Does math leave you anxious? Maybe you feel it’s unforgiving — that unless everything is perfectly right, it’s totally wrong. Perhaps it just doesn’t compute for you. It’s like looking at a foreign language — one in which you’re far from fluent.
If this is you, you’re not alone. “Math anxiety is a widespread, worldwide problem affecting all age groups,” a trio of researchers in Austria noted in a 2018 review on the subject. They cited work finding that more than nine in every 10 U.S. adults, for instance, admit to having some level of math anxiety.
Then there are other people — a far smaller group — for whom math makes perfect sense. Indeed, for them its logic and predictability offer comfort and even pleasure.
What sets the math-fluent apart from the math-phobic? That’s something that’s been puzzling Ben Orlin for a long while. This teacher and self-described “math apologist” in Saint Paul, Minn., thinks the world of numbers has gotten a bum rap.
Math brings Orlin great joy. But rather than dwell on the obvious — that relatively few people share his love of math — he’s decided to try and turn things around. Maybe he can’t make math fun for everyone, but he’d like to lessen the anxiety it triggers.
“One of my great pleasures has been getting to write four books about the power of mathematical ideas,” he says. Along the way, he notes, “I have taught everyone from 11-year-olds to undergraduates — mostly [about] math.”
He thinks that many people who have trouble with math simply weren’t taught it right. So, what does he think went wrong?
In many classrooms around the world, teachers present math — at least elementary stages of it — as a memory exercise, explains Tom Crawford. He’s a math professor at the University of Oxford in England. A lot of books and teachers around the world take a repeat-after-me approach, he says. Like “here are some formulas.” Now learn…
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