Why are we afraid of math?

One of the things that I love about living in the Twin Cities is our community education program.  You want to learn to swim? There are classes.  You want to learn to speak a different language? Check.  Need to learn how to write a will? Check.  A class on Czech Kolaches? There are more than one. Hundreds of classes are available. Amongst the ads for cooking and gardening and Spanish classes, I saw the following course description.

I have mixed feelings about this.  My first reaction is that I'm happy that this class exists for people who want to improve their math skills.  However, the wording troubles me.  Literacy training is approached in a different way than mathematics.  Many who are illiterate are afraid to admit it, whereas a fear of, or self-proclaimed incompetence in, mathematics can be joked about.  It's almost cool to talk about how bad you are at math. 

At first it may seem that joking about being afraid of math, or how hard math is, is harmless.  Remember "Math class is tough" Barbie? Multiple people had to have thought it was a good idea.  It takes more than one person to get a toy to market, so multiple people, people who probably had college degrees complete with math classes, had to have thought that this was the perfect thing to have a kids' toy say. Scary, isn't it?   Then I heard the story of a high school student who mentioned that she really liked math until a teacher kept stressing how hard it was. After a while, she began to believe it.  Sadly, I suspect that that teacher was using the "this is hard" statement as a friendly lead-in to the lesson.  A "we're all in this together, even though it is hard" approach.  I wonder if the results would be different if a "this is fun" approach was presented instead. 

A few months ago, I posted about how I have a hard time calling something engineering if it doesn't have any explicit math or science in it.  A friend, who disagrees with me on this point, pointed out how wonderful it would be if everyone could create things without having to understand the math and science behind them.  I agree that giving everyone the tools to create is an important goal.  That said, we can't ignore the fact that behind every microprocessor or cool new robotics kit is someone who really understood the math and science. So my goal these days is to figure out how to make the basic math and science that lie beneath the surface as exciting as playing with the cool toys the math and science produced.  Parents are urged to read to their kids, and doctors give out books.  What would this early intervention look like from a math perspective? We approach reading and writing as something that everyone, with the right training, can do.  I really think we need to treat math this way as well.  So back to the class.  I think it should exist.  However, I think we can aim higher than "coping" with everyday math. 

Comments

[StrayIdeas]

There are a couple of TED talks that I have enjoyed on roughly this topic. Dan Meyer, for instance, on reforming the math curriculum.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover.html
Arthur Benjamin's thoughts on changing the math curriculum:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/arthur_benjamin_s_formula_for_changing_math_education.html

In my own experience as a parent (and engineer), very few of my children's elementary school teachers like or understand math. This is a real hurdle.

All for now,
@StrayIdeas

[Grathio]

Math has a lot of bad PR. All of my math teachers were abrasive and rigid. Most of my "Gah, I'm so stupid!" memories are from math classes. (#1: Repeatedly missing recess because I couldn't do a half sheet of math tables fast enough even though I new the method perfectly. #2: Continuously being humiliated by my high school calc teacher by doing every problem I got wrong on the board in front of the class.) As a kid with mild learning disabilities it was made very clear that math wasn't for me.

Except I really want to learn it. My professional life would clearly benefit and I'm enough of a science and tech geek that a number of fun, person projects would too. I see people who know more math doing cool things I wish I could do.

Every few years I get over my prejudice and strike out to learn more. And every time I crack almost immediately whether I'm self studying or working with a private tutor.

I feel like it's taught in a way that doesn't work with how I learn. I need to explore, play around make mistakes, and learn from them. Math curricula are not tolerant of mistakes and not formatted for exploration. Contrast it to learning a foreign language, which also has lots of rules, but you can still make progress if you're not 100% correct. You can be downright sloppy in a language and still convey meaning. And there are many ways to teach and learn a language.

I'm confident that if I could find a math curriculum that plays to my strengths it would be easy to learn.

[Johanna Marion]

I get your point, girl! I guess that class should really exist. According to my friend, math isn't really not that hard. She disapproves the term "fear of math", actually! "Complicated" is how she defines it, however. Although it is complicated, the desire to learn depends upon the person, of course!

[Christina]

I stumbled upon this by accident and loved it! I love math even though I don't 'get it' the first time around, but once I do, I really enjoy applying it to everything around me.