Latest / Rounding Up / Breaking the Cycle of Math Trauma with Dr. Kasi Allen

Transcript

Breaking the Cycle of Math Trauma with Dr. Kasi Allen · Rounding Up

0:03
If you're an educator, I'm almost certain you've heard people say things like,
0:07
I am not a math person. While this may make you cringe,
0:11
if you dig a bit deeper,
0:12
many of those folks can identify specific experiences that convinced them that
0:17
this was true. In fact,
0:19
some of you might secretly wonder if you're actually a math person.
0:23
Today we're talking with Dr. Cassie Allen about math, trauma, what it is,
0:27
and how educators can take steps to address it. Well, hello,
0:32
Cassie. Welcome to the podcast.
0:34
Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
0:37
I wonder if we could start by talking about what drew you to the topic of math
0:41
trauma in the first place?
0:43
Really good question.
0:44
I've been curious about this topic for almost as long as I can remember,
0:49
especially about how people's different relationships with math seem to
0:54
affect their lives and how that starts at a very early age.
0:58
I think it was around fourth grade for me probably,
1:01
that I became aware of how much I liked math and how
1:06
much my best friend and my sister had an absolutely opposite relationship
1:11
with it, even though we were attending the same school, same teachers,
1:15
and so on.
1:16
And I really wanted to understand why that was happening.
1:21
And honestly,
1:21
I think that's what made me want to become a high school math teacher.
1:25
I was convinced I could do it in a way that maybe wouldn't hurt people as much,
1:29
or it might even make them like it and feel like they could do anything that
1:33
they wanted to do. But it wasn't until many years later as a
1:38
professor of education when I was teaching teachers how to teach math that
1:43
this topic really resurfaced for me on a whole new way and my family among my
1:48
friends. And if you're somebody who's taught math,
1:50
you're the math emergency person.
1:52
And so I had collected over the years stories of people's
1:57
not so awesome experiences with math,
2:00
but it was when I was asked to teach an algebra for elementary
2:04
teachers a course that was actually the student's idea.
2:08
And the idea this course was that we'd help pre-service elementary teachers get
2:12
a better window into how the math they were teaching was planting the seeds for
2:17
how people might access algebra Later on the very first day,
2:22
the first year I taught this class, there were three sections.
2:25
I passed out the syllabus and all three sections,
2:28
the same thing happened. Somebody either started crying in a way that
2:32
needed consoling by another peer, or they got up and left or both.
2:37
And I was just pretty dismayed. I hadn't spoken a word,
2:41
the S virus just sitting on the table.
2:43
And it really made me want to go after this in a new way. I mean something,
2:47
it just made me feel like something different was happening here.
2:50
This was not the math anxiety that everybody talked about when I was younger.
2:55
This was definitely different, and it became my passion project,
2:58
trying to figure how we disrupt that cycle.
3:01
Well, I think that's a good segue because I've heard you say that the term math
3:05
anxiety centers this as a problem that's within the person,
3:09
and that in fact, this isn't about the person.
3:12
Instead it's about the experience,
3:14
something that's happened to people that's causing this type of reaction.
3:18
Do I have that right, Cassie?
3:20
100%. And I think this is really important.
3:23
When I grew up and when I became a teacher,
3:25
I think that was an era when there was a lot of focus on math, anxiety,
3:30
the prevalence of math, anxiety. She,
3:33
Tobias wrote the famous book Overcoming Math Anxiety.
3:37
This was especially a problem among women.
3:39
There were dozens of books and there were a number of problems with
3:44
that work at the time,
3:46
and that most of the research people were citing was taking place outside of
3:50
math education.
3:51
The work was all really before the field of neuroscience was actually a thing.
3:56
Lots of deficit thinking that something is wrong with the person who is
4:01
suffering this anxiety.
4:03
And most of these books were very self-helpy.
4:06
And so not only is there something wrong with you,
4:08
but you need to fix it yourself.
4:10
So it really centers all these negative emotions around math on
4:14
the person that's experiencing the pain,
4:17
that something's wrong with them. Whereas math trauma really shifts the
4:22
focus to say, no, no, no, this reaction, this emotional reaction,
4:27
nobody's born that way. Right? This came from a place,
4:31
from an experience. And so math trauma is saying no.
4:34
There's been some series of events,
4:36
maybe a set of circumstances that this individual began to see
4:41
as harmful or threatening,
4:43
and that it's having long lasting adverse effects.
4:47
And that those long lasting effects,
4:49
this kind of triggering that starts to happen is really beginning to affect that
4:53
person's functioning,
4:55
their sense of wellbeing when they're in the presence in this case of
4:59
mathematics. And I think the thing about trauma is just that.
5:03
And I have to say in the early days of my doing this research,
5:07
I was honestly a little bit hesitant to use that word because I didn't want to
5:11
devalue some of the horrific experiences that people have
5:16
experienced in times of war witnessing the murder of a parent or
5:21
something. But it's about the brain.
5:24
It's how the brain is responding to the situation. And what I think we know now,
5:28
even more than when I started this work,
5:31
is that there is simply trauma of everyday life.
5:34
There are things that we experience that cause our brains to be
5:39
triggered.
5:39
And math is unfortunately this subject in school that we
5:44
require dear every year of a young person's life.
5:48
And there are things about the way it's been taught over time that can
5:53
be humiliating, ridiculing,
5:56
that can cause people to have just some really negative experiences that then
6:01
they carry with them into the next year. And so that's really the shift.
6:05
The shift is instead of labeling somebody as math anxious, oh,
6:09
you poor thing, you better fix yourself. It's like, no,
6:12
we have some prevalence of math trauma,
6:14
and we've got to figure out how people's experiences with math are
6:19
causing this kind of a reaction in their bodies and brains.
6:24
I want to take this a little bit further before we start to talk about causes
6:28
and solutions. This idea that you mentioned of feeling under threat,
6:33
it made me think that when we're talking about trauma,
6:36
we are talking about a physiological response.
6:39
Something is happening within the brain that's being manifested in the body.
6:43
And I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about what happens to people
6:47
experiencing trauma? What does that feel like in their body?
6:51
So this is really important and our brains have evolved over time.
6:56
We have this incredible processing capacity,
6:59
and it's coupled with a very powerful filter called the amygdala.
7:04
And the amygdala is there from eons ago to protect us.
7:08
It's the filter that says, Hey,
7:10
do not provide access to that powerful processor unless I'm
7:15
safe, unless my needs are met otherwise,
7:19
I got to focus on being well over here.
7:22
So we're not going to give access to that higher order thinking unless we're
7:26
safe.
7:27
And this is really important because modern imaging has given us really new
7:31
insights into how we learn and how our body is reacting when our brain
7:36
gets fired in this way.
7:39
And so when somebody is experiencing math trauma, you know it,
7:43
they sweat, their face turns red, they cry,
7:46
their body and brain are telling them, get out.
7:50
Get away from this thing. It will hurt you.
7:53
And I just feel like that is so important for us to remember because
7:58
the amygdala also becomes increasingly sensitive to repeat
8:03
negativity. So it's one thing that you have a bad day in math,
8:07
or you maybe have a teacher that makes you feel not great about yourself,
8:12
but day after day, week after week, year after year,
8:15
that messaging can start to make the amygdala hypersensitive to these sorts of
8:20
situations. Is that what you were getting at with your question?
8:23
It is. And I think you really hit on something.
8:26
There's this idea of repeat negativity causing increased sensitivity,
8:31
I think has real ramifications for classroom culture or the importance of
8:36
the way that I show up as an educator.
8:39
It's making me think a lot about culture and norms related to math in
8:44
schools.
8:45
I'm starting to wonder about the type of traumatizing traditions that we've had
8:49
in math education that might contribute to this type of experience.
8:53
What does that make you think?
8:55
Oh, for sure. Unfortunately,
8:57
I think the list is a little long of the things that we may have been doing
9:01
completely inadvertently.
9:03
Everybody wants their students to have a great experience,
9:06
and I actually think our practices have evolved. But culturally,
9:10
I think there are some things about math that contribute to these traumatizing
9:14
traditions is what I've called them. Before we go there,
9:17
I do want to say just one other thing about this trauma piece,
9:20
and that is that we've learned about some things about trauma in childhood,
9:24
and a lot of the trauma in childhood is about not a single
9:29
life altering event,
9:30
but childhood trauma is often about these things that happened repeatedly where
9:35
a child was being ridiculed, being treated cruelly.
9:39
And it's about that repetition that is really seeding
9:44
that trauma so deeply and that sense that they can't stop it,
9:49
that they don't have control to stop the thing that is causing them
9:53
pain or suffering. So I just wanted to make sure that I tagged that because I
9:57
think there is something about what we've learned about the different forms of
10:00
childhood trauma that's especially salient in this situation.
10:04
And so I'll tie it to your question,
10:05
which is think about some of the things we've done in math. Historically,
10:10
we don't do them in every place,
10:12
but the ability grouping that has happened over time,
10:16
it seems to go in and out of fashion when a kid is told they're in the lower
10:20
class, oh, this is something you're not good. The slower math,
10:25
we often use speed to measure understanding,
10:28
and so smarter is not faster.
10:31
And there's some great quotes Einstein among them. So that's a thing.
10:35
When you got to do it right now, it has to be a hundred percent right.
10:38
It has to be super fast.
10:41
We've often prioritized individual work over collaboration.
10:45
So you're all alone in this. In fact, if you're working with others,
10:50
somehow that's cheating as opposed to collaborating.
10:54
We teach kids tricks rather than teaching them how to think.
11:00
I think we deprive kids of the opportunity to have an idea.
11:04
It's really hard to get excited about something where all you're doing is
11:08
reproducing,
11:09
reproducing something that somebody else thought of as quickly as possible
11:14
and needs to be a hundred percent accuracy.
11:18
You don't get to bring your own spin to it.
11:21
And so we focus on answers rather than people's reasoning behind the answers.
11:25
That can be something that happens as well.
11:28
And I think one of the things that's always gotten me is that there's only one
11:32
way. Not only is there only one right answer,
11:34
but there's only one way to get there,
11:36
which also contributes to this idea of having to absorb somebody
11:40
else's thinking rather than actualizing your own.
11:44
And I absolutely know that most teachers are working to not do as
11:49
much of these things in their math classrooms.
11:51
And I want to be sure having this conversation that I'm a lover of
11:56
education and teachers,
11:58
I taught teachers for many years. This is not about the teachers so much as the
12:02
sort of culture of math and math education that we were all brought up in.
12:07
And we've got to figure out how to make math something more so that
12:12
kids can see themselves in it and that it's not something that happens in a
12:16
vacuum.
12:16
And is this performance course rather than a class where
12:21
you get to solve cool problems that no one knows the exact answer to,
12:26
or there's the exact right way,
12:28
or that you get to get your own questions answered, things you wonder about,
12:32
that it's a chance to explore. So I mean,
12:34
ultimately I think we just know that there's a lot of negativity that happens
12:38
around math and we accept it.
12:40
And that is perhaps the most traumatizing tradition of all because that kind of
12:44
repeat negativity we know affects the amygdala.
12:48
It affects people's ability to access math in the long run.
12:52
So we got to have neutral or better.
12:55
So in the field of psychology,
12:56
there's this notion of generational trauma and it's passed from generation to
13:00
generation,
13:02
and you're making me wonder if we're facing something similar when it comes to
13:06
the field of math education.
13:08
I'm wondering what you think educators might be able to do to reclaim math for
13:12
themselves,
13:13
especially if they're a person who potentially does have a traumatic mathematics
13:18
experience and maybe some of the ways that they might create a different type of
13:21
experience for their students.
13:23
Yeah, let's talk about each of those. I'm going to talk about one,
13:27
the multi-generational piece,
13:29
and then let's talk about how we can help ourselves and our students.
13:34
One is I think it's really very possible that that's what we're looking at in
13:37
terms of math trauma. Culturally,
13:40
I think we've known for a while that this is happening with respect to math
13:45
that I've had parents come to back to school night and tell me that they're just
13:50
not a math family. And even jokingly say, oh, we're all bad at math,
13:54
don't be too hard on us, and all the other things.
13:57
And so kids inherit that,
13:59
and it's very common for kids to have the same attitude towards math that their
14:03
parents do and also that their teachers do.
14:05
And that's where I think in my mind,
14:08
I really want to help every elementary teacher fall in love with math because if
14:13
we look at the data, I think of any undergraduate major,
14:17
it's those who major in education who report the highest rates of math,
14:21
anxiety and math trauma. And so when you think about folks who feel that way
14:26
about math, then being in charge of teaching it to kids in the early years,
14:30
that's a lot to carry.
14:32
And so we want to give those teachers and anyone who has had this
14:37
experience with math and opportunity to reclaim, regroup.
14:41
And in my experience,
14:42
what I've found is actually simply shifting the location of the problem is a
14:47
really strong first step.
14:48
When people understand that they actually aren't broken,
14:52
that the feelings that they have about math don't reflect some sort of flaw
14:57
in them as a human,
14:59
but that it's a result of something they've experienced a lot is
15:04
unlocked.
15:05
And most folks that I have worked with over my time working on this issue,
15:09
they know. They know exactly the moment.
15:12
They know the set of experiences that led to the reactions that they feel in
15:17
their body. They can name it and with actually fairly startling detail.
15:22
So in my teaching, and I think this is something anybody can do,
15:25
is they would write a myography,
15:27
what is the story of your life through a math lens?
15:31
What has been the story of your relationship with math over the course of your
15:34
life and what windows does that give you into the places where you might need to
15:39
heal?
15:40
We've never had more tools to go back and sort of relearn
15:44
areas of math that we thought we couldn't learn.
15:48
And so often the trauma points are as math becomes more abstract,
15:53
so many people have something that happened around fractions or
15:58
multi digit multiplication and division. When we started,
16:02
we get letters involved in math.
16:04
I had somebody say math was great as long as it was numbers.
16:06
Then we got letters involved and it was terrible. And so if people can locate,
16:11
this is where I had the problem, it's not me.
16:14
I can go back and relearn some things.
16:17
I feel like that's a lot of the healing and that in fact,
16:19
if I'm a teacher or if I'm a parent, I love my kids,
16:24
whether they're my children or my students,
16:26
and I'm going to work on me so that they have a better experience than I had.
16:30
And I've found so many teachers embrace that idea and go to work.
16:34
So some of the things that can happen in classrooms that I think fall from
16:39
this is that first of all, the recognition that emotional safety,
16:43
you can't have cognition and problem solving without it.
16:47
If you have kids in your classroom who have had these negative experiences in
16:51
math,
16:51
you're going to need to help them unpack those and level set in order to move
16:56
on. And mamography is also a good tool for that.
16:59
Some people use breathing,
17:01
making sure that when you encounter kids that are exhibiting
17:06
math anxiety,
17:07
that you help them localize the problem outside of them.
17:12
No one is born with math anxiety. It's the math of school that creates it,
17:16
and if we ignore it, it's just going to get worse.
17:19
So some people feel like they can kind of smooth it over.
17:22
I think we need to give kids the tools to unpack it and move beyond it.
17:27
But it's so widespread,
17:29
and I've encountered teachers who were afraid to go there.
17:32
It's like the Pandora's box.
17:34
My advice to them is that if you'll open the box and heal what's
17:38
inside, the teaching becomes much easier. Whereas if you don't,
17:42
you're fighting that uphill battle all the time.
17:46
Students will feel more safe in classrooms where mistakes are opportunities
17:51
to learn where they're not a bad thing and where they see each other as
17:54
resources,
17:55
where they're not alone and where they can collaborate and really take
17:59
responsibility for each other's learning. So some of the most powerful
18:03
classrooms I've seen where there were a lot of kids who had very negative
18:06
experiences with math,
18:08
a teacher had succeeded in creating this learning environment,
18:12
this community of learners where all the kids seem to recognize that
18:17
somebody would have a good day, someone else would have a not good day,
18:20
but it would be their turn for a good day a few days from now.
18:23
So we're all just going to take care of each other as we go.
18:27
I think some things that teachers can keep a particular eye on is
18:32
being sure that kids are given authentic work to do. In math,
18:37
it's really easy to start giving kids what we've called busy work,
18:42
but work that really isn't engaging their brain.
18:44
And it turns out that that boredom cycle triggers the negativity
18:49
cycle,
18:50
which can actually get your amygdala operating in a way that is not as
18:55
far from trauma as we might all like to think.
19:00
And so while it isn't the same kind of math trauma that we're talking about
19:04
here, it does affect the amygdala.
19:07
And so that's something we should be aware of.
19:10
And so this is something I think kids should learn about their brains in school.
19:13
I don't know if it's the math teacher's job,
19:15
but if they haven't learned about their brains yet, when you get them,
19:18
I would recommend teaching kids about their brains,
19:21
teaching them strategies for when they feel that kind of shut down that
19:26
headache.
19:27
I can't think because most of the time they actually can't and
19:31
they need to have some kind of reset.
19:35
Another tip just in terms of disrupting that trauma cycle in the classroom is
19:39
that by the time kids get to be third, fourth grade and up,
19:44
they know who is good at math or they've labeled each other,
19:48
who's good at math, who's struggled. Even if they are not tracked and sorted,
19:53
they've assessed each other. Sometimes they've put those labels on themselves.
19:58
And so if a teacher has the skills to assign
20:02
competence to those students that may be being labeled as low
20:07
status mathematically in their classroom,
20:10
and it takes a teacher that knows their students well,
20:13
but if you happen to see that a student that maybe has low status
20:18
with computation, but wow,
20:21
they are really good at developing the visuals for a math
20:26
problem, or they're really great at illustrating a story or
20:31
drawing others out in a collaborative group,
20:33
but finding an area of competence that's authentic.
20:38
Sorry to go on and on. I could sit here and talk to you about this all day,
20:41
but those are some of the things I would recommend.
20:43
Well,
20:43
I think there's a few things that jump out and I wanted to take them in little
20:47
bits.
20:48
I'm going to try to summarize and then I want to come back and pick these up a
20:51
little bit. So one of the pieces that you named really struck a chord with me,
20:55
which is recognizing as an educator that I have a story about
21:00
mathematics that is playing out maybe just under the level of consciousness that
21:05
bubbles up here and there. When you mentioned the traumatic experiences,
21:10
my head went back to third grade with multiplication tables,
21:14
and I can see myself sitting in the seat.
21:17
And when you mentioned fractions, again,
21:21
I could see myself facing the board in third grade looking down at a workbook
21:26
where we were supposed to be adding fractions with denominators that were not
21:31
common.
21:31
And I had this moment of just dread in my stomach because I
21:36
remember just thinking,
21:38
I don't know what is happening at all. And I'll say biographically,
21:42
I think I spent the first seven or eight years of my teaching career carrying
21:47
those things with me in the way that I approach students.
21:51
I knew that they weren't good for me,
21:54
but I didn't really have a compelling sense of what could be different until I
21:58
actually took some mathematics education courses and really started to
22:02
understand mathematics and how children's ideas develop.
22:06
And it did allow me to decenter the problem for myself and say,
22:11
actually, I can make a lot of meaning out of mathematics.
22:15
What I experienced was not mathematics.
22:17
It was memorizing a bunch of stuff and practicing a bunch of procedures.
22:22
This idea that decentering where the problem is from the
22:27
educator or in classrooms from the student, really,
22:31
really feels powerful.
22:32
I think it's a huge gift that we can give to our students and also to
22:37
ourselves. The other piece that I'm really thinking about is this
22:41
idea of positioning students and finding competency that
22:46
really stands out as something that I could attend to as a classroom teacher.
22:51
I suspect that people who are listening can think about their own class of
22:54
students.
22:55
You as an educator probably know who the other kids think of as good at math,
23:00
and I suspect you also know who they think isn't good at math.
23:04
Knowing that kids know those stories as well, I could do something about that.
23:08
I could look at the students who have low status and think about ways that I
23:12
could raise them up that feels really tangible.
23:16
I could take and start thinking about that when I ask students to share their
23:21
ideas, and I could do that tomorrow.
23:22
It doesn't take a master's level course in mathematics to do that.
23:26
Does that make sense, Cassie?
23:28
I love all of that so much. 100%.
23:31
When I was observing teachers,
23:33
and this tended to happen more with elementary teachers just because of their
23:36
own histories with math as you were saying here,
23:39
but the difference between saying, okay, everybody, we get to do math now,
23:44
clear your desks and okay, everybody, I know it's hard,
23:49
but it's time for math. We're strong. We're going to do it.
23:53
But there is this underlying kind of, I don't really like this either,
23:57
but we got to do it as opposed to we're going to discover something new today.
24:02
And so really just kind listening to some of those implicit messages in the
24:06
words that we choose, that's something we can change in a moment as well.
24:11
Well,
24:11
I think you and I could probably go on and on and continue this conversation for
24:15
a long time. If I'm someone who's listening,
24:18
are there resources you would recommend for someone who wants to continue
24:22
learning about these ideas?
24:24
Yeah, absolutely. For me,
24:26
the OG of this line of thinking is Joe Bowler, who most math teachers will know.
24:31
She's the first person I ever heard use the word math traumatized.
24:35
And before I embarked and dove deeper into my math trauma research,
24:40
I went down to Stanford and met with her,
24:42
and she was wonderful and encouraging of like, oh, no, no, no. Go, go, go, go.
24:46
This is great.
24:47
There's a woman named Ebony McGee who's the founder of our rights.
24:51
She's a professor at Vanderbilt.
24:53
She's doing some work with math identity that I think touches on this
24:58
subject in a valuable way. I mean,
25:00
I think this whole area of developing positive math identity
25:05
is tightly connected to the math trauma work, and honestly,
25:10
anyone who is doing work around child trauma and
25:15
neuroscience and how we are seeing the development of the brain is going
25:20
to provide some interesting resources. I have to say,
25:22
my all time favorite is a book that I believe it is out of print,
25:26
so it might be a thrift books purchase,
25:28
but Dr. Judy Willis wrote a book called Learning to Love Math.
25:32
Looks like you might be familiar with it.
25:34
And I really think she did a lovely job in that book in a way
25:39
that is absolutely targeting teachers to help us see how these
25:44
very small actions that we take in the classroom could make a really big
25:49
difference in terms of how our students see and experience the
25:54
subject that we care about so much.
25:57
I think that's a great place to stop. Thank you so much for joining us, Cassie.
26:00
It's really been a pleasure talking with you.
26:02
Oh my goodness, Mike, thank you so much. It's really been an honor to be here.
26:05
Thanks for having me.
26:09
This podcast is brought to you by the Math Learning Center and the Meyer Math
26:13
Foundation dedicated to inspiring and enabling all individuals to discover
26:18
and develop their mathematical confidence and ability.