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? Do we have a fear that our child won�t be good at math because we are not very good at math ourselves? The problem is Math Anxiety. Fortunately math anxiety has nothing to do with our ability to do math. Better still, our ability to do math has nothing to do with our genes. In other words, math is a basic skill that everyone can become proficient in. It�s like being able to read. No one would say that they are not good at reading, but it is commonly accepted that some are good at math while others are not.
What is the real fear behind math anxiety? It is the fear of getting the wrong answer! Wrong answers mean failure. Failure is to be avoided at all cost. This is our cultural belief. This is what we are taught in school. Get the right answer, get the A and you will be rewarded. You will be successful. You will have everything you desire. Get wrong answers and you fail! You become a failure. You are seen as hopeless to amount to anything. Wrong! This thinking is wrong. This belief is contrary to real life. If you ask any millionaire, he�ll tell you that he has had plenty of failure. Failure helped him learn and grow. No one can get it right the first time. People, who won�t try until they can get it right, never get anywhere. They never leave the starting line. They never really succeed. Failing and learning from your mistakes is the path to success. Millionaires encourage us to fail as fast as we can so that we can get to success faster.
How does this relate to math anxiety? Math Anxiety stems from our fear of failure. But contrary to our beliefs, getting the wrong answer is more useful to learning math than getting the right answer. Doing math wrong helps us to better grasp the math concept and the process because we have to analyze our thinking. We are forced to analyze our logic that led us to the wrong answer. We learn from the failure and we do math better the next time. In time we grow in our math proficiency.
Our anti-failure society is the root of math anxiety. Instead of accepting our math errors and learning from them, we get the mistaken impression that we are not good at math just because we can�t get the right answer first off all the time. Getting any wrong answer is failure and is a reflection of our lack of ability. Our society equates getting the wrong answers with not being very good at something. Of course, if you are not capable, not gifted, not talented at something, you should not be doing it. This leads to the belief that you should just give up and don�t try again.
How many of our children won�t go into the career of their choice because they don�t believe they can do the math needed for that endeavor. How many of us are letting math anxiety stop us from pursuing our interest in starting a business, changing careers, going to college? In my travels this summer, I met an airline pilot, a captain and a woman. I was interested to know what it was like to be a pilot, what skills were required to fly an aircraft. She spoke of calculating fuel consumption in her head, taking into consideration the plane�s altitude and air speed and other parameters. I marveled at her math ability. As we spoke further, I told her about my book, 2+2=Anxiety; Overcoming Math Anxiety is as Simple as Child's Play. She confessed to hating math. In college, she had dropped out of veterinarian school because she was afraid that the math would be more than she was capable of doing. She confessed that at home, she did not even balance her own checkbook. She had totally separated in her mind the math she did as a pilot from the math she did not do in the rest of her life. She did not see the calculation she did as a pilot as �doing math�. It was just a formula that she plugged numbers into. Anyone could do it. How true! Of course, my thought on hearing her fuel calculation, had been that doing that formula was beyond my abilities. Do you see the invasive mindset that is the root of the problem? We tend to think that the math is beyond our capabilities. The United State is seeing a mark decrease in the number of students pursuing math, science, and engineering degrees. The United State is losing it technological edge. Math anxiety is becoming a nation wide epidemic. Your child is just its latest victim. Don�t let this happen. Change your mindset about math. Help you child change his mindset towards math. Start with doing something fun that involves doing math, like calculating the fuel consumption based on altitude, aircraft weight and airspeed. Math is not hard. Math is basic. Everyone can do math.
Ann LaRoche, Senior Consultant at mathischildsplay.com mathischildsplay.com