How have I only found out about this thread now?! Wow, just when I needed it too!
I am not a maths person at all, and probably never will be. Must be maths anxiety.
Yes, indeed, I have experienced maths anxiety, and as a result, maths apathy. Then I experience almost daily episodes of wanting to break down over maths. Kinda sucks when you study (or try to study) Methods and feel that way. Recently I made my own thread about how teachers never tend to explain the
why behind the
how in maths, if you get what I mean. Having read that article, I think that because there is so much to learn, (through mostly no fault of their own, mind you), the teachers have focused on quantity of content drilled into student's heads rather than true intuition.
It's great that they're doing this with primary students! Get 'em while they're young(er). I sure could've done with a bit of meditative thinking before my primary school maths classes. Maths, for me personally, slowly became this:
1) Learn formula
2) Plug numbers into formula
3) That, ladies and gentlemen, is Mathematics.
3a) With next to no explanation of the signficance of what we were being taught or where stuff was being derived, etc.
4) Hence why I gradually lost interest
Until about Year 10. Maths concepts became seemingly more abstract and about as unapplicable outside the classroom as you could get. My interest in Maths continued on a downward spiral to the present day. I have a SAC in less than a week, and I am absolutely petrified of what will be on it (despite us being able to use bound reference + CAS, but that's a story for another day)
They feel like any effort to try and improve is going to have any positive outcome.”
You're kidding, right? That is a typo, right? I'm pretty sure that's meant to say "They feel like any effort to try and improve is
not going to have any positive outcome". That's exactly how I feel. Even if I
am doing maths work, I don't feel like I'm improving.
“A student might think their maths ability is fixed, or inherited, or they might say, ‘I am just not a maths person’
^ Me. How I'm going to change this, I don't know.