Math is everywhere, and we have to deal with it daily. Without knowing it we calculate how long until we need our next fill up at the gas station, or how much change we'll be getting back. The human brain is capable of incredible physics calculations, like catching a ball or not ramming your car into the one in front of you, without any math being brought to the conscious mind at all. It's weird then, that so many people shut down as soon as they are asked to work out math consciously. People avoid math, hate it, fear it even, but most of all I think people just don't want to look stupid by getting the math wrong.
The frustrating thing about a fear of math is that almost everyone is capable of performing the basic math skills that you need in everyday life. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who shut down once math reared its ugly numeric head. At some point in their personal development math stopped being intuitive and just started being hard.
Personally, I've never had a problem with math. From addition, to physics, to basic calculus (I've never gone past the absolute basics, although I can imagine that things get rather tricky rather quickly) things always just sort of made sense. I'm not entirely sure if this is a good thing from a teaching perspective. If I have never known, what I imagine to be, the immensely frustrating struggle of dealing with math how can I help others deal with it? The answer, newer teaching techniques seem to suggest, is to integrate math into other parts of the curriculum. So, how does one do that? I don't exactly know. I suppose that is why I'm going to school to be educated as an educator.
The frustrations associated with learning math seem innate in some people. Where exactly this stems from I'm not sure, but I have seen the way people shut down when math is brought up. Some people act as though math is unimportant, others try and hide behind their other intelligences. Still others hide behind a wall of forced ineptitude in order to avoid the horrors of math altogether. And although it is true that in today's society of forced specialization fewer and fewer people need to know math, learning it expands the mind and develops problem solving skills that will pay out some pretty serious returns in the long run.
