A Real Fear
It’s more than stage fright. MATH anxiety can derail academic or professional success. But some scholars are working to help students get over it.
By Paul Ruffins
“Math anxiety is my worst enemy,” says Dr. Louise Raphael. “I feel that I am teaching the most important mathematics class on the Howard University campus, but my students’ fear of math is the toughest battle standing in my way.”
“I continuously have to confront attitudes like, ‘Nobody in my whole family can do math,’ or ‘You know our folks just aren’t good at this,’” Raphael says.
A third factor is slowly gaining attention as a possible cause of math anxiety: learning disabilities. Specialists who treat learning disabilities understand how these problems interfere with math skills, but discussions of learning disabilities have largely been absent from the academic research on math anxiety.
Math anxiety’s psychological symptoms include feeling nervous before a math class, panicking, going blank during a test or feeling helpless while doing homework. The physiological symptoms include sweaty palms, racing heartbeat or an upset stomach. The symptoms are essentially the same as stage fright, or the “butterflies in the stomach” athletes experience before a game. However, the critical difference between stage fright and math anxiety is that math represents the gateway to almost all forms of higher education and many career opportunities. Because of this, Bob Moses, a veteran of the Mississippi Freedom Summer, has defined math literacy as a civil rights issue and has organized The Algebra Project to help communities organize to demand better math education for low-income children.
