Overcoming Math Anxiety

This week's article summary is When Teachers Overcome Math Anxiety, Students Benefit, and it's dedicated to Jill, Becky, and Kerry.

As you’ll see from the article, everything we have focused on over the past 6-7 years with respect to math is supported by research: deeper conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, problem solving, flexible thinking.

Like the slow food movement, Trinity embraces slow math: we take the time to have students truly understand math concepts and the reasons and ways they work. 

Even with disruption due to the pandemic, I have been so pleased with our professional development opportunities like the Embolden Your Inner offerings for parents and employees. The three top anxieties adults have are fear of math, writing, and public speaking.

And our students thrive in these areas when our faculty feel more confident and competent in all those areas. Anyone who has taken Jill’s Embolden Your Inner Math classes gains much more confidence in math and hence much more confidently teaches it to their students.

While we’re not a test-driven school, our commitment to and emphasis on deeper mathematical understanding and confidence has led to significant increases in our math standardized-test scores which are now far above the independent-school average. As an example, this year’s fifth grade scores on the two ERB math subtests were 11% and 12% above independent school averages!

Let’s keep up the great work!

Joe 

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For many students (and many adults), just hearing the word math can send a chill down their spine.

My first brush with math anxiety came in college. I had breezed through math from elementary through high school. Then I enrolled in calculus and hit a wall. I got my first F ever on a test. Nothing helped me understand. My very identity as a math person was rattled. I even considered changing my major so that I wouldn’t ever have to feel that way again.

Many adults I have spoken with said their math anxiety began with required timed tests in elementary school. They knew the answers, but their brains froze when up against the clock. Others remembered wanting to understand the why and not just the how, and receiving lackluster or even hostile responses. In particular, women and people of color I have spoken with expressed their frustration at being labeled bad at math because their ideas didn’t mirror what their teachers expected.

Without intervention, children who experience math trauma and math anxiety often grow up to become adults with these unresolved issues. Some may become parents who feel helpless when their child brings home math homework. Some may become teachers who feel powerless when their students don’t understand the content or make self-deprecating comments about not being a math person. Their pain gets passed to the children, and the cycle continues.

Math anxiety and math trauma are very real, are extremely debilitating, and have been studied for decades. Yet they persist. Why, and what can we do about it?

The math classroom that prioritizes rote memorization, meaningless algorithms, and speed must become a relic of the past, and those of us who learned in those classrooms must take a deep dive and hone our own conceptual knowledge. Students need procedural fluency and efficient problem-solving strategies, for sure, but these must be rooted in understanding why the math works, which means the adults need to know why the math works.

Methods of math instruction that focus on conceptual understanding may take longer than what we’re used to, but the positive results are well worth the time. The mysteries of fractions, integers, and variables, topics that often cause the greatest amount of distress, can all be unlocked by a solid understanding of arithmetic crafted in the early grades. This means allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and letting our guard down in front of students by encouraging their questions and being willing to admit that we may not have all the answers.

Several educators are on a mission to assist their colleagues in the math community. Graham Fletcher hosts a series of videos on his website breaking down the progression of math topics, including addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Math educator and author Pam Harris regularly posts problems on Twitter and welcomes others to find clever solutions to arithmetic problems. Everyone is invited to participate at their comfort level and share their reasoning. Howie Hua, a math instructor at Fresno State, regularly shares his experience teaching math to future elementary school teachers on Twitter.

We have the power to break the cycle of math trauma and anxiety. No one should ever feel terrified of math. Math should be a subject where the rules of logic are tested, and then tested again. When teachers have both a strong conceptual understanding of math and a strong confidence in their ability to do math, they will be able to pass those on to students.