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MATH ANXIETY

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One of the questions I get most often from parents is this: How can I help my kids from being anxious about math like I am? And for a math nerd like me, the answer is pretty simple. I’m unnaturally aware of the math around me. Because of my background and experience — and maybe even the way my brain is wired to see patterns in damned near everything — I can weave math into just about any situation I come across.

(Go ahead, try me. Post a situation in the comments section, and I’ll bring the math. It’s a game I used to play with my daughter, until she got really tired of losing.)

But for most parents, this level of math awareness is just not as simple to access. This is where Laura Bilodeau Overdeck comes in. With degrees in astrophysics and public policy, Overdeck is probably a little like me — finding math in everything and pointing it out to her kids at every turn. But she didn’t just keep this to herself. Nope, she launched Bedtime Math, a really simple idea designed to help parents inject a little math in their kids’ everyday lives.

Each day, she and her crackerjack team send out an email to subscribers (it’s free!) that offers three math questions — one for Wee Ones, one for Little Kids and one for Big Kids — that are centered on a little story or current event. Yesterday, the theme was tongue twisters. On Wednesday, it was hopping.

During Math Awareness Month, Overdeck and her team have introduced a series of mini, math videos. And these things are funny. The first is about ninja training — what kid (or parent) wouldn’t want to find out what happens? Check it out below:

I can’t tell you how much I love Bedtime Math. If you have little kids, give it a shot. You’ll probably learn something too — and you might even raise your awareness of the math around yourself.

Are you a Bedtime Math subscriber already? How do you use it with your kids? What do your kids think about it? Share in the comments section.

If there’s one thing most folks assume about me, it’s this: That I am some sort of mathmagician, able to solve math problems in a single bound — quickly, in public and with a permanent marker.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

I don’t like what I call performance math. When I’m asked to divvy up the dinner tab (especially after a glass of wine), my hands immediately start sweating. When friends joke that I can find 37% of any number in my head, I feel like a fraud. I’m not your go-to person for solving even the easiest math problem quickly and with little effort.

Truth is I really cannot handle any level of embarrassment. And I’m very easily embarrassed. I’m the kind of person who likes to be overly prepared for any situation. This morning, before contacting the gutter company about getting our deposit back because they hadn’t shown up, I had to re-read the contract and literally develop a script in my head. What if I misunderstood something and was — gasp! — wrong about the timeline or terms of our contract?

Oh yeah, and I hate being wrong. About anything.

In short, I’m not much of a risk taker. Unlike many of my friends and some family members, I can’t stand the thought of failing publicly. Imagine writing a math book with this hang up! Thank goodness for two amazing editors, who checked up behind me.

I’m also not a detailed person. Not one bit. I’m your classic, careless-mistake maker — from grade school into grownuphood. I’m much more interested in the big picture, and I am easily lured by the overreaching concepts, ignoring the details that can make an answer right or wrong.

For years and years, I worried about this to no end. How could I be an effective teacher, parent, writer, if I didn’t really care about the details or I had this terrible fear of doing math problems in public? What I learned very quickly in the classroom was this: Kids needed a math teacher like me, to show them that failing publicly is okay from time to time and that math is not a game of speed or even absolute accuracy. (It’s never a game of speed. And it’s frequently not necessary to have an exact answer.)

Two weeks ago, as I sat down with my turkey sandwich at lunch, the phone rang. It was a desperate writer friend who was having some trouble calculating the percentage increase/decrease of a company’s revenue over a year. (Or something like that. I forget the details. Go figure.) She really, really wanted me to work out the problem on the phone with her, and I froze. I felt embarrassed that I couldn’t give her a quick answer. And I worried that I would lose all credibility if I didn’t offer some sage insight PDQ.

But since I have learned that math is not a magic trick or a game of speed, I took a deep breath, gathered my thoughts and asked for some time. Better yet, I asked if I could respond via email, since I’m much better able to look at details in writing than on the phone. I asked her to send me the information about the problem and give me 30 minutes to get back with her.

Within 10 minutes, I had worked out a system of equations and solved for both variables. She had her answer, and I could solve the problem without the glare of a spotlight (even if it was only a small spotlight).

My point is this: Math isn’t about performing. If you like to solve problems in your head or rattle off facts quickly or demonstrate your arithmetic prowess at cocktail parties, go for it. That’s a talent and inclination that I sometimes wish I had. But if you need to retreat to a quiet space, where you can hear yourself think and try out several methods, you should take that opportunity.

Anyone who criticizes a person’s math skills based on their ability to perform on cue is being a giant meanie. And that includes anyone who has that personal expectation of himself. There’s no good reason for math performance — well, except for Mathletes, and those folks have pretty darned special brains.

Do yourself a favor and skip math performance if you need to. I give you permission.

Do you suffer from math performance anxiety? Where have you noticed this is a problem? And how have you dealt with it?

I’m betting that many of you dear readers will identify with today’s guest post from Lisa Tabachnick Hotta. Math anxiety may still dog some of us, but it doesn’t have to ruin our lives. Read my guest post on her blog here.

“Miss Tabachnick,” exclaimed my grade 8 math teacher.  “Please come up to the board and demonstrate how you obtained the answer to that equation; I’m sure the entire class will benefit from your explanation.”

Sweat trickled its way from my brow to my toes. Show the class? Now? At the chalk board? Somehow I must’ve squeaked out the answer because I did graduate – from grade 8, then from high school and ultimately obtained two university degrees. (My majors, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with math!)

Anxiety in all its sweaty glory – shaky hands, racing pulse, nausea – is pretty much the story of my life when it comes to math. Of course I’m rarely at a chalk (or smart) board deciphering mathematical problems these days as a writer, community volunteer and parent. But, you will often find me deep in “grownup” math conundrums.  Here are but a few examples:

  • Recently I was out for dinner with the girls and we were splitting the check. “Anne, you’re the accountant, you can figure out what we all owe,” I half-joked to one member of our group. She wasn’t amused. (Maybe it’s like the doctor who’s always getting asked for health tips at parties?) Her reluctance to assist me meant having to figure out not only what my drink, dinner and dessert cost but also my portion of the tax and tip – not at all easy for someone who’s math challenged!
  • My son who is (miraculously) gifted in math, asked me fairly simple questions in the car as a kind of numbers game: What’s 2 + 2, What’s 4 + 4, What’s 8 + 8, What’s 16 + 16, etc. Now, the first few questions? No problemo. But, as the numbers and queries got larger, I had to think harder to come up with the answers and, yes, that in turn increased my anxiety level.
  • Just today my kids and I were at a medical appointment. The administrator explained that receiving a response from the government to our query could take up to 30 weeks. I laughed along with the other adults who joked about government inefficiencies but, somewhere in my mind, I was still trying to figure out how many months equalled 30 weeks.

All joking aside, being mathematically challenged has caused me enormous stress. From hiring tutors throughout middle and high school, to being told (by that same grade 8 math teacher) that I’d never amount to anything because my math skills were so poor, to ensuring that I am charging clients appropriate rates on invoices – I’ll be forever haunted by issues around math.

So, how do I cope as a math-phobic adult? Luckily, I’ve learned to lean on my strengths – writing, communications and art. I also lean on calculators! Have you heard the expression, “fake it ‘til you make it”? I’ve also employed that strategy more than once. And, I’ve found that humor works well – I’ll just admit outright that math isn’t my forte and, while I’d be happy to volunteer as project manager or group leader, appointing me treasurer really isn’t the best idea.

Lisa Tabachnick Hotta is a professional writer, editor, social media expert and researcher who lives just north of Toronto, Ontario. Lisa specializes on topics related to health, mental health, family, the arts and society. Check out her blog: KidsAndMentalHealth.com.

What are your childhood memories of math anxiety? How does math anxiety influence your life now? How have you learned to get around it?

Today, I’ve asked Siobhan Green to share her math story with everyone. As the CEO Sonjara, Inc., a woman-owned technology firm, she is a huge proponent of increasing women and men’s math skills worldwide. But she hasn’t always felt confident in her math skills.  As she told me, “I think my story is not that unusual in how many of us, especially girls, too easily believe that math is hard and only for super smart math geek types.” Amen!

I was considered a smart kid. I learned to read early, knew my numbers and letters before age 3, entered first grade early and did well in school. However, when I got to third grade, I and my teachers started noticing a discrepancy between my math scores and the rest of my school work. I would regularly get poor grades on timed math tests — two- and three-digit addition and subtraction problems —  which predominated our math education. I easily mastered the concepts presented, but when given a timed test, I would run out of time and/or make a lot of odd mistakes.

This pattern continued in elementary school. The result was that I was either yelled at by teachers for being lazy or intentionally not focusing on my math work, or the teachers just assumed I was “bad at math.” I vividly remember one teacher saying “Yeah, girls are better at verbal skills, boys at mathematical/spacial ones. Just stick to what you are good at.”

Things got better in seventh grade when we moved to pre-algebra. I was excellent at pre-algebra and routinely got As and Bs on tests. But I also managed to make the teacher mad when a group of students was interviewed by a local paper and I made a disparaging comment about him (I had no idea what I was doing). As a result, he recommended that I NOT move into Algebra as my grades would warrant but rather into pre-algebra/algebra, for kids who struggled. No one — not my guidance counselor, nor my parents, nor even me — remarked on this fact, as we all had agreed by that point that I was “bad at math.”

This decision had huge implications. Math is tracked; students take algebra, then geometry, then algebra II and then trig, and only then can you take calculus. By not allowing me to go into algebra in eighth grade, I would not take calculus in high school — something that excluded me for many science (especially computer science) learning opportunities.

The rest of my educational history with math was similar – I excelled in algebra (go figure), did fine in algebra II and trig and did surprisingly well in geometry, but my heart wasn’t in it. I also took some basic computer programing courses — BASIC and Pascal. I enjoyed these but never associated them with math, and the overwhelmingly geeky-boy atmosphere of the computer lab turned me off to more experimentation in these fields. By the time computer science camps started becoming popular in high school (in the mid/late 80s), many programs expected that students would be in advanced math classes.

My college degree was in international affairs, which required two years of economics. I was NOT good at economics, and because I didn’t know calculus, and my antipathy for anything involving numbers, was a big part of it. I excelled in the social sciences and went onto a career in international development.

However, over the years of my career, I noticed that I was good at technology — I was the person in the office who figured out the printers, who set up macros and templates in Word, and who taught herself basic HTML. I was also a whiz with developing databases and excel spreadsheets and was often the person who tracked expenses and invoices. I became more and more interested in using technology for international development; I did my masters’ dissertation on the Internet in Africa in 1997. Falling in love with a software developer didn’t hurt, either.

It was actually through my husband (the math/computer science major and total math geek) that I realized I am NOT bad at math. I am in fact pretty darn good at it, and a lot of the tasks I enjoyed “count” as math!

Andy recognized that I have a mild learning disability — dyscalculia. I transpose numbers, have a hard time retaining numbers in my head, don’t memorize numbers well (I still don’t know my 7 and 8 times tables by heart — and by now, I will never memorize them), and often misstate numbers when going from listening to writing. (Trying to capture a number left on a voicemail is torture for me.) And this is true after years of learning coping skills! He was the one who said “Your calculation mistakes are not normal. And they have NOTHING to do with your math abilities.”

See, remember those timed tests? Thinking back, I would think one number and write down another one. Now, I always take a second to double check, but in a timed situation at age 8, I would panic and just move on to the next one. Many of the mistakes I made in the early years were down to calculation errors. When the math was based in patterns (like algebra) or depended on calculators, I did much better. But by that time, my math ability had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The research is clear about the impact of low expectations on ability; I never pushed myself and accepted lower scores as evidence of my innate lack of talent.

I didn’t realize that my strong abilities in building relational databases, especially to track quantitative data, counts as math! I absolutely love building databases, especially related to financial management. Those spreadsheets I use to track finances?  They speak to me and tell me a story in numbers. I had no idea that my ability to create and read those numerical pictures of my firm also counted as math.

Andy also taught me how to program, and while I will never be a full blown developer (mainly because I don’t have time to gain in-depth programming experience), he found that I grasped the key pattern processes quite easily. This skill has been invaluable in my role as business process analyst for web application development. It helps me translate between user needs and programming architecture, which helps with figuring out edge cases and pricing.

Today, my job as CEO of a web application company involves a lot of math. For example:

* Pricing work, especially figuring out hourly rates for specific roles/individuals based on salary, benefits, and overhead plus profit. It is very easy to “win” enough work for bankruptcy (win the work but price it so low you don’t cover your costs). We are always repeating the joke “yeah, we lose $1 per widget sold but we will make it up in volume.” (The explanation is at the bottom.)

* Overseeing projected and actual utilization of my staff. If our rates are based on this person being at 80% billable, and they are regularly at 75% billable, that 5% difference will eat into my profit.

* Understanding the difference between the profit and loss statement, the balance sheet, and a cashflow statement. This is omething that every business owner must understand in order to figure out how the business is doing. You can have huge paper profits but still be in serious trouble if you cannot make payroll, or you could be cash rich but slowly going under because your easy access to credit is masking the fact you are spending more than you are earning.

* Making decisions about how to spend money. What investment will make a bigger impact? For example, should I hire another person or pay down a loan? Should we purchase this new computer now on credit or wait until the next check comes in?

Oh, and here’s the explanation of the above joke:  “Yeah, we lose $1 per widget sold but we will make it up in volume.” Assuming that your costs do not scale (decrease per widget based on volume), if you sell 100 widgets, you have now lost $100. And if you sell 1,000,000 widgets, you have now lost $1,000,000. It is astonishing the number of business people I meet who do not get this concept. Usually, they are not in business for long.

Can you identify with Siobhan’s story? Share yours below. 

“Math is fun power” Photo courtesy of dtweney.

Things that make many kids anxious: a new school, big dogs, the deep end of the swimming pool, bees, strangers, nightmares, math.

Did you notice something there?  For many children, math and bees are equally frightening or at least nerve-wracking.

Not all kids have math anxiety, but it’s not uncommon for elementary, middle or high school students to express nervousness about learning math or taking math tests.  At the same time, these students may also feel less confident in their math skills or even say that they hate math.

Want to know how to eleviate math anxiety–for your kids and yourself? Check out my guest post at Imp3rfect Mom.  You could win a free copy of Math for Grownups!Would you like me to guest post at your blog?  Or do you know of a blog that I would fit right in with? I’ve got lots of ideas to share with anyone who will listen! And I promise I’m a good guest.  I wipe out the sink after I brush my teeth and don’t mind if the cat sleeps on my pillow.  Get the details here.