math anxiety – MathFour

Discalculia: 10 Great Articles on Math Disabilities

This is the 4th in the draft purge series where I’m throwing stuff out over a three week period.

Discalculia (pronounced dis-kal-COOL-yu) is the official word meaning a learning disability in math. Some think that math anxiety is just another way of saying discalculia. Maybe because people with this learning disability often have math anxiety.

But you can certainly have math anxiety without having discalculia. I did once. So it’s not exactly the same thing.

Here are some resources and descriptions you might find helpful. If you have 8 extra minutes, watch the video at the bottom – it’s a super great intro!

What it is…

What Can Stand in the Way of a Student’s Mathematical Development? from PBS.org

Dyscalculia from Dyscalculia.org

Some tactics on how to teach a student with discalculia…

Math Learning Disabilities at LDOnline

Infosheet About Mathematics Disabilities from the Council for Learning Disabilities

Simple list of tactics from Daniel Daley, Assistant Professor at Lyndon State College

Printables from SEN Teacher

Understanding students with discalculia…

Letter to My Math Teacher (written in 1985) on Discalculia.org

A great explanation…

Got any more articles about discalculia or math anxiety to share? Post them in the comments. And share this list on twitter.

Thanks a bunch to my cousin Vijay who provided many of the links (or links that got me to these).

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May 18, 2012

How a Mathematician Became Math Phobic

It’s rare that you get a chance to really see life from the other side. Today I did.

I presented at the Western Social Science Association conference at 8am. I stayed to watch the other talks – and got a serious taste of what many people feel when in a math class.

I was comfortable with the concepts.

Strangely, I was totally comfortable with the hypotheses of this group of social scientists.

I saw talks where people speculated on what was up with juvenile detention workers that liked their jobs. And I was cool with it.

I was fascinated, engaged and understood the hypothesis that people who identified with their gender, and lived that way, were more healthy than those who claimed one thing and behaved the opposite.

It made perfect sense to me that someone would want to do research to see if indeed boys who are close to their moms pray more as grownups.

I got uncomfortable when they started talking… stats!

Yup!

It was the math that got me.

At first I watched in relative peace as these folks paraded the slides loaded with positive and negative decimal numbers. I ignored my ignorance of something they deemed important called “R².”

I told myself that if I knew what these things were, I would totally get this.

I’m an algebraist. We don’t even use numbers, much less negative decimals.

But I assured myself that I was perfectly capable, I just hadn’t learned this branch of math.

But the talks and slides kept coming.

And my defenses didn’t hold up.

Wil was kind enough to give me a cheater hint. I tried to memorize it. The rule ended up looking like this:

Positive number means “as one thing goes up, the other does too.”

Negative number means “as one thing goes up, the other goes down.”

“Big” number means it really is true.

“Small” number means it probably is just B.S.

I developed math-anxiety.

When a stat slide came up, I looked away. The speaker’s voice became Charlie Brown’s teacher. I checked my iPhone to see what was happening on Twitter.

As Wil would say, I was participating in avoidance behavior.

But occasionally I’d try…

If one of those slides came up and I didn’t turn away fast enough, I’d give it a shot.

After all, I’m a mathematician by trade! This shouldn’t intimidate me.

I would fish around desperately in my brain for that memorized rule.

And to think that just two days ago I told my students, “You can’t just follow the rules – you should understand what they mean.”

Easy for me to say.

I’m going to crawl into the tub with a glass of wine.

Will you comment or tweet?

*sigh*

Math Anxiety – How to Empathize with Students

Have you ever experienced performance anxiety?

If you don’t have math anxiety, remembering (or freshly experiencing) performance anxiety is a great way to understand what it’s about.

This happened to me at the beginning of this semester.

I try to memorize the names of all my students. I go through the roll and for each person, I say the name and then look at the student. I study where they are, who they are and their name. I say it a few times and try to get it solid in my memory.

Doing this helps students with math anxiety relax a little. And students who are trying to stay in the shadows (so they can miss class, etc.) learn quickly that I’m going to connect with them, personally.

Of course the act of memorizing names isn’t perfect. The second day of class I usually remember about 30% of the names. So I go through and try to match the names on the roll with different people – giving it my best shot.

I often get it wrong.

A few weeks ago, I mistakenly called one woman, “Sandra.” I was wrong. She said, “Awe, come on, now!”

It was all in jest, I had no doubt. But the strong reaction to my mistake hit me. So when I was looking through the roll to find her correct name, I was nervous.

I was experiencing performance anxiety.

If I gave it a shot and chose the right name, I would look good. But if I picked incorrectly, I would likely get another round of jeers.

Of course, I’m the instructor, so there isn’t that much risk. But there certainly was performance anxiety.

Surprisingly, there was a lot of anxiety.

I pointed this out to the students.

Because the class is less of a content based course and more of a confidence building/math anxiety busting experience, I thought pointing this out might be enlightening.

We talked about how they might have said things like, “That’s a good try, Bon. Unfortunately, Sandra’s not my name. Would you like to give it another try?”

We talked about how that kind of encouragement compares with the “Awe, come on, now!” reaction that they gave before.

And we talked about the parallels of those statements to the statements by math instructors to students – about math. And the parallel of my performance anxiety to the math anxiety many experience.

Consider it yourself.

The next time you try something and get it wrong, notice how you feel. Think about how your child might feel in a similar situation.

And ponder how this feeling would manifest itself as math anxiety if this performance anxiety happens in a math class.

Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments. And tell others about it…

Tag: math anxiety