Teachers require ongoing professional development throughout their careers to learn and grow in instructional practices in order to best meet the needs of all students. In this chapter, math anxiety is addressed in terms of those professional development needs. Instead of providing support in the use of a specific program or curriculum, ideas for school and district leaders who provide such professional development are described in terms of easing the phenomenon of math anxiety, a common fear of math that can hinder one's ability to provide quality instruction in the content. People who experience math anxiety often avoid the subject to alleviate the negative feelings, which is detrimental to the ability to effectively teach mathematical concepts.
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Third grader Madison has heard her parents joke about not being able to do math before. They say they can’t help her or her sister with homework because they don’t understand the way they are being taught math, and they always need to take out their phones in order to figure out tips in restaurants. “We’re just not math people,” her mom has often told her. Her older sister frequently needs help to complete her math assignments, and this usually results in her crying in frustration when she isn’t able to grasp the concepts and no one at home is able to help. Today, someone else is crying in frustration over math - Madison’s teacher.
While providing instruction to the class on equivalent fractions, Madison’s teacher started talking in circles, trying to explain what equivalent fractions even are. She had taken out some plastic fraction pieces that fit together to make a complete circle, and she was using them to model how the pieces of different sizes matched up, except the demonstration didn’t work the way Madison’s teacher intended, and she started getting frustrated. The more she manipulated the pieces and referred back to her notes, the more annoyed she got. She told her class “Third grade math is hard! I always thought math was confusing,” and continued to reference her Teacher’s Manual and play with the pieces while Madison’s classmates called out suggestions to her. Growing impatient, she sharply told the class to start working independently while she tried to figure out how the fraction pieces modeled the problem, mumbling to herself. Finally, after being unsuccessful with what she was trying to do, Madison’s teacher found herself in tears, mortified at not being able to figure out the math, mortified at having such a reaction in front of her students.
Madison’s story is not uncommon. Think for a moment how it feels to hear her parents say “We’re just not math people.” Another way to say it is “We can’t do math.” In the United States, this is largely accepted. Math is considered by many, if not most, as inherently difficult. People of all ages can relate to the statement; even if they don’t agree with it, chances are, they have heard others say it, probably multiple times. Now think how it would feel if someone instead said “We can’t read.” It evokes a very different feeling. If someone were to proclaim they could not read, the reaction would likely be one of shock or discomfort, rather than acceptance and understanding.
All people need math in their everyday lives. For many, the idea of math means “solving for x”. However, mathematics is a vast discipline that involves reasoning skills, finding patterns, abstract thinking, and constructing arguments. While “solving for x” may be a goal to complete an assignment in a high school math class, the more important objective of math instruction is to teach how to simplify problems and think critically. All adults need these skills to survive and thrive. The age-old question of “When are we ever going to use this?” is easily answered - we are going to use it daily. We are going to need to have some degree of time management. We are going to need to analyze data. We are going to need to think through a problem creatively to come to a solution. We are going to need to find patterns in things to figure out what comes next. We are going to need to be able to clearly justify our arguments in ways that are coherent to others.
In past decades, the emphasis in math classes was on memorizing more than it was on deeply understanding and learning to critique and reason. Methods of teaching math were often based on timed drills and only one way of thinking; teaching math today involves much more sophisticated techniques so that students learn the nuances of mathematics, the ability to analyze data, and the skill of constructing logical arguments. Math teachers of students of all ages face a challenging task in achieving these goals, especially given that the way they are expected to teach today may look nothing like the way they were taught themselves. In many ways, teachers need to learn math all over again with a different viewpoint in order to be effective instructors for all students.
For many, the thought of learning the math all over again invokes a sense of dread, and people who dread it try to avoid math at all costs. This is especially true of females, who take fewer math classes at the high school and college levels (Hembree, 1990). However, when the responsibility of one’s job is to effectively teach math concepts to young children, avoiding math is not possible. It needs to be faced head-on so that our students not only learn to be proficient in math skills, but learn to thrive and enjoy the challenges that come with the learning process, so that they do not grow up to fear numeracy.