If you ask around in the room with the question “who likes Maths” one will find the crowd divided into two groups – one who love maths and the other who hates maths. The fear of maths starts from an early age in an individual. This increases as time passes by. When the foundation is not strong, the child is not able to cope as the syllabus gets tougher and more abstract in the later years. This becomes a vicious cycle, and the child can never overcome fear of mathematics and completely moves away from it.
This fear gets percolated to other subjects like Science and Economics which involve maths. We talk about a lot of kids steering away from STEM, the cause of this could be the development of fear of maths at an early age. Sometimes this fear gets transmitted from parents, especially the mother who is the main person who takes care of teaching and homework in the early formative years of the child.
There is a fundamental fault in how we approach teaching maths to a child. We use a close approach which gets limited to a textbook and solving of problems on paper. The teaching of the subject needs to move away from books to everyday life and activities around us. The phobia can be overcome in the early years by applying the concepts in real life as much as possible. For example, the child can be taken on grocery shopping and paying for items bought using cash instead of a credit card. This will help the child understand maths’ application in daily routines. Pointing out the different shapes in nature and the objects around us is a lesson in geometry itself.
In Asian education, a lot of emphasis is given to rote learning of multiplication tables and formulas. Not everyone is good at retention. Cognitive retention can be encouraged through visual application, rhymes, songs, or sequencing. Who can forget the famous BODMAS or Pythagoras method? There are other alternate ways like using Abacus or Vedic mathematics that can do away with rote learning. In today’s day and era, with the rapid advancement of technology and tech tools, we no longer need to remember many things including times tables. Our maths curriculum has hardly gone through any change in the early years of school. It is high time we update the curriculum to match the new ways of living.
We should come away from the method of teaching maths where the final aim is getting the definitive answer wrong or right. The teaching pedagogy should put more emphasis on using a problem-solving approach while making the process interesting, engaging, and fulfilling. More focus should be put on the steps taken instead of getting the answer right. Once the marking focus shifts from getting the definitive answer right to the steps taken to get to the answer, much of the anxiety in students will be gone and students will start to enjoy their maths lessons again. Parents, teachers, and curriculum creators all have a major part to play to make the subject more fun, interesting, and rewarding and drive away all fears from the early days of a child.