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Comment by rlanday | Hacker News Reader

Why does “math anxiety” get such special attention? What about “foreign language class anxiety” or “essay-writing anxiety” or “being forced to read old books I don’t care about” anxiety? Is it because journalists tend to like those activities and be scared of math?

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Pure anecdote, but maths seems to me to be in a class of its own when it comes to people feeling incapable of solving problems. People may not know much of a foreign language, and they may not enjoy speaking it, but they will rarely look at a sentence in another language and think "Nope, can't work out what that means" when in fact they can.

I noticed a particularly odd example of it with my mother, who "hates maths" but has worked with finances all her life. If you ask her what 10% of 200,000 is, she'll say she doesn't know. If you ask her what sort of return she'd expect on a $200k investment she'll say, no shit, "you'd want 10% per year, so... $20,000.".

It's not that she's incapable of doing it. Her mind just shuts down when faced with the question.

This part does seem like the notation is responsible to at least some extent. I definitely have that experience myself when I read things like econometrics and machine learning papers. I know the concepts and could probably handle the words, but the pages full of bizarre elongated Greek letters that has to be translated with some kind of nonexistent Rosetta Stone just induces a bit of panic.

Just from my own personal experience, I disliked math classes, but I was terrified by my Spanish class. Something about class participation in another language filled me with dread, and I learned to absolutely hate it. It seemed tedious and stressful at the same time to me, I felt so stupid. Now I'm more sure of myself and could probably do just fine, but it was a big missed opportunity, and that's a skill I wish I had now.

Underlying this is the fact that teaching is a discipline by itself. Understanding the material is maybe halfway to quality teaching.

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