Math anxiety causes trouble for students as early as first grade | Hacker News Reader

Math anxiety causes trouble for students as early as first grade

news.uchicago.edu

32 pointspav3l21 comments

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.)

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.)

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

Don't see why you were downvoted. My daughter had the same experience with Everyday Math in a top-tier private school: intense anxiety. Now she's in a good public school with Houghton Mifflin. Say what you want about public school and Houghton Mifflin, but her standardized test scores have gone from 'needs remediation' to 'consider advanced placement' and while she still doesn't rank math as her favorite subject, she doesn't actively combat it.

Who says you have to follow the school's curriculum. Send your 2nd grader to Kumon Math. It's relatively affordable and your child will be out achieving the other kids in no time.

My school district is a pretty well regarded one in my state. I also contribute over $7,500 yearly in property taxes to fund this district. "Relatively" affordable is a complex idea as far as I see it.

You might think a good math education is something you're already paying for, and you may well be right. But a la carte education is pretty cheap.

How does the amount of property taxes you pay matter? It seems to me that it's your responsibility to see that your child gets a good education. The school is just a vehicle for that. If something is lacking then you have 2 choices: work with the school to fix things or supplement your child's education out of pocket. Kumon costs around $100/month/kid. You can judge for yourself whether that's affordable. Btw, many of the kids at my children's Kumon Center had teachers as parents. While it may feel nobler to battle the bureaucracy and to try to get your $7500 worth, your kid will likely have graduated long before you can effect any change.

And yes, you're absolutely right. And this is part of my frustration with schools, curriculua, adminstration boards, and how they all mesh together.

I will probably resort to some other method to make sure my child understand and possibly even enjoys math. I realize that.

But I believe I deserve a right to be upset because one path would give my son a decent education and the other will cost me $1000 a year to fix.

That makes me so angry. We live in the 21st century, we fly to the moon and rovers to Mars and build microchips yet we can't teach our kids math effectively.

I have seen these books, I have seen this "everyday"-type approach to math also in college for non-technical majors. I looked at Everyday Math links.

They are a disaster. It is simpler to explain the goddam subject than to find round-about "simple" problems and "games" that somehow distantly refer to math but are meant to be "easy" when in fact they are nothing but confusing. They build their own "easy" terminology that is non-standard and they go and apply it.

This is the crap I am talking about:

http://everydaymath.uchicago.edu/about/understanding-em/EM20...

The decimals for example. They go about in 10 round-about ways (base-10 block, wtf are those?) before finally showing a number line and asking students to order them. The number line is probably the most useful. I remember learning this from exercises. No base-10 blocks, no "math facts" (why not call them theorems and axioms). Just lots of exercises. Eventually the student internalizes the relationship and builds an internal abstract model.

The confusing part is all these "easy" terminology that tries to help in the end it all looks like an onslaught of random stuff pushed onto the student. They don't know that the author is trying to carefully orchestrate this long and drawn out process of presenting "math facts" so in the end the student reaches an "aha" moment and gets. He gets lost among orange circle with blue borders, playing coin-top-it and base-10 blocks in the end never really reaching the intended "aha" moment be she got stock at the "Decimals All Around Museum"

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?

There's a distinction between testing, and disclosing test results to anyone other than the student.

(I don't have much time to type, so maybe this is too brief.)

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...

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

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.

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)

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

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!

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.

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...

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...

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/Functions-Graphs-Dover-Books-Mathemati...

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....

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.

And... where is the creativity curriculum?

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