Common Disease found among Yungsters these days.......!!!!!!

1. Understanding Maths Phobia
The purpose of this event is to
provide a reflective space in which
we as professionals from a great
many different backgrounds can
share our ideas and experiences
with the aim of developing our
ability to help maths phobic
students to deal with the demands
of their chosen degree.

2. The format of the event
1. A 25 minute presentation to stimulate
and give direction to your thinking
2. 1 hour of facilitated discussion in small
groups. Each group is requested to
make some notes.
3. 30 minutes to eat the light supper
provided and look at the notes of the
other groups.

3. What is the ‘maths anxious’
experience?

4. Empathy
• Sensing another person’s private world as
if it were one’s own
• Being able to communicate this
understanding
• verbally and non-verbally
• in a manner tuned to the other’s feelings

5. Katy
• What do you learn from the video about
the experience of maths anxiety?

6. At this point a video was shown a short armature video was shown.
The video was made at Loughborough and shows one of their
students talking about her experiences. She was happy for this
to be shown to a small group of people but has not given
permission for it to be put on the internet.
She is a mature student in her mid twenties who first talks freely
about her school experience and the development of her
anxiety. She also tells us about the impact her maths anxiety
had on her personal development. She then tells us about
overcoming the effect of the anxiety, passing her GCSE maths
and later the maths modules in her degree. She is clear about
the coping strategies she has developed but tells us that the
anxiety will never go away.
The following slides give a good impression of what she said.

7. Reflection

8. Reflection
• Not understanding – anxiety
• Getting behind – more anxiety
• ‘may seem simple to others’ – humiliation
• Trying to control anxiety as well as learn
maths
• ‘I SHOULD be able to’
• Anxiety → panic attacks → generalised
fear

9. • Coping strategies
– Deep breathing
– Thinking positively
– Little chunk at a time
– Build on past sense of achievement
– Determination “I don’t want these
difficulties to hinder me further”

10. “People are not disturbed by
things but by the views which
they take of them”
Epictetus

11. • Is it maths itself which is
disturbing, or is it the way in
which it is viewed?

12. Common Misunderstandings
 Maths requires a good memory
 Maths is not creative
 Maths is always right or wrong
 There is a best way to do a maths
problem
 Men are better than women
Kogelman and Warren (1979) Mind Over Math, McGraw-Hill, New York, pp30 –42

13. Sources of misunderstandings
and anxiety
• Teachers
– don’t like maths
• Pass on their own attitudes
– teach it as they learnt it, badly
• As a closed, cold and uncreative subject
– fail to distinguish different learning styles
• Grasshoppers and inchworms
⇒ belief that failure to understand is the result of
a lack of effort or attention
• punish this ‘bad behaviour’.

14. Compounding the problem
Society:
– Why do you have an accountant?
– Employers
– Perception of mathematically gifted
• 'strange' 'exceptionally intelligent' 'frightening‘
• Lacking in empathy
⇒ belief (especially in the world of the support
services) that empathy ALONE is sufficient to
teach maths to the maths phobic

15. How do we help?
Maths tutors need to develop
BOTH empathy and an
appreciation of maths as a
creative and satisfying subject