Anyone suffering from math anxiety, can all remember the moment when they began to doubt that they had what it takes to learn math.
In some cases, it was because someone had told them:
“Girls don’t do math.”

“Blacks don’t become engineers.“

Others came to the conclusion that they would either be good with numbers or with words but that they could not be good with both.

Because our American culture is ambivalent about mathematicians’ role models, some students decided they did not want to enter the field. Besides, math seemed dreary, never fun.

None of these widespread assumptions are true.

• First, if there are still few females and blacks in the top tiers of working mathematicians and scientists, it is not because they are genetically inferior; it is because social and institutional barriers exist that are only now slowly disappearing.
• Second, while some writers do not like math and some mathematicians do not like to write, no evidence exists that writing ability and mathematics ability are mutually exclusive. In fact, people who show high capability on both the mathematical and verbal sections of the SAT are more likely to succeed in math than those who have a severely skewed score, strong only in quantitative skills.
• And, finally, while elementary mathematics may indeed be repetitive, it is a skill that must be practiced to get to the creative part later on.

Another source of trauma for many people is the style of the mathematics classroom. Students complain that math offers little opportunity for debate or discussion.

Teachers say they liked English and social studies better than math because they could participate more in class and because there was no pressure to find the one right answer.

Mathematics does depend on the right answers but it can also be experienced as a series of discoveries that we all make for ourselves. More often than not, however, math is presented as a fixed set of rules to be digested whole and without dispute, which may discourage students from learning.

• Few people can think clearly and well with a clock ticking away.
• It is hard to perform on the blackboard with thirty sets of eyes watching you.
• No one likes a subject that is presented rigidly and uncompromisingly.
• And most people do not do well when they are scared.