I am not doing math - so I am happy!

Being chased by the ghosts of Math

The Tune that Sticks

What is 17 times 3?

I loved playing cards when I was young. Contract Bridge, ACOL system - in case you were interested. Inevitably, once in a while, we would be a partner short. So we would often play "Auction Bridge". If you have never heard of auction bridge before, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia:

[A]uction bridge [is] an invention of three members of the Indian Civil Service stationed at an isolated community, designed as a three-handed form of bridge to compensate the lack of a fourth player.

A deck has 52 cards, but 52 is not divisible by three. One logical solution is to use a "dummy" hand in each round, but a more interesting solution is to take away a single card and be left with 51 cards to deal amongst 3 people. Thus, 17 times 3 equals 51 gets etched in the mind of a young boy without having to memorize times tables.

... One Step Back ...

In a previous blog, I questioned the notion of math anxiety being more prevalent in girls than in boys. Some of the earlier papers, specially OG articles by Dreger and Aiken or by Richardson and Suinn, hint that math anxiety scores do not differ significantly for males and females. Nevertheless, the review article "Mathematics Anxiety: What Have We Learned in 60 Years?" by Dowker et. al paints a more complicated story.

The relationship between gender and mathematics anxiety has been studied widely. I plan to go through this topic in detail in a later post, but for now I will rely on some the snippets from the review article. The citations for the primary sources can be found in the article by Dowker et al, and are not explicitly mentioned in the points below.

1. Females tend to rate themselves higher for Math Anxiety. Males, on the other hand, show more confidence.
2. Girls show a relationship between math anxiety and performance even when general text anxiety has been accounted for, while for boys this relationship disappears after controlling for general test anxiety.
3. There are studies that suggest no gender differences exist in math anxiety and performance, although these studies do not account for general text anxiety.
4. Females are often being reminded of the sterotype that males are better at math than females, and due to these gender stereotypes, girls may expect to feel more math anxiety which results in avoiding math activities and courses.
5. There is a lot of room for further research on how the working memory of girls may be affected differently than that of boys by math anxiety.

Overall, the idea that math anxiety is more prevalent in girls than boys is more nuanced than I expected. The review article discusses this in more detail, and covers numerous other aspects of math anxiety. I am not a big fan of summarizing review articles, as that will just be a redundant summary of a summary. Therefore the reader is strongly recommended to read the review article themselves. What are your thoughts on providing key takeaways from review papers in learning blogs? Please let me know in the comments.

Why we do what we do.

Recently, a student dropped by my office to announce that she received a perfect score in her math test. Just a week earlier she had been suffering from severe math anxiety. I had no doubt in the student's math ability, but a single problem that she had trouble understanding was enough to derail an entire practice exam. It brought her to a near standstill, and led her to make mistakes in proceeding problems, problems that she could otherwise solve in her sleep. Thankfully, studying about math anxiety gave me some perspective on what she was facing. It also allowed me to empathize with her, and provide helpful suggestions on sidestepping her math anxiety. Her grades bore the fruit of her hard work and my understanding of math anxiety. Have you been able to help someone overcome their math anxiety? How did you do it?

Removing Math Anxiety

Throwing Caution to the Wind

"I am not doing math - so I am happy!" is a verbatim quote from an acquaintance of mine. How soul crushing would it be if that sentence were to be spoken in front of a group of strugggling students, who are all facing math anxiety to some degree? We really need to be mindful of projecting negative attitude towards math in front of others.

In fact, in their short paper "Math anxiety: who has it, why it develops, and how to guard against it", Beilock et al. list social influences as a cause for math anxiety. In particular, teachers with negative attitude towards math can pass it on to their students (specially female students). What's worse is that it can have a rolling snow-ball effect from one generation to another as the negative vibes keep getting transmitted from teachers to students.

Sale! Sale! Sale!

The images in this section look like typical sales in your neighborhood grocery chain. However, carefully reading the small text tells us that the Classico pasta sauce, if bought individually, is $1.99 each, while the PC Spinach and Cheese sauce can be purchased for $2.29 per single jar. Do you see what is wrong here? How often do you check whether the sale prices actually make sense?

It is imperative that we promote positive math vibes to those around us. We should be encouraging kids to play around with numbers in their heads, so that when they grow up, they are not intimidated to calculate whether they are getting a good deal at the grocery store. Let us tell the next generation how awesome it has been to do math without a calculator, so that they may find their way out of using AI to do all their math.

Courtesy of Reddit user u/dotdoth