Old article but a good one, I think. I can't stand people who spread this virus, especially in the presence of kids.
Some of the kids I've encountered who are "bad at math" (really, its just poor numeracy and being dependent on a calculator) seem to actually be just completely not resilient/have no wherewithal. Like they encounter a problem, can't figure it out on the first go, give up. Then ask for an explanation, but accept nothing less than a step by step walk through and then seem to be unable to generalize the walk through and give up. And then these kids have been so far behind for so long that, from what I've heard from teacher friends, they can't reasonably catch up to get back on to grade level in a year - and so the problem persists until they're in a work place and have to find the math guy or use chatgpt or google if they have some kind of math problem, or just estimate (usually pretty badly).
When I tutored math in like 2010-2014, the kids who were "bad at math" usually just needed to slow down and actually write down the steps. They didn't have much gumption because they had it in their heads that they weren't good, but they were willing to try (probably because they were willing to be tutored so whatever). I dunno why there seems to be such a difference over the last decade.
I just found it to be abstract and unsatisfying. I study history or sociology or whatever more, i understand the world I live in more, I study language ans I get better at reading and writing I study math and I get better at taking math tests. My sole motivation was to not have to repeat it. Then the last year I had to take a math class it was all science math that relates to irl shit and also not being expected to do arithmetic on paper or in my head also helped. I can understand a formula, where to apply it, what numbers to plug in and sometimes I've made up formulas to solve stuff irl, but i am BAD at calculating them. Things clicked for me when learning sine functions, the teacher actually bothered explaining what it's useful for in real life, even if it wasn't anything I was doing, knowing people out there were out there plotting sine functions and achieving real benefits outside of a math sheet made me actually give a fuck. Otherwise I just felt like I was putting the abstract idea of an amount through a thing that makes it the abstract idea of a different amount,
Earlier on there were some super out there ways we were forced to 'visualize math problems involving little coins thar were yellow on one side and red on another, I think red meant 10 and yellow meant ones and this was later elementary. Trying to get help from my folks with homework was exhausting for them cause they had to reverse engineer this weird shit into normal math. They had so many dumbass ways of approaching the same math problem that seemed cooked up by some mid 90s inner child gurus or something that doing math in a sorta normal way would get taught by my folks with what they remembered from school and then I'd fake the work I needed to show working backwards. Those were the teachers that didn't get mad at me for sucking at math. Don't even get me started on Around the World in 4th grade. The teacher had a book of math flash cards and we'd do one on one quick draw mental math against each other very publicly and one kid always just fucking swept, I didn't even try, that did teach me that sometimes there's greater reward in not trying. Winning didn't get you anything and trying made me stressed, the lesson is never try. Not really but it did teach me to examine a situation and determine a little more objectively whether I should have any mental stake in it. I didn't need to try to win at something I didn't wanna do that gained me nothing just because I was placed in a competition. That was useful, but they were trying to teach math
so true 90% of my tutoring was telling kids to, slow down, take it one step at a time and then nodding along saying "thats right/correct/absolutely/true/you got it!"
“Music class is where we take out our staff paper, our teacher puts some notes on the board, and we copy them or transpose them into a different key. We have to make sure to get the clefs and key signatures right, and our teacher is very picky about making sure we fill in our quarter-notes completely. One time we had a chromatic scale problem and I did it right, but the teacher gave me no credit because I had the stems pointing the wrong way.”
In their wisdom, educators soon realize that even very young children can be given this kind of musical instruction. In fact it is considered quite shameful if one’s third-grader hasn’t completely memorized his circle of fifths. “I’ll have to get my son a music tutor. He simply won’t apply himself to his music homework.
“To tell you the truth, most students just aren’t very good at music. They are bored in class, their skills are terrible, and their homework is barely legible. Most of them couldn’t care less about how important music is in today’s world; they just want to take the minimum number of music courses and be done with it. I guess there are just music people and non-music people. I had this one kid, though, man was she sensational! Her sheets were impeccable— every note in the right place, perfect calligraphy, sharps, flats, just beautiful. She’s going to make one hell of a musician someday.”
The way we teach math is wrong. Students are taught to memorize formulas instead of taught formulas to go in their toolbox to solve problems. And because K through 12 is all memorization and repetition, students then spend undergrad unlearning all the damage that's been done. Only when they're in upper division courses or graduate school do they get to do actual math.
If we taught music or art like we taught math, there would be fewer artists or musicians.
I am bad at math. I have dyscalculia. I CAN do math, but not in my head, and it takes longer.
Nobody is saying you can't be bad at math. The article is about how math is a subject in which people feel uniquely free to celebrate their difficulties, and what messages that conveys to children.
Right, but this article isn't about pedagogy. Whether math is taught "properly" or "improperly" in a given school, district or country, teachers of all subjects are engaged daily in persuading students to persevere when they encounter challenge.
This article is about how that effort can be especially frustrated in math because it's so common for parents (or other influential adults) to deal with the ego threat of not having been successful in their math class by announcing a strange pride in that fact. The message that can be conveyed when someone influential to children says "I never understood anything in mathbutInever had to use the quadratic formula in my life lol" is that math class doesn't really matter so who cares why try if it feels hard.
i dont think being unable to do math in your head means you're bad at math
omg i didnt know that was a thing
i was decent at math in highschool but i had to use a calculator for everything because i cant do even basic addition in my head
One of my majors was math and I swear people who already knew that would ask what i study just to tell me how much they hate math lmao. It really gets a bad rap from such an early age and it’s all down to how it’s taught imo. Once you connect the dots and realize the applications and beauty of the science it becomes an absolute joy to explore
Growing up during school, Algebra was gibberish to me and I didn't know why until college when I figured out I just never learned Algebraic expression notation
Since 8th grade I knew what a constant was and that was about it, so I never advanced beyond basic 2 + x = 5 type equations or intuitive chemistry equations; ask me what an integer or coefficient was and I'd give you a blank look, even to this day those words give me anxiety
My teachers were god awful and just angrily repeated formulas whose notations I didn't understand and since I didn't have a concrete conception of what notations are I couldn't articulate why I couldn't understand or memorize the formulas
Your problem with math is you had shitty teachers. I see this all the time in tech. It's almost a trope at this point. The angry IT tech who calls you names when you ask them a question? Yeah, that's just them compensating for their lack of knowledge.
I was terrible at maths until I stopped hanging out with physicists and mathematicians >.>
I did flunk out of Engineering math at uni, but that was more the severe depression
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Can someone explain to me how telling a child that my math is not up to snuff equates to anxiety in a child, beyond just stating ‘it hurts the children’?
research …..
Where the research?
Giving them the idea that "math" as a concept can be something you can choose to not engage in because "some people just aren't good at it". Like anything, it takes understanding and practice. It gives kids an out from grappling with challenging concepts and expanding their cognitive abilities
I vividly remember watching my classmates turn their brains off (through no fault of their own!) in real time when math or reading or even biology classes started later on. And say stuff like "I can't understand any of this", "it isn't even worth trying" etc.
This isn't to invalidate anybody's experience with dyscalculia or similar, or anybody that struggled for non-diagnosable reasons, but anything that builds up any subject as this unapproachable thing that you are predetermined to be good/bad at can rob a kid or adult of the opportunity to give it an honest attempt with a positive attitude.
My advice for parents or other role models is to say "I've forgotten how to do this" or "they didn't teach it like this when I was little" or even "i used to struggle with x subject" instead of saying "I am bad at/can't do x subject". It's a subtle difference, but for kids, it's not that they can't do it, they just haven't gotten it yet.
You’re just repeating the article, comrade. That’s no different than the writers statement.
The article says there’s research behind it, but I didn’t see where it was presented. Did I miss it somewhere?
Why can't you choose not to engage with math? I would say most adults require very little engagement with math. For most people, understanding and practice requires motivation. What motivates me to learn advanced mathematics? If you want to be a physicist or engineer I guess you'll be motivated to learn but for most people it just seems like a headache or waste of time.
The article doesn't link to any studies and that is sucky.
That said, when I have a question like that, it's a great opportunity to search for an answer!
My first stop is always Google Scholar (it really is the best, but the link tracking is anxiety-inducing) or Research Gate. In this case, you could search for "learned helplessness in math" or "teacher math anxiety effect on learning outcomes" or "do students inherit math anxiety from their teachers/parents/etc" or "learned helplessness in elementary/primary school". Keep adjusting your search terms and putting quotes around particular phrases until you find some answers!
I found one study that has a pretty good literature review at the beginning. They cite another study for each argument it makes. Try reading the abstract and the introduction:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325621246_Mathematics_Anxiety_Perceived_Mathematics_Self-efficacy_and_Learned_Helplessness_in_Mathematics_in_Faculty_of_Education_StudentsYou could rephrase that as "I haven't learned research skills yet" considering the discussion we are having, lol. Here is some info on how to research better!
Another thing you can do is go to a university or local library website or in person or call them on the phone and find their "research guides" section for the general topic of your question.
Lol, I was joking based on the topic. These links are significantly useful though, I do tend to over-rely on normal search engines.
Mainstream reporting is very bad at actually citing the works they're writing about but these three paragraphs are summaries of the research.
Anxiety over mathematics has been recognized as a grade killer. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel of the U.S. Department of Education has found that anxious students perform lower than their abilities. What’s more, there is growing evidence that mathematical anxiety can be passed on like a virus from teachers to students as well as from parents to children.
Girls are especially affected when a teacher publicly announces math hatred before she picks up the chalk. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that female — but not male — mathematical achievement was diminished in response to a female teacher’s mathematical anxiety. The effect was correlated: the higher a teacher’s anxiety, the lower the scores.
Parents’ mathematical anxiety can have a similar effect on their children. Researchers observed that children who received math homework help from mathematically fearful parents showed weaker math achievements than their peers, which in turn resulted in increased math anxiety for the children themselves.
If by "where's the research" you mean where are the actual papers, they're not that hard to find, i got these two in like 2 minutes of searching just copy pasting the quoted journals with some extra words in there
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8240551/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0910967107
(edit: not to say i'm faulting you for not immediately getting what they mean by "research says no", science communication really is in the dumpster; a regular ass person that has a passing interest in something really has to do this extra homework and trawl these papers that were never meant for them to read to get at the good bits which should have been in the reporting itself)
Maths is very frustrating to me but honestly it was kinda fun to solve a problem logically. It gave me the same smile as solving a puzzle.
I did badly in high school physics because I was totally disinterested in the “just plug in the numbers” approach my teacher used. I signed up for the course because I was fascinated by the theoretical side; it was disappointing, to say the least.
I stuck with my extracurricular book reading about the Big Bang and star formation and string theory (for laypeople). I joined the physics program at university despite my poor mark in high school. The first year was organized very well at this university because it’s heavy on the “wow that’s neat” and philosophy of physics courses which inspire people to learn more. The rest of the time was immensely challenging but perhaps the most rewarding period of my life.
Humans crave understanding and narrative. Mathematics have to be explained in this way too, not with equations but with a story. Anyone can appreciate math in the right environment.
I think it would help kids if we teach maths in tandem with the applicable science it is used in. Most kids find it too abstract to bother. I mean why not have an engineering or more advanced chemistry class in like High and Middle School.
I remember my class asking my 8th. grade algebra teacher "When are we going to use this?" regarding some complicated formula and him smugly replying "Never again for the rest of your lives."
Then I got to college and had to take physics with calculus and it turns out, those formulas came from trying to solve actual problems. Some of them are used to find the integral for the mass of a weirdly shaped object, like a meteor. My 8th. grade teacher was just an asshole who probably killed dozens of children's interest in math.
I'm bad at math but I love it. It's like puzzle solving. Yeah puzzles are kinda supposed to stump you, but once you get that "aha" moment, it's frickin amazing.
