Coming from a math hater turned math major…
Believe it or not, not all math majors have been math geniuses since day one. In fact, a lot of us aren’t math geniuses at all. I’m no human calculator, and despite doing well enough in math throughout high school, I’m by no means the smartest mathematician out there. I hate doing proofs, and I barely scraped a B in differential equations last semester. Trigonometry is my greatest weakness, and I couldn’t even begin to tell you how to multiply or divide decimals without a calculator.
What I can do, however, is recite the times table in my sleep. I can long divide and take derivatives like a pro. I can explain how to multiply and divide fractions to someone who just learned what fractions are; just ask the students I tutored while I was in community college last year. It was while I was tutoring that I made a realization: most people aren’t bad at math and hate it. They’re afraid of math, and heck, I am too!
Fear of the unknown is the basis of all other fears. Just as psychologists have tied this fear of the unknown to several fears, I attribute people’s fear of math to the same thing: the fear of the unknown. As humans, we are hardwired to be afraid of the things that we don’t understand, from spiders and the dark to the deep ocean and, more recently, artificial intelligence (AI). We don’t know if the spider we see is one that will hurt us, so we are afraid of them all. We don’t know what may be hiding in the dark, so our minds conjure scary images to keep us up at night. We don’t know what lies in the deep ocean, so we fear being in it. And most relevant to my argument, we don’t understand AI, so we are afraid of what it can do (Carleton 2016). This is what I believe causes people to hate math in the first place. If it’s something we don’t understand right away, we tend to fear it, so if we don’t have a good mathematical foundation, we get scared when mathematical concepts build on each other. You can’t do algebra without arithmetic, geometry without algebra, trigonometry without geometry, or calculus without any of them.
When you get scared of math, you start to avoid it, and when you avoid it, you stop understanding it. I didn’t learn the multiplication table overnight. My teachers instilled it into my mind by repetition. I didn’t pass AP Calculus by being able to see the problems in my mind. I studied and did practice problems until I could call on formulas in my sleep. Did I want to write equations until my hand fell off? No, but I needed to in order to understand. We learn by doing, and we understand that we need to do math, but we stop trying once we get scared. Whether we are scared to get help, admit we don’t understand or fail, fear is the underlying factor.
So now I would like to ask you: Are you bad at math? Or are you afraid of it? I tutored many math students at my community college last year, and almost all of them started their first session by saying, “I’ve always been bad at math.” It was my job to reassure those students: “I can almost guarantee that you aren’t bad at math. You just don’t get it.” If that sounds like you, you aren’t alone. I was once that girl, and the way I overcame it was by doing math. I figured out that my dad and I had very similar learning styles and that he was good at math (and still is), so whenever I felt stupid for not understanding math, I went to my dad. He explained it to me in a way that made sense for my brain, not necessarily everyone else’s. School teaches the way the majority learns, especially math, so it’s normal not to get it the way your teacher explains it.
This, dear reader, is my advice to you and my parting wisdom: find someone who gets you and gets it. I was lucky to find this in my dad, and I was that person for many students as a tutor. I was also that person for my friends, and now, since I’ve officially surpassed the math level that my dad reached, I’m that person for the very person who taught me how to do math in the first place. Math isn’t scary. You just don’t understand it. Yet.
Reference: Carleton, R. Nicholas. “Fear of the Unknown: One Fear to Rule Them All?” Journal of Anxiety Disorders, vol. 41, June 2016, pp. 5–21, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2016.03.011.