Maths phobia

[watervole]

What are we doing to our children?

Today, I encountered the worst case of maths phobia that I've ever come across. A girl expected to do GCSE maths on the advanced paper who is absolutely petrified. She got U (unclassified = total failure) in her mock paper.

I don't think she's stupid, though I won't be able to tell for certain for several weeks, if she decides to continue with lessons.

She was in tears when faced with a quadratic equation - and trust me when I say that I'm a very supportive teacher. When someone intelligent enough to have got placed in an advanced class cannot even multiply 9 x 4 without a calculator (she was even afraid to reach for the calculator until I said it was okay) then that's fear, not stupidity. She'd never have got into the class if she couldn't do basic arithmentic (she was blanking on three digit subtraction as well).

What happened to reduce an intelligent girl to that level of fear? She's not from the local school that most of my pupils come from, so I don't know what the standard of teaching is like, but I'm forced to suspect a teacher who gets angry when pupils fail to understand something.

What she has is a serious fear of failure. She's terrified to even guess in case she gets it wrong.

Give her a question like "give a rational number between 5 and 7" and it would never occur to her to guess 6. She isn't sure that she knows what 'rational' means and thus is too scared to try.

If she comes back to me (and I hope she will if the simple factor of yet another math lesson isn't too frightening in itself) then the first lesson I need to convince her of is this "You never lose a mark for a wrong answer. It's okay to guess."

If you're too scared to put pen to paper, then you can't do even the things that you actually know.

There's also other basic lessons. "You are entitled to ask for tracing paper in an exam." I got out some tracing paper before we started on the paper we were looking at it and told her she could use it, but I still had to give her the hint when a relevent question came up. Difficult rotation questions are a pushover with tracing paper. She actually smiled for a brief second when she completed that one.

I'm worried about her. She seems a sweet lass and her mother seems very supportive and non-pressurising. I've got a pupil from a U to a B before now, but I've never seen fear as bad as this.

Who/what did this to her? Why isn't her school working on the problem? Have they even realised?

Comments

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

It's horrible. You are familiar with dyscalculia, I expect? I have really bad maths fear and that's just beause of dyscalculia. My brain can't work with numbers at all (though it compensates with good verbal skills).

[temeres.livejournal.com]

I once played a session of the Star Wars RPG with a woman who had an absolute dread of numbers. Her face went white with terror when she realised that she would have to roll lots of dice and add them up. Until her character got hold of a heavy repeating blaster. Once she realised that she could blow a whole squad of stormtroopers away with one handful of dice, she suddenly became extremely adept at totting up all those dice. So it may be that with your student her fear of maths, as with a lot of fears, has a lot to do with context. Maybe you could get some mileage out of inviting her to join in a game of Monopoly or something? Or maybe not. Just an idea.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

Games can be a very useful tool, but it's kind of difficult to convince parents to pay you to play games with their kids. Also, they're great for basic number skills and probability, but not much use for algebra and geometry.

[kerravonsen]

Also, they're great for basic number skills and probability, but not much use for algebra and geometry.

Someone should invent one!

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

Just in case, here's a link:

Dyscalculia.org (http://www.dyscalculia.org/)

I can safely say that dyscalculia is the reason for my maths phobia. One needs not to be stupid to have a fear of maths:(...

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

Knowing the GCSE exams, she wouldn't have been entered for the higher papers suffering from discalculia (or shouldn't have been, her inability with numbers should have led the school to enter her for the foundation papers)

What were her SATs levels like? I agree with watervole that it could be a bad teacher has taken all her confidence.

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but it depends whether dyscalculia is recognised in the UK, which I doubt--it's hardly being recognised in the US! Which is bloody annoying. So she might not have been "diagnosed" with it to begin with.

I agree that crap teachers may be the cause of the worst fears... ugh.

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

She probably isn't diagnosed as such, but if she couldn't keep up with the others there's always "bad at maths".

[snowgrouse.livejournal.com]

...which really doesn't help at all:(. Ack. I'm now getting flashbacks to arsey teachers who couldn't understand the fact that someone could actually not understand the stuff so easily and just Mocked. Ugh. I'm convinced that "bad at maths" is applied to girls in particular all too often, when there should be investigations into dyscalculia. I can't tell you how much I'm pissed off at the amount of "you're bad at maths=you're stupid" crap I had to endure whilst at school. Ugh.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I don't have her SATs figures, but I'm sure they'd never have put her down for the advanced paper unless she had good results.

To be honest, given the short amount of time until the exam, they really need to move her to the Intermediate paper regardless of her ability. The most important thing is to reduce the pressure on the poor girl. So what if the highest grade she can get on the Intermediate is B. If they put her on the Advanced paper with this level of fear, she'll fail totally.

All that really matters for practical purposes (like people needing minimum level qualifications for jobs/A-levels and the like) is to get a grade C.

BTW, I'm trying to put a face to you and I can't. Have we met?

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

Only on-line, you know me from editing my essay, I'm Linda Death.

I'm in a science department and pupils are only entered for higher paper if they are virtually certain of a B. If it's going to be C, then it's the foundation paper in case they have a bad day. Better a D than a U.

[steverogerson.livejournal.com]

There is also the tactic of teaching not how to do a subject but how to pass an exam, which is different. I remember coming up to A Level physics, which in those days had a multiple-choice paper as part of the exam. None of us in our class had ever done a multiple choice paper. We were given a mock, and we all did terribly - not a pass among us. The teacher taught us no new physics just the tactics of how to handle multiple choice papers. A week later, we did another multiple choice mock and we all got pass marks.