
Math anxiety causes trouble for students as early as first grade - pav3l
http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2012/09/12/math-anxiety-causes-trouble-students-early-first-grade
======
joezydeco
My second grader has a _ton_ of anxiety over the confusing and disorganized
lessons & homework that are coming out of the "Everyday Math" textbook that
his teacher is using.

Hmm, I wonder who wrote this Everyday Math curriculum...oh, look at that.
_It's the University of Chicago_.

(And yes, I'm opening that door.)

~~~
textminer
I'm going to side with you here. Loved math as a kid. My high school then used
the Chicago series, and I barely got past “Functions, Statistics, and
Trigonometry”. I later got a bachelors and masters in mathematics from pretty
good schools, reveling in abstraction and structure.

(Said logic compels me to say it's impossible to know whether the Chicago
textbook series was responsible for that earlier poor performance, and not the
more likely issues of the specific teachers, family, or adolescence. But!
Anecdote.)

~~~
niels_olson
You know, something just clicked in my head: isn't Chicago famous for Econ?
That's pretty low bar in math, isn't it?

------
stephengillie
Teaching and learning often occur in supportive, nurturing environments where
mistakes are made, lessons are learned, and people grow. Testing usually
occurs in the same room, but often has a cold, authoritarian feel to it. The
human who used to happily answer your questions now quietly and soberly tells
you to go back to your seat, that providing the same warm answers to your
questions would be very wrong. Mistakes are punished and even talking is not
allowed. Learning feels like love. Tests feel like prison.

Is there a way other than testing to measure a student's progress?

~~~
analyst74
I think it's important to get an objective feedback on your newly gained
knowledge. While nobody wants to hear that they are not getting better after
putting in reasonable effort, it's important part of learning.

Now if you use that test score to punish students, that's different...

~~~
stephengillie
Very good point - objective feedback is important. How can we provide students
with objective feedback without putting them through that intimidating testing
environment?

~~~
danielweber
Life is full of intimidating circumstances. If a child suffers anxiety from a
"test environment," then it's good to identify that early rather than try to
remove _all_ stress from a child's life.

I think we should largely get rid of grades. Schools should be about
education, not about evaluation, but you need _some_ evaluation entirely
internal to the system.

------
veb
This is a thing?!

Huh. For as long as I can remember, this has been me.

I remember when I was 6, sitting in a class-room with a Math test before me.
If I got something wrong, I'd get severely yelled at however when people
yelled at me for doing something wrong (and I didn't know what I was doing
wrong) I'd get utterly confused, and because I'm deaf I'd get very anxious
too. So I wasn't hearing the teacher right, and therefore applying what I
heard wrong to the paper (thus getting it wrong, leading to me getting
screamed at).

It eventually got so bad that year, I started to actually forget how to even
think in numbers. When I was given a question like "5 + 5" I kept reading it
like "five + five".

From there I went on to completely fail at Math in every possible way.
However, I turned into a programmer somewhere along the way which is a bit
weird! :D

Does anyone else wonder if this anxiety stuff ties into Dyscalculia?
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia>)

~~~
7952
How good are you at maths now? I wonder how you compare to the other
"brighter" kids on your class.

~~~
veb
Still completely hopeless.

However, I'm great at putting Math into an algorithm, or using code to work
out a problem (this was not acceptable in school...)

I passed compsci with good marks, went straight into jobs so I'm obviously not
that bad!

------
e40
Maybe I just live in a good school district. One day my son came home from
either 1st grade and asked what a square root was. I can't remember if he knew
multiplication already, but after I explained it didn't seem like it got very
much of it. The next day he asked me what a cube root was. At this point, I
had to find out what was driving these questions. It turns out there were a
bunch of them on the playground trying to impress each other with their math
knowledge. He begged me to teach him more math. Btw, these kids doing this on
the playground, none of them would be considered nerds. They were all pretty
physically able and most of the games they played were the typical variety.

I believe it's all about expectations and tone. If you fear math you can pass
that anxiety on to your kids. I wasn't in my kid's 1st grade class, but I'm
guessing they made it fun and not very intimidating. At home, even before he
was school age, we would do math problems, so that he was comfortable with it.

------
tokenadult
I am revising some of my FAQ files about elementary mathematics education just
now. Let's see what electrons I can paste in here from my drafts.

For homeschooling, which for other parents on Hacker News could take the form
of "afterschooling," I much prefer Miquon Math

[http://www.keycurriculum.com/products/supplementals/miquon-m...](http://www.keycurriculum.com/products/supplementals/miquon-
math-materials)

for starting out my children, and then the Singapore Primary Mathematics
materials (which now have an edition aligned to United States curriculums
standards)

[http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/1...](http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/134.htm)

followed up by the Gelfand textbooks

<http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773>

[http://www.amazon.com/Method-Coordinates-Dover-Books-
Mathema...](http://www.amazon.com/Method-Coordinates-Dover-Books-
Mathematics/dp/0486425657/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-
Mathemati...](http://www.amazon.com/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-
Mathematics/dp/0486425649/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-I-M-
Gelfand/dp/0817639144...](http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-I-M-
Gelfand/dp/0817639144/)

appropriately supplemented by ALEKS

<http://www.aleks.com>

and EPGY

<http://epgy.stanford.edu/district/info.html>

ALEKS

<http://www.aleks.com/>

is a commerical online site (in which I have no economic interest) delivering
personalized instruction in mathematics through precalculus mathematics. The
ALEKS website includes links to research publications on which ALEKS is based.

I also recommend the Art of Problem Solving (AoPS)

<http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/>

(where I first took on the screenname that I also use here on HN) for more
online mathematics instruction resources, and I also share specific links to
specialized sites on particular topics with clients and with my children. I
should note for onlookers that the articles on mathematics learning on the
AoPS website

<http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Resources/articles.php>?

are very good indeed, especially "The Calculus Trap."

My children make quite a bit of voluntary use of Khan Academy (both watching
videos and working online exercises) and I am gratified that my previous
suggestions to the Khan Academy developers here on HN

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2760663>

have been followed up as Khan Academy developers have communicated with me by
email about new problem formats available in their online exercises, which are
becoming increasingly challenging.

Besides that, I fill my house with books about mathematics, and circulate
other books about mathematics frequently from various local libraries.

I also recommend that all my students use the American Mathematics Competition

<http://amc.maa.org/>

materials and other mathematical contest materials as a reality check on how
well they are learning mathematics.

In general, I think mathematics is much too important a subject to be single-
sourced from any source. Especially, mathematics is much too important to be
left to the United States public school system in its current condition. I was
rereading The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving
Education in the Classroom (1999) last month. It reminded me of facts I had
already learned from other sources, including living overseas for two three-
year stays in east Asia.

"Readers who are parents will know that there are differences among American
teachers; they might even have fought to move their child from one teacher's
class into another teacher's class. Our point is that these differences, which
appear so large within our culture, are dwarfed by the gap in general methods
of teaching that exist across cultures. We are not talking about gaps in
teachers' competence but about a gap in teaching methods." p. x

"When we watched a lesson from another country, we suddenly saw something
different. Now we were struck by the similarity among the U.S. lessons and by
how different they were from the other country's lesson. When we watched a
Japanese lesson, for example, we noticed that the teacher presents a problem
to the students without first demonstrating how to solve the problem. We
realized that U.S. teachers almost never do this, and now we saw that a
feature we hardly noticed before is perhaps one of the most important features
of U.S. lessons--that the teacher almost always demonstrates a procedure for
solving problems before assigning them to students. This is the value of
cross-cultural comparisons. They allow us to detect the underlying
commonalities that define particular systems of teaching, commonalities that
otherwise hide in the background." p. 77

Plenty of authors, including some who should be better known and mentioned
more often by HN participants, have had plenty of thoughtful things to say
about ways in which United States mathematical education could improve.

In February 2012, Annie Keeghan wrote a blog post, "Afraid of Your Child's
Math Textbook? You Should Be,"

[http://open.salon.com/blog/annie_keeghan/2012/02/17/afraid_o...](http://open.salon.com/blog/annie_keeghan/2012/02/17/afraid_o..).

in which she described the current process publishers follow in the United
States to produce new mathematics textbook. Low bids for writing, rushed
deadlines, and no one with a strong mathematical background reviewing the
books results in school textbooks that are not useful for learning
mathematics. Moreover, although all new textbook series in the United States
are likely to claim that they "expose" students to the Common Core standards,
they are not usually designed carefully to develop mathematical understanding
according to any set of standards.

The Epsilon Camp website

<http://www.epsiloncamp.org/FAQ.php>

also has some useful FAQ files about studying mathematics at a young age.

~~~
wslh
And... where is the creativity curriculum?

