When I taught my online class, and I read all the responses from the people who took it, I realized more strongly than ever before that many people have been traumatized by math. Not only did I find out how widespread the trauma is, but the evidence I collected showed that the trauma is fuelled by incorrect beliefs about mathematics and intelligence. Math trauma and math anxiety is kept alive within people because these incorrect beliefs are so widespread that they permeate society in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries in the world.
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We all know that math trauma exists and is debilitating for people; numerous books have been devoted to the subject of math anxiety and ways to help people overcome it (Tobias, 1978). It would be hard to overstate the number of people who walk on our planet who have been harmed by bad math teaching, but the negative ideas that prevail about math do not come only from harmful teaching practices. They come from one idea, which is very strong, permeates many societies, and is at the root of math failure and underachievement: that only some people can be good at math. That single belief—that math is a “gift” that some people have and others don't—is responsible for much of the widespread math failure in the world.
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The idea that people who can do math are the smartest or cleverest people. This makes math failure particularly crushing for students, as they interpret it as meaning that they are not smart. We need to dispel this myth. The combined weight of all the different wrong ideas about math that prevail in society is devastating for many children—they believe that mathematics ability is a sign of intelligence and that math is a gift, and if they don't have that gift then they are not only bad at math but they are unintelligent and unlikely to ever do well in life.
