Having see people who say they are hopeless at math I want to dig deeper and find out when their fear was triggered and what might be done about it. I'm interested if anyone has had to deal with their own issue, or has had a child or loved one who is struggling. One girl told me "I was good at math till they put the alphabet in." So using letters as variables is one area of confusion. There is also a lot of new vocabulary for many students - exponents, combining like terms, the distributive property, reciprocals, coefficients etc. That might make them shut down. I have wondered if the "x" in so many problems bothers students because they are used to seeing it as a multiplication sign.
I hope this doesn't turn into a gripe session about teachers. In Shanghai, with its high math scores, teachers spend 12 hours in the classroom. Most of their time outside the classroom is spent collaborating, extensively fine-tuning lessons to make them as clear as possible. In the U.S. it's up to 30 hours in the classroom. The people on this sub-forum are probably not math-phobic, but maybe they know someone who is. Where are people's blocks and what could teachers do differently to help the lower-end students to "get it"? The level I'm talking about is freshman algebra, but students in my environment also seem to get really thrown by fractions. There is neuroscience on this issue that I'll pursue. Meanwhile, has anyone you know had specific problems, and what if anything allowed the student to break through the "I'm bad at math" barrier?
I hope this doesn't turn into a gripe session about teachers. In Shanghai, with its high math scores, teachers spend 12 hours in the classroom. Most of their time outside the classroom is spent collaborating, extensively fine-tuning lessons to make them as clear as possible. In the U.S. it's up to 30 hours in the classroom. The people on this sub-forum are probably not math-phobic, but maybe they know someone who is. Where are people's blocks and what could teachers do differently to help the lower-end students to "get it"? The level I'm talking about is freshman algebra, but students in my environment also seem to get really thrown by fractions. There is neuroscience on this issue that I'll pursue. Meanwhile, has anyone you know had specific problems, and what if anything allowed the student to break through the "I'm bad at math" barrier?
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