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55% think so. The other 60% disagree.
For me, I had a bad algebra teacher. He’d yell at you. I was nervous enough doing work on the board in front of everyone, I didn’t need someone yelling at me.
Is math anxiety strictly an American phenomenon?
For me it was crap teachers in elementary school who didn’t make the subject interesting. Instead they just pounded it into us repeatedly*. By the time I got to junior high I was sick to death of general math (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). I was getting crap grades in math because I was sick of it. In high school they put me into my first algebra class which was different and then I got straight A’s in it.
I want to add that it wasn’t until my mom showed me the patterns that numbers make that I was able to memorize the multiplication tables and find it slightly interesting.
For a lot of my students it is really difficult. It’s like learning a language or playing a musical instrumment. I can’t find a common issue other than their brains seem to have a hard time keeping track of the “locations” of numbers as they move through steps.
My suspicion is that there are a lot of elementary school teachers out there who aren’t particularly great at math, and because they aren’t great at it, all they can teach is rote memorization and chunking through an algorithm. That’s boring, and students’ grades depend on their ability to memorize a seemingly random collection of facts - or on their ability to grasp the underlying concepts without much help.
Math isn’t English. It’s effectively another language, and it’s extremely unforgiving; unlike English where you don’t have to get everything right to use it usefully, math does, in fact, need everything to be right.
To steal from Chekhov; people who are good at math are all the same, but people who are bad at math are bad at it in different ways. Any interference in your pickup of math and you fall behind and the whole thing is frustrating, and a lot of things cna interfere:
- Bad teacher
- Curriculum not aligned with the way you learn
- Missed a period of time in school
- Weak working memory
- Dyslexic
- Undiagnosed eyesight problem
- Behavioural issue
- A bazillion other things
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My suspicion is that there are a lot of elementary school teachers out there who aren’t particularly great at math, and because they aren’t great at it, all they can teach is rote memorization and chunking through an algorithm.
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That’s not really a function of being bad at MATH. That’s a function of being bad at TEACHING.
You don’t need to be a whiz mathematician to understand fourth grade math. You need to be a whiz educator to help every one of your 27 students. Someone who really understands teaching but never took math past high school will do just fine in that scenario; someone who has a Fields Medal and knows crap about teaching will fail catastrophically.
Almost all the worst teachers I ever had were in university, and yet, of course, they were subject matter experts by definition, to an extent no public school teacher ever was… except for my Grade 12 chemistry teacher. She was a Ph.D. who’d decided to leave academia and become a high school teacher, worked better with her family. (I’d lived across the street from them for years.) So if any teacher was going to prove that being a good teacher can be done through high command of the subject matter, she could do it. She was a terrible teacher, as it turned out. Nice lady, knew chemistry, couldn’t teach.
It’s not just math. We have an ignorance culture. I don’t know what the rest of the world is like but I can’t imagine many other societies scorn education the way we do. I recall some talking head saying this was historically built into our culture, a distrust of ‘eggheads’ that faded after WWII with the success of the Manhattan Project but pride in know-nothingness has slowly returned.
I have seen this often times in my life, people believe school is a form of punishment, reading is boring, no one needs to know that stuff, people who know stuff are snobs…
Now I’m a math idiot. I don’t know why I have such a hard time with it, but I know that’s something about me and not the math.
Because it is hard for a fair portion of the population.
I’ve never had a hard time with math, but I did go to a college that focused on art. Since they hand out bachelor’s degrees, even the artìstés had to take college level math. It was fascinating to see them fail to even do simple addition. 1+1 doesn’t only not equal 2, it was closer to one+newspaper=rutabaga. Numbers don’t mean anything.
It was humorous and purely academic there. I had the same problem working at a retail art supply store. We attracted artists as employees and they had problems with things like measuring and register transactions.
I don’t know if the hard-wired problem could be alleviated with better schooling. If you don’t fully grasp the digits standing in for quantities, everything about mathematics means nothing.
It’s not just the United States. There are many people in Canada who are also bad at math.
I think we have been cursed with several generations of teachers who are bad at math, and who don’t understand how to teach math, passing on their fear and incompetence to children.
Throw in the current school of thought to focus on “competencies” instead of actual learning and it gets even worse.
Now don’t get me wrong – competencies are a useful and increasingly necessary skill, but you need to have students who are already comfortable with math and have mastered the basic skillsets before you start introducing all the interesting and fun games you can play with math.
-Dyscalculiac
(I strongly suspect I have dyscalculia myself).
A math professor named Paul Lockhart wrote an essay some years ago called “Lockhart’s Lament” that talks about why students dislike math in the US. It’s pretty much spot-on.
As a data point, I’ve been one of those “bad at math” people my entire life. In reality, what that means is that I didn’t pick up on the arithmetic or calculations quite quickly enough to get good grades. Something about numbers and letters on a page was too abstract for me to really get a handle on.
However, I blew geometry away like it was the easiest class I ever took. And computer programming (essentially a sort of applied math skill) is something I’m relatively good at as well. So I’m not actually bad at “math”, I’m just bad at the calculation part.
Back when I was in elementary school in the 70’s my parents were unable to help me because of the ‘new math’ they were teaching us that my parents had never been exposed to. I really didn’t understand the logic at the time because math was math and that was how it was done.
Then my youngest managed to get caught up in one of the math classes where they were taught something totally different than the way I learned. I did manage to sus out what they were doing, but it was about as far from intuitive as I could imagine being possible. So more ‘new math’ for a new generation.
Fortunately she got into some nice calculus and trig where math is still math.
Is there anyone that
Not only is math difficult, but the society reinforces it. People hate math and then promote the view that math is awful, and when a student learns math already with the expectation that it will be awful, it is self-reinforcing and the student’s confirmation bias is confirmed and he hates math all the more.
And also a society that ridicules or sneers at people who are good at math, or actually praises math illiteracy, or bad math skills, as an outright virtue.
All of this creates a society in which only people who really love math, will truly pursue it.
Bump, thanks for that wonderful essay!
I must admit to taking great issue with Lockhart’s Lament. His analogy between fine arts and mathematics is facetious; while they certainly share many similarities, the fact of the matter remains that mathematical literacy is a fundamental cornerstone of modern society. You cannot have a school system that essentially lets students doodle as they please in their math classes and relies on talent and drive to sort out the rest. Society would still function were an entire generation of tone-deaf, hopelessly inept painters to be born, but it would crumble very quickly were an entire generation to learn no math at all.
Math may be an art, but Lockhart is far too quick to forget that it is also a tool, and a very necessary one at that, and that there are plenty of people who loathe math that must nevertheless learn a very great deal of it due to their occupation. Pretending that we can simply do away entirely with the formalistic approach to mathematical education is simply refusing to deal with reality and necessity.
Math was painful.
So, I got a liberal arts degree. Which put me at the front of the line at the unemployment office.
I became an electrician. And decided I wanted to be an electrical engineer.
Went back to school. Math 99, 101, 105 and geometry. Very painful.
Then I took calculus. And it all came together. Algebra is the language of calculus. And it all had meaning. I spoke the language!
Math rocks!
Thanks for sharing that essay.
I posit that people who have genuine math skills and a love of mathematics tend to end up in lucrative mathematics-needing careers, leading teachers to be drawn disproportionately from the ranks of people who avoided math in school.
Tvtropes makes a similar point about writers.