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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 acid andy on Tuesday November 06 2018, @03:01PM
Whilst it's true I'm not the fastest ever at mental arithmetic and my memory's not the strongest, having to often stop to re-look up mathematical methods and formulae, none of that has really held me back too far in mathematics.
What I struggle with is when a lecturer or teacher is explaining a very advanced topic and they start to skip out steps in the explanation. I think usually it's because they assume a certain grounding in their students' prior mathematical knowledge of the simpler topics, so presumably they would feel the bits glossed over are obvious. That's not a good teacher though. The best teacher takes the time to state the obvious because when a problem is broken down such that every part of the explanation is obvious, the whole thing becomes easy to grasp. Pretty much all operations in physics and mathematics can be understood in terms of basic arithmetic--addition, subtraction, multiplication (and a few look up tables like trig. functions and square root)--if only someone bothers to be thorough in their explanation of them. To put it another way, don't be too quick to dismiss the "Dummies" books--they were onto something!
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.