Teaching aids to overcome a fear of mathematics

Ask any adult what their least favourite subject at school was, and the most common answer you will probably get is mathematics. Why exactly this should be is a difficult question to answer, but I suspect it has something to do with the inherently abstract nature of the subject. `I was fine with maths, right up until X`s and Y`s started appearing` a friend of mine told me, `and once we got to trigonometry and calculus, I was completely lost!` Of course mathematics is one of the core subjects, so there`s no way any pupil can get away with simply dropping it from their timetable before they are 14 or 15 years old.

When I was a pupil our teacher attempted to make mathematics more interesting and comprehensible by utilising a number of interesting techniques. Algebra was the first hurdle that many of my peers (and myself) had difficulty with - so to make the imposing equations appear a little less intimidating the teacher would replace the dastardly X`s and Y`s with the the name of cartoon characters we were all familiar with. If I remember correctly Disney characters were chosen, the teacher writing `Donald` and Mickey` in small letters wherever an X or a Y appeared in the equation on the blackboard.

For most pupils this simple technique helped enormously. It made the mathematics more `real` and comprehensible, and soon every pupil was following the work on the board, and understanding how the equation was to be solved. After the few more examples I remember the teacher saying that it was rather cumbersome having to write `Donald` and Mickey` in place of every X and Y, so he was going to abbreviate the names to a D and an M. We were all fine with this - in fact it made things easier to follow, as the equations appeared more compactly on the blackboard, and we followed the teachers examples as he worked through a few more problems. For our homework we had to solve 5 of these equations, and even though the D`s and the M`s had somehow been replaced by X`s and Y`s, none of us had any trouble completing the work.

Simple techniques like these can be of such huge help, and of course with mathematics, once you understand how to solve a particular problem, you are unlikely to have any problems with that part of the syllabus in the future. You either get it, or you don`t - there`s very little grey area in maths.

A recent survey commissioned by Santander UK has found that parents are taking the initiative to improve their children`s mathematics by using everyday experiences, and turning them into teaching aids. The study of 1000 parents of children aged between six and fourteen, which was commissioned by Santander UK, found that parents used such commonplace experiences as counting money, or how many cars of a certain colour appear in a traffic jam. Sports were used as a teaching aid by many of the parents, with 69% of them saying that they were particularly helpful for their child`s understanding of mathematics. An example one parent employed was taking note of how many goals a football player had scored in a certain number of games, which enabled the child to calculate how many goals he scored on average per game. Other examples involved shopping trips, money, and road signs - each of which presented familiar situations which could be used to help the child learn.

The survey found that children were more than twice as likely to be engaged and interested by famous footballers, than over celebrated mathematicians, such as Sir Isaac Newton - and though the inventor of Calculus might be dismayed by such a result, he would surely applaud any teaching method that leads to a greater understanding of maths.

59% of UK parents said they mathematics difficult when they were at school - an extremely high proportion, and one can only hope that todays children find the subject more congenial. There is actually a recognised medical condition where someone has a fear of mathematics: numerophobia. Researchers at the Nuffield Foundation published a report in 2019 that stated any maths anxiety should be considered a `real concern` because of the damage it can inflict on a child`s learning, and the long lasting impact it can have on an adult`s life.