James' World 2

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I teach people how to teach math, and I’ve been working in this field for 30 years. Across those decades, I’ve met many people who suffer from varying degrees of math trauma – a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics.

When people share their stories with me, there are common themes. These include someone telling them they were “not good at math,” panicking over timed math tests, or getting stuck on some math topic and struggling to move past it. The topics can be as broad as fractions or an entire class, such as Algebra or Geometry.

The notion of who is – and isn’t – a math person drives the research I do with my colleagues Shannon Sweeny and Chris Willingham with people earning their teaching degrees.

One of the biggest challenges U.S. math educators face is helping the large number of elementary teachers who are dealing with math trauma. Imagine being tasked with teaching children mathematics when it is one of your greatest personal fears.

Math trauma manifests as anxiety or dread, a debilitating fear of being wrong. This fear limits access to life paths for many people, including school and career choices. There are many reasons people may develop negative associations with mathematics. The way students are positioned as “good at math” is often based on non-mathematical characteristics such as gender, race, language, or socioeconomic status. For example, Ebony McGee, an education researcher at Vanderbilt University, describes both fragile and robust mathematics identities that Black engineering and mathematics college students developed in response to negative stereotypes about their ability to learn and do mathematics.

While math trauma has multiple sources, there are some that parents and teachers have power to influence directly: outdated ideas of what it means to be good at math. These include speed and accuracy, which were important in decades past when humans were actual computers.

But research has confirmed what many people share with me anecdotally: Tying speed with computation debilitates learners. People who struggle to complete a timed test of math facts often experience fear, which shuts down their working memory. This makes it all but impossible to think, which reinforces the idea that a person just can’t do math – that they are not a math person.

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Even some teachers suffer from anxiety about math. Undrey/shutterstock.com

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