![]() ![]() ![]() I’ll meet people at the grocery store or I’ll be in an Uber chatting with the driver. “Hating math seems to bring people together,” said Reshma Menon, a preceptor in Harvard’s mathematics department. According to the cognitive scientist Sian Beilock’s 2019 Harvard Business Review article, “ Americans Need to Get Over Their Fear of Math,” nearly half of first- and second-grade students say they are “moderately nervous” or “very, very nervous” about math, and a quarter of college students report moderate or high levels of math anxiety. (The death was not widely reported until a New York Times obituary appeared in September of this year.)Īlmost 50 years have passed since Tobias, whose papers are held by Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library, first described math anxiety’s impact on students - especially young girls and women. “You can’t begin to grasp those issues,” Tobias said in a talk at West Virginia University just one year before she died, in 2021, at the age of 86. Threats like climate change, pandemics, and gerrymandering cannot be solved without math. Today, math anxiety still smothers students - especially those who belong to groups historically underrepresented in the field - and there’s more at stake than a balanced checkbook. (‘Your mother never could balance a checkbook,’ he says fondly.)” “It is handed down from mother to daughter with father’s amused indulgence. “Math anxiety is a serious handicap,” Tobias wrote in a 1976 article in Ms. Many remembered their parents saying something like, “Nobody in our family is good at math.” Others recalled the shame of standing at a blackboard, failing to solve an equation as their classmates heckled and laughed. I must be wrong.”Īnother wrote: “I’m not finished. ![]() On one side, they worked on a math problem on the other, they wrote down how the problem made them feel. In one of her early studies, the graduate of Radcliffe College, self-described “scholar activist,” and author of 14 books, including the 1978 bestseller “ Overcoming Math Anxiety,” gave elementary school students a sheet of paper, divided in half. In the 1970s, Sheila Tobias noticed something peculiar going on in mathematics. ![]()
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