12%: take 10%, then add 1% two times.
  142-59: subtract 60, then add 1; add 1 and subtract 1 from the initial problem (142-59 = 143-60).
  39*39: 40*40 (forty, forty times), then subtract 40 (forty, thirty-nine times or thirty-nine, forty times), then subtract 39 (thirty-nine, thirty-nine times), which is also 40*40 -80 +1.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	0		points
  Moderation		+1
  Insightful=1, Total=1
  Extra 'Insightful' Modifier		0
  Total Score:		1

• Re:I've observed it (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @03:27PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 05 2018, @03:27PM (#758003)

  You are VERY right... It is one of those things in early programming to find the fastest way to do something.

  Had two programmer working on 80186 trying to figure out how to quickly (fewest clock steps) to calculate the the position of the curosr on a 24x80 screen.

  So they where going to use MULT instruction to multiply by 80, and could not see how to speed it up. I looked a the Assemebler book (I was Z-80 ASM and IBM mini ASM knowledgeable.

  80 is 16 (2^4) * 5 (2^2 + 1)...
  Save ACC
  Shift left twice (x 4)
  Add saved back to ACC (+ 1)
  shift left 4 tiems (x 16)

  If i remember right 12 clocks total. The MULT function 5 to setup and 2 per 1, so X * 80 = 165 clocks.

  Parent