If this question causes you just a little anxiety, you are not alone. I am seriously tempted to list the horror stories of my education. One of them was a deep insecurity about my abilities with math. It is an example that I use often in the class that I teach. It is especially common with women, and I teach mostly women.
I heard an excellent interview today on KQED Forum with Jo Boaler, an education instructor at Stanford. She works to release people, especially children, from their math phobias. I was gratified to be able to hear her speak. She reenforced what I teach in my class: that talents and beliefs about our abilities are mostly a mental construct that prevent us from reaching our full potential.
She really talks the talk and walks the walk of a positive mindset.
We all have had experiences long in our past that help us to form our beliefs about ourselves. Unfortunately those beliefs have little to do with the reality of who we are and what we can do. They are tied to emotions and pictures in our brain that confirm our image of who we are. So when we have several bad experience with math as children, we form a self image that we are bad in math. All we have to do is change the picture. Create visualizations where we are succeeding in math. Repeat affirmations that confirm our abilities. Most importantly we must get rid of the negative self-talk.
Here is the link: http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201601251000
It is well worth listening to. Also here is Ms. Boaler’s website: https://www.youcubed.org/ I would click on the link that leads one to “Growth Mindset”. This concept is key to becoming a confident person.
If you are still reading, I will relate one math story from my adulthood. I grew up with many insecurities about my ability to learn anything that school taught me, especially math. My father nurtured my love of art, and insured that I have a positive self concept of myself as an artist, but little else. I struggled into high school, flunked and repeated my freshman year. Since I did better taking these classes the second time, it did boost my self confidence a bit.
Amazingly I became a teacher. In the late 1980’s I ended up teaching math in a continuation school. The reason is that in a continuation school, the number of teachers are limited, and one must just step up to the plate. I went to a math conference at Asilomar. My first day I got up early and went to a workshop on Algebraic equations. Everyone except me was an experienced math instructor. Problems would be given, and I ended up being the only person in the room who could not solve them. I left the workshop feeling embarrassed and insure about my abilities.
If I had the consciousness that I have now, things would have been different in that room. Here I was, the perfect example of the student who cannot get it. And these all math teachers could not construct a lesson to help me feel comfortable about math. Instead I felt the room full of excitement because these teachers were reveling in how smart they were. Now I would turn the situation around. I would say: “Here you are in the perfect teaching situation. How are you going to make this student feel good about him or herself? How can you teach this concept in a way that instills confidence, not shame and insecurity?
Photographs courtesy of Jo Boaler's site youcubed.
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