Woman's Hour - Parenting: Maths anxiety

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

“Maths anxiety” is real and one in ten children suffer from despair and rage when faced with the subject, according to new research from Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education and its Centre for Neuroscience. 1,700 British pupils aged eight to 13 were surveyed and Jenni is joined by Lucy Rycroft-Smith, research officer at Cambridge Mathematics and Kayla Fuller a mum of two and digital communications coordinator at National Numeracy to discuss their reactions and what parents can do to support their children if they have maths anxiety.

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, Jenny Murray welcoming you to this week's podcast for parents. Now, I've often been criticised in the past for publicly stating that I was so useless at maths my teacher threw me out of her class and said a science would do for getting into university. I did biology. I will no longer be ashamed of confessing my terror of the subject on account of some new research from Cambridge University's Faculty of Education and Neuroscience, which confirms that maths anxiety is real. And I'm clearly not alone

in feeling really quite sick at the thought of the times tables or calculus. I really have this. Watch the bill arrive at a meal out with friends and watch me freeze. And not because I don't want to pay my share, I just want someone else to work that out. Tax returns were a nightmare. At 70 it still affects me, and I am blessed to have a very understanding accountant.

When I was eight, I managed to convince my parents I absolutely had to move school. An hour's bus ride away, because my friend was going to move there. It wasn't about my friend at all. It was the looming backlog of sums I couldn't face. My daughter has a total phobia of maths. She is now 15 and we are struggling to find a sixth form that she can attend because it is extremely unlikely that she will get her maths GCSE. Her problems with maths have shaped her whole education, confidence and sense of self. No exaggeration.

It is like a form of punishment and has a constant impact on her life. Maths anxiety started in primary school for my daughter. Now she thinks she is rubbish and can't do anything. Maths anxiety leaks into science lessons and any subjects that might contain numbers. Learning mathematics when I was at school was for me a completely alien subject. From a very young age while at primary school I found the whole subject completely baffling. I would sit in class with tears rolling down my face and when confronted by my teacher as to why I hadn't written anything she would then

very quickly go over the same problems and then leave me to it. I always find it stressful and yet what was very amusing years later I had to do my own VAT returns which funnily enough I quite enjoyed. As a child I studied my times table over and over again with my grandfather, and he assured me they'd stick. They never did and never have. Nights before maths classes, I couldn't sleep, and when I used to get made to stand up and answer questions in front of the class, I would feel sick, my face would burn red, and I just dreaded it. I still feel the same, and every time I'm in a work or social situation where numbers come up I desperately try to hide my panic. I can only work things out if nobody's looking and I can calm down and preferably use a pen and paper. I feel like it's a big secret like not being able

to read might be. Well the research in Cambridge surveyed 1,700 British pupils from the ages of 8 to 13 and concluded that one in ten children suffers from despair and rage when faced with the subject. Why is it so frightening? And what can parents and teachers do to make maths less scary? Well, Kayla Fuller is a Digital Communications Coordinator at National Numeracy. Lucy Rycroft-Smith is an academic at Cambridge Mathematics. Lucy, what is maths anxiety and why do we get it in a way that doesn't seem to happen with reading? Yes, so the first thing to say is that primarily it would be categorised as an emotional response

and you heard lots of emotional words there from people who are saying, as you say, that they felt despair or rage or moved to tears. But actually, it also might manifest in a physical response, in a behavioral response. So all of the stories that we heard there about people feeling frozen, feeling that they couldn't persist with what they were trying to do because of some sort of obstacle. And so that that sense in which it moves beyond just not being able to do something or feeling frightened, that actually it overtakes your brain in some sense. It co-ops your working memory. So you're actually in that very adrenaline-raised state of fear to the point where you just feel you can't do anything at all. Keller, I know you had it.

How did it make you feel when you were going through it? So when I was originally taking my maths GCSE, which was 20 years ago now, I definitely suffered from maths anxiety. I would sit in class and, as Lucy was saying, my behavioural response was to disengage because I would feel stress and panic and fear, I think, a fear of humiliation, of being, I want to use the expression, picked on to answer a question, which I think is quite telling. So as a teacher, Lucy, what impact does this have who is refusing to engage, my first response might be frustration and annoyance, because I might feel that actually that's a behavioural issue that's nothing to do with my subject. And actually, it's very difficult to disentangle sometimes the effects of maths anxiety with just students who are being oppositional or difficult. But one of the things to think about is that perhaps sometimes this is a response, exactly as Kayla said, to a feeling of humiliation,iliation feeling ashamed and so it's my first duty as a teacher to make sure that pupils are feeling comfortable and comfortable enough to experiment and take risks because that's what maths is all about

it's about making mistakes. Oh thank you reassuring. You're very welcome. The report Kayla does say that teachers and parents may actually inadvertently play a part in it. How much do you reckon that was in your case? I definitely think it had a role to play. My family is the sort of family where we all walked around saying we were words people and not numbers people. And that was the message I received growing up. It was OK to not be able to do numbers. So I think that definitely impacted how I felt about it and

it was almost okay for me to feel the way I did and I could just check out of it and not you know persevere it does seem to be the case that girls suffer more than boys Lucy why yes I think there's potentially three different aspects of that one might be um that girls just generally suffer from a lack of confidence compared to boys. And that's the same for women and men as well. That persists into adulthood. Often you will find that women feel they need to be particular group and there's a particularly strong stereotype about that group i.e that girls are worse at math than boys then your performance actually suffers a result of that just being reminded that you're female before you do a math test can affect your mathematics performance you did overcome it yes how um i think for me so i went i went back and retook, I reset my maths GCSE as an adult. I was almost 30 when I did it. And you got an A.

And I got an A, I know. Which I think, I definitely went into the first class still feeling very maths anxious. And it didn't go well, that first lesson. The teacher set a test on the first day just to get a baseline, I think, of where everybody was. And I sat there and my stomach flipped over, my palms were sweaty, and my mind went so blank that I couldn't remember how to do things that I knew how to do. But I kept on going because I think at that age I had a really good grasp of the value of what I was doing. And I also had more resilience because I had life really good grasp of the value of what I was doing and I also had more resilience

because I had life experience to draw on to know that I could overcome things if I needed to. And you see I can do my bank account and household expenses and you know work out what time I have to be at the airport if I'm catching a flight but numeracy is very different from maths isn't it yes absolutely um so we have sort of what we get national numeracy called school maths which is you know your algebra your trigonometry and there's that sort of trope about you know i'm still waiting for the day when i'm going to use algebra in my real life um and then you have everyday maths which is numeracy it's the things that you're using every single time you you know when you need to catch your train in the morning and you need to work out how much time you need to leave before you get out of the house that's

using numeracy i think it's worth pointing out there as well that some of the things that you're describing are using tools where in a classroom situation you might be actively not encouraged to use those tools like a calculator or a spreadsheet and the time pressure isn't there in the same way as well so that is why it might feel different. It does feel very different but come on what are we going to do to help the children who are suffering now because exams are coming up tests are coming up what do we do? So luckily there are some researchers in the field doing really great work on this some of whom have been working for some time and the idea really is that like any other stress response, you want to find a balance point, a sweet spot. So in maths, if you're working on things that are repetitive and tedious and that you know how to do, nobody's learning anything.

It's quite boring. You won't actually register much of any kind of stress or anxiety. Similarly, if you go the other way and something is way too stressful and challenging, it might be the math itself that's too challenging, or it might be the context. It might be the fact that it's time pressured or you feel there's a danger of public humiliation. You're not learning then either. In the middle, however, you're growing, you're learning, you're making mistakes, you are slightly overreaching and then coming back and you're able to be creative and experiment. And in order to allow students to find that mid-ground sometimes we actually have to present them with these sorts of models and give them the language and the

framework to be able to conceptualize the way that they're learning as well as the learning itself. I was very careful never to say to my boys that I was bad at maths what would you say to your children you can be good at maths it's not hard or just let them get on with it? I probably wouldn't say that it's not hard because I think that's yeah I think that's part of it maths it's not hard or just let them get on with it i i probably wouldn't say that it's not hard because i think that's sometimes it is yeah i think that's part of it and it's um helping them to understand that even when it is hard you can still keep going with it and get there in the end it's not going to be it's not necessarily always going to be easy um but i've it's difficult to not draw on your own experience. And if you did really dislike maths at school and had a terrible experience,

it's so easy to fall into that trap of saying, don't worry, I hated maths at school, or even saying things like you don't really need maths. I think it's really important to be positive. I was talking to Kayla Fuller and Lucy Rycroft-Smith. And inevitably, we had lots of response to this discussion. Sandra said in a quite long email, your item on maths anxiety had resonance for me. I too wanted to weep in maths lessons, but loved language.

My husband was made fun of because he couldn't spell. Highly intelligent and career successful, he learned to sail in his 50s and took us two-handed by yacht from England to Canada and back. He still can't spell. Feeling a failure from maths classes, by the time I left school I'd decided maths were irrelevant to my life, apart from the basics taken care of by addition, subtraction, percentages and measurement. After starting work at 15 in my 30s and with my husband's encouragement, I took an OU course avoiding anything involving maths and after getting top marks for my first exam decided I wasn't stupid after all.

I've since had books published and still find all but basic maths irrelevant. I'm 75 now and have met a number of people in my life who've had parents, spouses and teachers who've consigned them to despair at their stupidity but who've had so much to offer the rest of us. The truth is we come into this world with a brain that works in a particular way, producing a set of skills which we should be allowed to use to our own and other people's benefit and not be required to fit into some kind of man-made model. Someone else said, really interested in your piece on maths anxiety. I was famous at primary school for crying in maths out of frustration. Even now at 64 people will remind me of this. I managed to get into grammar school, despite being working class and coming from a council house,

and I was nervous of maths, but less anxious than I was before. I would say I was an average student at that stage. Well, one day I noticed that one of my fellow students had discovered that the answers to our maths homework were in the back of the teacher's textbook. Now, I wasn't naturally a cheat but armed with the correct answers I could do my homework knowing the answers but I had to really analyse why I had got the answers wrong and rework them. This transformed my relationship with maths which I no longer looked at juggling symbols and numbers, but more problem solving.

I went on to get grade A maths O level, which was a challenging exam in the early 70s. And that came from Michael Dillon. And then Annie says, I'm 69 years old and still vividly remember the maths anxiety I experienced as an 11-year-old at secondary school. Believe it or not, out of a class of 36 pupils, I came first in all other subjects, but maths couldn't even think straight. The teacher would call me out to blackboard in front of the class and I can still feel my cheeks burning and heart banging and the snide comments she made while pupils giggled behind me. This wasn't teaching, it was a process of humiliation.

Worse still was knowing all the class would be given detention if I didn't get an answer right. I still see this person and long to tell her it wasn't my maths ability in question, it was her inability to be a good teacher. And then Catherine Fry on Twitter said, Thank you so much. I had no idea maths phobia existed. Now I know what my daughter is going through. She completely disengages whenever there are numbers involved. And then the email that I think was almost directed

straight at me came from Bob and said, I'm a retired maths teacher. Many parents told me at parents' evening they were not surprised that their child found maths difficult because they themselves found it difficult and intimidating. This attitude is infectious and should be confronted. It's exactly what my mum did. He says, maths is magical, mystical and fun. If only somebody had told me that when I was little and learning, I might have done better. That's today's podcast for parents. If you have ideas about things you would like us to discuss, please do get in touch with us. You can send us an email or a tweet. Bye-bye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year,

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