Math Anxiety - Is There A Dark Cloud Over Your Child's Math Work?

Are you tired of the yelling and cajoling to get your child to do his Math work?

• Are you tired of the tears of frustration as your child struggles to learn math and do math problems he does not understand?

• Are you tired of feeling helpless to help your child understand his math work, because you were never good at math in school?

• Are you tired of the complaints that math is boring and tedious and totally unrelated to anything in real life?

Why is this? What is it about math that causes such pain and anxiety, turmoil and fighting, tears and anger? Is it math or our own fears of failure, of not being very good at math ourselves? Is it math or is it the method that we employ to teach math to our children? Is it math or an illusion of catastrophe if our child does not become proficient in this skill? In a series of three articles on Math Anxiety, I will be addressing these points.


Personally, I don’t think it is math. Math is ancient. People have been learning math for centuries. Even in this country, people learned math, were profitable in business and industry, and our nation became great. Basic math or accounting was the foundation of every household and business. More complex math enabled us to create great inventions and great engineering feats. We even put a man on the moon. We accomplished all this because of our nation’s ability to do math. Math is not hard. It is a basic skill, like reading. Yet no one would admit to not being very good at reading.

I think the problem is with how we view math, as this awesome hard thing other people do. I read a wonderful historical fiction book called Carry on, Mister Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham. Set just before the American Revolution, the main character, a self-educated young man who taught his shipmates how to do a lunar sighting. A lunar sighting is a navigation calculation for determining your ship’s position while out at sea. My first thought was of awe. I could not imagine the complex math that was involved in doing a lunar sighting. I thought the math was more than I could ever do.

Why did I think that? What is the math that’s needed to do a lunar sighting? I don’t know. So why did I assume that it was more than I could do? Shame on me! The book had just related that this young man was teaching his shipmates how to do these calculations. His shipmates were uneducated men and boys. Here I am with a B.A. in mathematics, a college graduate, a good education in one of the most advance nations in the world and I’m thinking that this math is beyond me. This in itself is very revealing of the mindset towards math in America. What is your mindset? Do you assume the math will be too hard before you even try? Do you convey this mindset to your children? It's time to change this negative attitude towards math. Start with doing something fun that involves math, like figuring out how to do a lunar sighting. Math is not hard. Math is basic. Everyone can do Math!