🧵 If you're teaching math, you need to understand that a student who is 'afraid of math' is not afraid of numbers. They are afraid of YOU and their fear is JUSTIFIED because people in your position HAVE HARMED THEM. You will NOT fix it by trying to 'teach them not to be afraid.'
People are not afraid of math because 'math is hard.' That is not a reason people become afraid of things. You are dealing with an adaptive response to trauma. I do not say 'adaptive' lightly; this response is good. It helps them avoid harm and maintain psychological integrity.
It is a complicated defense mechanism, a reaction to society binding their worth with their ability to perform school math in an artificial setting, and demanding that they expose themselves to this judgment over and over again. It's not just their social worth or their selfworth
We tell students over and over again that their access to all kinds of important things is mediated by their ability to perform this ritual. Society treats this as an objective measure of value. What you are seeing is the response a human has to literally being branded.
We DEEPLY exacerbate this problem by misunderstanding it and pretending it is about math being 'hard.' We are demonstrating very plainly to those people that we DO NOT UNDERSTAND THEIR FEAR and WILL NOT TAKE IT SERIOUSLY OR FIX IT.
Trying to simply 'teach them not to be afraid' is just an additional cruel gaslighting twist of the knife. You can help these students by respecting and understanding their fears and treating them with dignity! You can't do it by pretending they're 'afraid of numbers!'
They are afraid of being dehumanized, they are afraid of that because it has happened to them, and you can only fix it by respecting their humanity.
