SUCCEED WITH MATH:
Every Student's Guide to Conquering Math Anxiety
Chapter 10. Getting Comfortable with Math
People who are comfortable with mathematics perceive the world in ways that are not available to people who are not. They see connections between quantities the way students of history perceive connections between events. They grasp the essentials of a problem and can abstract these by means of notation so as to be able to predict--without going through a large number of calculations--what will happen if any of those essentials were to change. They have a sense of what is "absolute" and what is "relative" in a particular context. They understand that to say an object is "moving slowly" has little meaning, except in relation to something else. And they are unlikely to be fooled by statements that don't hold up to quantitative analysis. They know that to say "the inflation rate is going down," does not mean that inflation itself is going down; rather, only that the rate of increase is diminishing, or, more visually, that on a graph showing price against time the curve is flattening out.
How will you know when you are getting comfortable with mathematics? You might find yourself paying closer attention to the numbers and quantities around you, recalling them with greater ease, and thinking harder and more creatively about them.
Asians think of mathematics "ability" as fairly equally distributed
among individuals and that differences in mathematical performance
are the result of hard work. Americans apparently believe the opposite: that mathematical ability
is a very rare talent, possessed by only a few, and utterly impossible
to attain if one is not born...
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