Teachers Need to Take Math Trauma Seriously
Healing, Step 1: Recognise it Exists
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I was 15 years old, sitting in grade 10 (Sophomore) maths, feeling utterly alone in a room full of my peers.
At first I’d put up my hand to ask for help, but soon stopped when I realised that my questions sounded stupid. Everyone else got it the first time, and there I was asking the math-equivalent of “but how do you know those two musical notes are different just by listening to them?” It was an awful feeling that churned my stomach and made a painful dent in my self-esteem.
“Ha ha! I’m in the dumb class now,” I joked the following year, on my way to remedial math, almost succeeding at looking like I didn’t care.
Facts don’t lie: no way was I “dumb”. I got straight As in right-brain subjects like Drama, Music, English, and History. Science and math — another story. They were dull necessities for most people I knew, but for me it was like being a monolingual Cantonese speaker in a class where the text was Mandarin. Looked familiar, sounded foreign.
I’d picked up French in an immersion class, but bombed out with the language of numbers.
