Overcoming Math Phobia
The way math was taught to me as a public and private school student always left me confused and doubting myself. I finally got over my fear of math in my twenties, when I became office manager at Holt Associates and was taught double-entry bookkeeping and record keeping for tax purposes. Math now had a purpose for me beyond knowing my bank balance and keeping score in games, and as I age I continue to appreciate and enjoy the various ways math can help and entertain us, despite my bad math school experiences.
Most educators believe it is problems with curricular materials, families, and children’s health that are the key issues preventing learning in school, not with the structures and assumptions of school. Nonetheless, unschoolers often describe how their children learn school subjects, particularly math, in the course of their lives, not while they are engaged in course work. Here’s a story from GWS 73 that illustrates this.
JJ Fallick of Washington writes:
We are new subscribers to GWS, and I was pleased to see the letter about overcoming math phobia by Kim Kopel in GWS #72. Our eldest. Kate, now 13, got a good case of math phobia from an incident during first grade, her one year in public school. Both my husband (an ex-school teacher) and I realized then how we should have begun with homeschooling. My husband had been adamant about letting the school “have a chance” (to fail? to foul up our daughter?) but we have not repeated this mistake with any of our other four, who are all happy at home. Kate is happy at home too. She Is currently working on math and on overcoming a test phobia as well.
I don’t know why I seem to have such an easy time trusting my kids to learn what is necessary. This problem of responsibility for education seems to be a big bugaboo to many beginning homeschoolers. My contention is that, given access to materials and an open, stimulating atmosphere, all kids will learn, and not just memorize stuff to regurgitate on a quiz, but really learn it by making it their own.
When we brought Kate home from school (in the middle of the fall term of second grade, when she just couldn’t cope another day), we just plain ignored math. She read, wrote, drew, listened to and discussed just about anything, helped cook, can, plan gardens, sew, etc. (you realize all these involve numbers, but she didn’t recognize that as math). She could figure cups to pints and quarts, convert fractional cups to tablespoons and tell me how many tomato plants went into fifty feet of row if they were three feet apart, but she still couldn’t do a page in a workbook. Then she started getting an allowance and wanted to order things by mail, like I do. When she was 9 she saw her dad doing the Income taxes and asked what he was doing. While he explained, she looked over the tax booklet and then asked, “How often do you get to do this?” When he told her (choking down a laugh) only once a year, she looked crestfallen (she was hoping It was monthly) and asked If she could do It next year. He told her she could, but pointed out that you needed to know how to add, subtract, multiply and divide and that she had to do It without a calculator (as he did, using the machine only to check figures). This didn’t faze her a bit, and I figured our low-key approach to math was working. As an added incentive for her to master these skills I promised her a calculator of her own when she could do all four operations. She earned her calculator before the next tax time and then successfully figured our income taxes, earning us a $500 refund from the IRS. Of course, her dad and I signed the form so we had to double check her arithmetic, but we found no errors.
Math is still her weakest subject, though she can easily do approximations in her head while shopping, find the most economical size and so on. Currently she has chosen to study for the GED which she can take when she is 16. She has also decided to begin taking standardized tests (here we also have the option of non-test evaluation, so she has not yet had to take tests). She wants to take them as a way of learning to overcome her block against them, not because she thinks the results will be representative of her knowledge and skills.