Week 1 Task 5: Citizen science project - signs of dangers

This is a great list! I need to study it and the suggestions. The biggest obstacle I have noticed in my kids is math anxiety. So far I have handled it by sitting with them, working problems together, modeling making mistakes and trying different approaches. They seem to think they have to know the right answer right off the bat. I'm trying to get them to see it as a process .

This is a tricky one. The only time I felt math anxiety is when I got moved to the more difficult math halfway through the year and I thought I would not be able to catch up. My son's biggest problems with math occured when he was still in the classroom and not progressing at all in math. He was so bored that he was really starting to hate math time. There was also a large emphasis on memorization and fact recall, as opposed to playing with concepts, which was disheartening in that they were only 6 year olds. Since he has been homeschooled he has really bloomed and I haven't seen any signs of math anxiety. He abhors memorization and solves problems on his own. Since math was very sterile when I went to school I really want to help him see connections more, so we are all working on that together.

My answer to this question really is the reason that I wanted to do this course. In primary school I loved playing with numbers and arithmetic. I had an enthusiasm for it, even up to 16 years old. Then, I lost my confidence in my ability in maths in the last two years of school when we had to tackle integration at school. My teacher would spend the lesson writing lines and lines of calculus on the blackboard and ask us to copy it down in our books without explanation. If we did ask a question, she would get very cross with us and we were too frightened to ask her questions. After that experience, I believed that I couldn’t learn maths. However, I needed maths for my biology degree and luckily my university lecturer was very different and made me start to believe that I could do it with effort and support. Now my job includes quite a lot of statistics and some maths and this wouldn’t have happened without the support of my uni lecturer. Looking back, I think much of my school teaching was focused on rote-learning methods to derive the correct answer, rather than having an understanding of what that really means. So, for example, while I had no problem learning multiplication of integers, I remember getting muddled with multiplication involving numbers with decimal points, which wouldn’t have happened if I’d understood multiplication more fully. I also think that mathematical terms can strike fear into the hearts of the under-confident, particularly if you have had a bad experience in school, so I’d like for my daughter to learn and understand mathematical concepts first without the labels. I would also like her to have a full understanding of the concepts, and not be taught primarily to learn a series of methods to get the right answer. I am grateful to you and this course for encouraging us all to find the love and enthusiasm of maths again - thank you.

As a teenager I feel like math anxiety is something a lot of us teenagers face. Both in homeschooling and in public school.

When I was seven years old I remember crying in frustration as I did my subtraction homework. The concepts of carrying and borrowing didn't make sense to me. By the time I was in the third grade though I was one of the "good in math" kids though. I didn't feel math anxiety after that until I hit calculus. After two months of scratching my head, I finally opened my text book and started at the very beginning until I figured out where I got tripped up. Not surprisingly, it's the momentary suspension of disbelief: "imagine you *could* do something an infinite number of times". Once I realized what it was, I was back in the saddle :-) My son with math anxiety is a perfectionist. If he can't get it immediately, he doesn't know how to cope because he gets so much very quickly. He doesn't use mnemonics, but he still has to count on his fingers and "reinvent the wheel" every time he needs to do simple multiplication. I'm torn between letting him work this way and feeling like he *should* have certain facts at the ready.

I was usually fine with multiplication...memorized the tables by third grade. My challenges came when the concepts became more abstract. I identify with my students who find it difficult to represent or explain their process for solving a math problem.

In 5th grade I was moved back up to the advanced math group because the middling group was too slow for me, according to the teachers. The first homework I was given in the advanced group were word problems where the teacher explicitly emphasized how we were to "write out" the problems completely. I spent the entire evening, weeping, late into the night, copying out longhand the entire question in my notebook before attempting to answer it. Math association with meaningless drudgery. Much later, in geometry, I invented new proofs for some problem that made sense given what we knew at the time. The teacher informed me that it would not work given what I did not yet know. Oh. The unknown will defeat you, there is no point trying. Unlike many subjects where I had an idea of the grade I would earn on an exam, I could never predict with any accuracy the grade I would get on a math exam, through college. It felt like the rules of math were held tight by some exclusive club of people who always knew the right answer. And there was *only* one answer.

Haven't had any of these things happen to me... except the eyes glaze over part... that has happened with anything past Calculus ... ie Fourier series. But it is helping me to understand what has happened to so many people around me, who seem to struggle with math. I just hadn't thought of all the ways in which they don't get it, or how/when they fell off the boat. I was lucky: I was always so far ahead of my (working-class town) school mates, that I just taught myself from books for fun, and so I never had pressure to perform, and I could always take a playful approach. Maybe the reason I struggled with the "harder topics" was that I ran into them in a high- pressure context... in college.

Man, some of the stories you hear about math trauma...makes you wonder why so many unhappy people decide to teach math. Anyway, I don't really know math instruction (I was "unschooled" as a kid) but if it's anything like art, just sloppy language on the part of a well meaning person can stunt creativity and stifle genius. For example, be sure you REALLY know something about color before you try to teach a bunch of preschoolers their colors. Take a poor or incomplete understanding, couple it with authority and you've got a recipe for creating some tremendous road blocks in their brains. I can only imagine what us numerically challenged people must do to kids with our imprecise and fumbling talk about mathematical concepts!

I've always found math relatively easy; however, two experiences stand out for me. 1) My brother in about grade 9 was given the task of finding the perimeter and area of three triangles (he was quite behind in math according to his teachers and has a learning disability). My mother didn't know how to help him with the questions, so she asked me to work with him. He proceeded to ask me to do it because that's what the teachers did when he didn't know. I sat there for almost an hour waiting him out. I had a very strong gut feeling that the problems were within his ability. I will never forget the look on his face when he said FINE!, put his head-down, completed the questions (only making one error), and walked out of the house to go play hockey. Fifteen years he still refers to that single experience, as one of the only times that he felt that someone believed in his academic ability and didn't let him "play" the system. 2) In grade six, my math teacher called a parent teacher interview to discuss why I was "cheating" on my math tests. In the meeting the teacher pulled out my exam and showed my mother that I had gotten 100% on the exam (long division, algebra, etc) and that I had completed the test without showing any work-his conclusion I must have cheated. I sat there confused, thinking I was getting accused of cheating because doing work in your head and not showing your work was cheating (I didn't realise that he thought I'd copied the answers). For the next exam, I "showed" my work and again a meeting was called. This time because I didn't show the correct work and again he thought I was cheating (I did long division by estimating the answer and using multiplication to find the answer). My teacher didn't understand the method I used and said it wasn't possible. At the end of that meeting my mom suggested that he give me a test right then because she believe me. I completed the test my way without "cheating".

Dangers making assumptions about a students ability or knowledge based on their performance. But I feel both these examples illustrate the protective power of believing in someone's ability.

I still remember when I was in kindergarden and wanted to move to first grade early. The class was in the middle of learning subtraction, so the teacher gave me a long worksheet and quickly went over the two practice problems with me so I'd be good to get the rest. It just so happened the practice problems were both something minus zero, so I though subtraction was just picking the bigger of the two numbers. I got every problem on the worksheet wrong except when it was something minus zero, and felt stupid. My daughter will be unlikely to experience a similar problem as I'll be guiding her throughout her education, giving her tons of attention. If she makes a silly mistake, we can laugh together over it.

WOW! Can't wait to scour through the links :) My DD is 7 and was told by her grade 1 teacher that she wasn't allowed to count on her fingers. After that moment, she asked to go to the bathroom every time they did math and stayed there until the recess bell rang. We homeschool now and she still has an aeration to math... But when I play subitization games, cards, dice, pattern play, she is quite bright and enjoys *math* as long as it doesn't look, feel, smell like *real* math...

Since I started this class, I have been stretching my brain to see ordinary activities in a math sense. My children and I are probably torn between Loss of creativity and misconceptions. I am wondering what the (^) means in the algebraic equation in the misconception portion?

My first F in the 6th grade was in math. From then on I thought I didn't have geometric brain function. I had just coasted by and am pretty anxious about teaching my children the upper level math classes for credit. Although I have confidence now, only because I feel I have to just let it go and face my fear, to do the math that is needed to show completion of work I want to STOP COUNTING ON MY FINGERS! It rolls off my tongue when the kids are doing worksheets or a timed drill.

As I literally look around me, I am starting to visualize the math concepts around me. I feel a fuller concept of natural view ahead.

There is a danger in our society of not valuing math and science. The various fields/careers that involve math and science are often portrayed as geeky, nerdy, boring, etc. Politicians and parts of the media bashing science and math don't help. Anti-intellectualism doesn't help. Our country needs more scientists. But first we need more teachers who understand math & science to help pass on the love of math & science. And our society as a whole need to realize how much math is everywhere instead of the dissing of math with the "I don't need to know that" or "when will I ever need that." Combine with the culture attitudes with a student struggling in middle school or high school and then quitting on math is a problem. Sadly schools are so rigid that they don't realize if they changed the presentation or math or looked more globally at the problem, the student might be able to get the concept. Also there is a problem of holding kids back. If a kid can grasp higher level math, let them move on. Sometimes the repeated drills ending up killing the love or curiousness of math.

Ways to change: expose kids to algebra thinking earlier on, discussing how natural math can be, showing how math is all around us, getting & keeping kids curious, and connecting math with art & music.

We've been using "xtramath.org" to do some math drills on basic addition facts. I thought it would help my daughter if I walked away while she worked on it so she wouldn't feel the pressure of me watching her every move. But I found that she actually performed worse this way. So instead, I decided to try "math with love," meaning that I sat next to her and smiled and encouraged her while she practiced her drills. Her performance improved a bit, but even better was her attitude about the practice sessions.

I see that many students in high school "give up" on math and science because they believe it is "too difficult" and therefore they won't get marks high enough to allow entrance to university or college. I see many cases of students who enter university hoping to get into the sciences or medicine but give up after a year or less because they cannot tolerate the mathematics courses. This is a shame. I still think that the best way to set a foundation in multiplication is to learn the basic multiplication tables from 1 x 1 to 9 x 9 and the rest of multiplication is basically derived from there. Yesterday, my 4 year old grandson was having a sandwich which was cut in halves and he asked if it could be cut in "fours". This was a perfect opportunity to learn the concepts of 2 halves, 4 quarters make a whole, 2 quarters make a half, etc.. He really enjoyed that and the sandwich too! I think too much stress is put on students with testing, especially in math. Students have to be able to experiment and make mistakes in order to truly learn the concepts and applications of mutliplication. Testing and the expectation of perfection is very stressful for students, especially in math, where it is generally expected that there are only right or wrong answers.