Editor’s note, July 8, 2020; Updated March 18, 2021: The author of this piece, which was originally published on the Conversation, contacted Educati

How to Help Students Heal From ‘Math Trauma’

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2021-06-12 01:30:05

Editor’s note, July 8, 2020; Updated March 18, 2021: The author of this piece, which was originally published on the Conversation, contacted Education Week to acknowledge to us that she failed to attribute the phrase “fragile math identity” to the researcher who coined the term—Ebony McGee, an associate professor of diversity and STEM education at Vanderbilt University. The author also misused the term, which describes how negative racial stereotyping motivates Black students to disprove negative profiling in mathematics education settings. The essay has been updated, and the term has been dropped. Education Week has elected to publish a different version of this essay from what currently appears on the Conversation, as we believe it is more accurate to the original essay we published.

I teach people how to teach math, and I’ve been working in this field for 30 years. Across those decades, I’ve met many people who suffer from varying degrees of math anxiety. In its worst manifestations, math anxiety becomes what my colleagues and I call math trauma—a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics.