Math Anxiety

Sheila Tobias first wrote Overcoming Math Anxiety in 1978. In her updated version, published by W.W. Norton in 1994, she expands her analysis of the attitude and approach variables that interfere with students' performance. The first thing people remember about failing at math is that it felt like sudden death. Whether it happened while learning word problems in sixth grade, coping with equations in high school, or first confronting calculus and statistics in college, failure was instant and frightening.

Math Anxiety

Mathematics is not fuzzy, mathematicians insist. But it is often taught fuzzily. Students who experience such difficulties feel they are just dumber than everyone else, but in fact they may be smarter. A mind that is bothered by ambiguity - actual or perceived - is not usually a weak mind, but a strong one. This point is important because mathematicians argue that it is the learner - not the subject (or its teaching) - who is imprecise.

When most of us learned math, we learned dependence as well. We needed the teacher to explain, the textbook to drill us, the back of the book to tell us the right answers. If we can control our anxiety by recognizing its symptoms and coping with them, we can go far. How far do we want to go? Not far enough to become engineers or mathematicians, perhaps. But surely far enough so that our fear of math no longer makes decisions for us.

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