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Math anxiety and math trauma are real. So much so, that depression and mental health issues can be directly linked to the pressures of learning mathematics. Sadly, there have been suicides by students linked to the fear of failure with this subject.
Identifying math anxiety, which probably ramps up in middle school, has been a topic of fixation by many educators for as long as I can remember.

“Why do smart people enjoy saying that they are bad at math?” laments Petra Bonfert-Taylor, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College. “Few people would consider proudly announcing that they are bad at writing or reading.” After seeing one too many examples of adults “passing on [mathematical anxiety] like a virus,” Bonfert-Taylor has an important message for math-phobic parents and educators: “We are passing on from generation to generation the phobia for mathematics... [and] as a result, too many of us have lost the ability to examine a real-world problem, translate it into numbers, solve the problem and interpret the solution.”

Math has been a traditionally thorny subject in many American schools. Lots of children dislike math and many more adults stopped taking mathematics as soon as they are able, even when they were successful in their classes. At the same time, mathematical thinking is a crucial part of many of the most exciting and growing careers in science, technology, engineering and math, not to mention important for a general understanding of the mathematical world around us. So, what can U.S. math educators do to shift this dynamic?

Stanford Mathematics Education Professor Jo Boaler is championing a dramatic shift in how many math teachers approach instruction. Rather than focusing on the algorithms and procedures that make mathematics feel like a lock-step process -- with one right way of solving problems -- Boaler encourages teachers to embrace the visual aspects of math. She encourages teachers to ask students to grapple with open-ended problems, to share ideas and to see math as a creative endeavor. She works with students every summer and says that when students are in a math environment that doesn't focus on performance, speed, procedures, and right and wrong answers they thrive. They even begin to change their perceptions of whether they can or can't do math.

When I read the following post, I was chagrined to see myself in it. Are you? Here’s why you need to change your tune. This was written by Petra Bonfert-Taylor, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College and a 2016 Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project, a non-profit working to increase the range of public voices and ideas.

Let’s face it: A lot of students have test anxiety. How do we change test-taking so that we’re creating a comfortable environment for our students to show what they really know? A strategy called Test Talk, which my late co-teacher Diana Herrington and I created, has helped my students relax during exams. Our students are pre-service elementary school teachers, but since I wrote about this strategy on Twitter several months ago, teachers around the country have let me know how they have used this with their K–12 students (and in subjects other than math).

Four years ago, Diana and I decided to dedicate the first five minutes of the testing period to having our students look over the test and talk about strategies to solve the problems. We would have them put their pencils on the ground so they could focus on having a conversation. Our students were grouped in fours, and they would talk within their group, but I’ve seen videos from other teachers trying this where their elementary students walk around so they can talk to any other student, and I now follow suit.

The purpose of this was twofold: First, we wanted to test the way we taught—students collaborated a lot in our class, so we decided to include some collaboration during the test. And second, we realized that a lot of our students had both math anxiety and testing anxiety.

A new study shows that creating an environment in which math is part of everyday life, can help kids do better in the subject.

“How was skiing?” I asked my 14-year old daughter as she hauled her boot bag into the car. “Well, the ratio of snow to ground was definitely low,” she replied, adding that she had tried to figure the ratio of snow-to-ground during practice but had received only mystified looks. “Stop the math!” demanded a coach. “You are confusing us!”

Why do smart people enjoy saying that they are bad at math? Few people would consider proudly announcing that they are bad at writing or reading. Our country’s communal math hatred may seem rather innocuous, but a more critical factor is at stake: we are passing on from generation to generation the phobia for mathematics and with that are priming our children for mathematical anxiety. As a result, too many of us have lost the ability to examine a real-world problem, translate it into numbers, solve the problem and interpret the solution.

"Math anxiety affects almost half of elementary school students. Spot the symptoms and use these strategies to counteract it."