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Maths Anxiety - The fear is real · Let Them Fly - Heather Harries Ed Hub

• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, welcome to Heather Harriet's podcast, Let Them Fly.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: And today it's all about everything to do with maths.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I personally have a massive anxiety about maths, and I blame my mum because when I was a child, my mum always used to say, Well, I can't count, and I took that on board and thought, Well, if she can't count, of course I can't.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: And today we've got maths prime uh maths teacher Angela Corell in today, who's mum of two children and has taught maths to secondary students.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: She's particularly had to teach maths to students who had failed their GCSEs and now needed to get emergency grades to pass in order to go to college.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Angela, tell us about maths.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, just about maths in general.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_01: So, two things from that.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: I my mum as well was very different.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: She had always worked with numbers and worked with money, so felt quite confident with it.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, on that perspective, I've how you said you felt your mum influenced your view of numbers.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think my mum then had a positive influence on me with numbers.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's really true.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think we take on our parents' personas so much.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's true.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you are then a parent thinking, what do I struggle with, even if it's not just maths in anything, actually, do you want to pass your own fears onto your children?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you think actually, just because it was something I struggled with, I don't how can I then help my child not struggle with it even if I can't help them personally, but try and have a more positive approach towards it so they then don't feel that same anxiety?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then as a teacher, I was teaching.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: So if children had sat their GCSEs in the summer exam period and they didn't get the grade four or the old school C as it was, they had to resit it at college, and then for the comeback, they were thinking, I'm finally done with it, and then all of a sudden, we're like, No, you've got to do it again.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: And the dread on their faces was awful, and you felt so sorry for them, you felt like you were forcing them, and we used to have to spend a lot of time talking them around and trying to feel more positive about it, and building on the small foundation skills that they had because they did have more skills than what they believed, but they just felt so down on themselves and had this wall up against it, as in never been able to do it, never going to be able to, which was really quite sad.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we were talking about failure recently on one of our podcasts, and I think one of the problems is that children who've never failed, suddenly, when they do fail on something, they actually don't know how to learn how to turn it round.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think maths is one of those things, you know, it was it's relatively easy to do reading because you see letters all the time.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: But when you see numbers, they're not necessarily they don't necessarily have a real meaning.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: You might see a road number, but a road number to a child doesn't mean anything, but a road sign to home does.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I've noticed before as well you'd have children if you'd asked them to read something loud in class or just to themselves, and they'd perhaps go a bit shying, oh I don't like reading in front of people.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it was because they couldn't read that well, but they don't want to have to admit it, they felt a bit of like a social anxiety about that.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: No one wants to admit they can't read, but some people they see it as a bit of a badge of honour, oh yeah, I can't do maths, and they're almost seeing it as a good thing, but they're using it as a barrier because they just don't know how to get past breaking down that anxiety and fear of it.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that comes back very much to primary school or to infant school, um, when you've learnt numbers, and perhaps you just didn't get it.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's very hard to go, well, that that funny shape there is equal to two balls or two apples, and you look at them going, Yeah, but I've got two apples, and to make that connection is it's really hard for children, it's like a two-step process that they've not yet learned trained themselves to do.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's really difficult, and I think teaching of maths has changed over the years, and historically, it was more just about numbers written on a page, black and white, and if you struggled to learn that way, it meant you struggled with maths.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Other people learned that way really well, so they flourished with it, but you were cutting off so many people that didn't learn that way.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm at the very beginning of the learning journey with my youngest, she's in FS1, and her school have a really lovely approach to it, as I'm sure many others do, and it's that mastery approach.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you're not just learning in one way, you know, they're still learning to write and hold pens, so you can't do loads of maths written because you can't write properly yet.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it's doing it for many other ways that like learning with kinesthetics, holding up so many fingers to represent a number, and if you have to add one more, they put an extra finger up.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: So they're learning the maths, and they haven't even picked a pen up yet.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and I see it in my daughter, and they pick objects up, so you've got the hands-on approach.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: So if you have got a more creative style of learning with your child, it means that maths then becomes more accessible to them.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I see it in my little girl coming home, and she's using her hands and her fingers and objects to do her maths rather than just the written, and I think it opens maths up and takes away the hard aspect of maths from it and makes it much more fun.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: So she will take that from the channel.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you're absolutely right.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the things about maths is that relevance, and I think what we tend to we tend to find is that you know the relevance of numbers isn't always there, and that and that's really difficult.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that always worries me, and that I think proves how difficult maths is for children to learn, is how many different schemes there are around for maths.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: Things like um Singapore maths, there's all and everything is about how do we learn maths, how do we compute faster.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, the reality is it doesn't matter what scheme you use, you've still got to use those those little figures to come up with the right answer.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: So you say there's lots of different approaches, but fortunately with numbers, numbers are universal.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: One means one, two means two, and if you add one more, then you've got three.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you think, as a going back to being a parent, and you think, well, if you've got that fear of numbers and thinking, how am I going to help my child overcome it?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: I want to do the best I can for them.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's amazing how much you can incorporate numbers into everyday life without going, right, we must sit down and do some maths today.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you're playing a game and you're sharing cards out between your family members, you're doing division.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you go, I haven't got as many as you, who's got more or less?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you're doing cooking with your children and measuring and doing quantities, you're using numbers in all of those activities without even realising it.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes you can then say to your child afterwards, you've used all of these skills today.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: You've added, you've taken away, you've done division, you may have done ratios as well with cooking, and then they go, Oh, have I?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: And they feel quite good about it.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: And they're realising then what a useful skill it is for them for everyday life as well.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think even things like when you order a pizza, you know, it pizzas will come in fractions, and I think it's really important that uh children children kind of look at the pizza and they go, Oh, I'm gonna have a quarter, I'm gonna have an eighth, or I'm gonna have a tenth of it, and it really makes it very visual to them.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you say, or you think when you're ordering, it has eight slices in.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: So there's how many people, how many slices do we need, how many pizzas do we need to order?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: And pizza math is really important on a Friday night in our house.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, very important.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And but I think one of the and you've just touched on it really, is how many times do you hear a child say, Well, I'm never going to use maths when I leave school, and it's not important.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: It is, and some things, some parts of it, and we've had colleagues say to us, Well, what if you use Pythagoras?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: And if you work perhaps in construction and things like that, then you may do when you're doing technical drawings things, of course.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: But I always say to my students, it's not necessarily just about then using the math skill afterwards.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: What your qualifications and what any qualification shows to a potential academic choice, a university, or an employer is that you've been able to use learn lots of little bits of information, and you've been able to bring it all together and use it to problem solve, and that's and maths is key for that.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: Maths is problem solving.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: You're using learnt knowledge to problem solve, and for an employer or a further education place, that's what they want.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: They can think, well, can we you learn all of these things and apply it to a real life situation?
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think um, I think with maths, one of the things with maths is that you know, how do we make it easy for them?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the things that we see particularly is that maths is layered learning, and we get a lot of students through our centre, and what we end up saying to them is, you know, we're gonna have to go backwards quite a long way to move forwards.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of children haven't learned their number bonds and they haven't learned the multiplication tables, and they're key in able to move forward.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same with anything.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you try to build a building and the foundations are no good, you might get quite high up in construction, but at some point the foundations are going to crumble underneath you and the whole thing will come down.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, when you can give students as well that visual representation of it, they think, well, actually that makes sense as to why the foundations of any topic, not just maths, are so important.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: Learning their phonics properly to learn and bundle their words together and grow the sounds.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: The foundation skills are so so important and so good to go back to.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And my big bugbear, I know with the international GCSEs, there's no calculators, but I'm still a strong believer in not using the calculator for everything, having the quickness as the mental arithmetic, you do something quickly and you hit a wrong button and you just believe what the screen tells you.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: Totally if your mind then has that thing to go, that doesn't look quite right today, you go back and recheck it.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I totally agree with that guesstimate.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, in terms of in terms of mass and making it easy, I think the key thing is learning times tables.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: So if you've got a primary school child, um, and this advice to our parents out there, you know, if you have a primary school child, what we're really looking for is we're looking that they know how to add up.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: They know that two plus three is five, and once they've learnt those number bonds to five, they then start learning the number bonds to ten and to twenty, and they understand the place value of numbers, because that's one of the things we find particularly, you know, a one doesn't necessarily become ten or a hundred because they're not understanding where that place value is, and then the multiplication, and the multiplication has to be more than the rhyme, the rhyme of it.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: They have to it they they don't just want to be able to recite it, they need to understand why that number two times two has become four.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Completely.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: And my daughter, my eldest one who's in year four, she's fairly well through learning them, and sometimes she has that moment where she thinks, hang on, I need to go back.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And she does do the going up from times one, times two, times three.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I've said sometimes you can use other skills if you're thinking I've got to do times by eight, and you're having that little bit of a brain fog moment.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: But if you can recall what times by five and times by three is, and then just add the answers together, and you start to develop a skill set and a method to help you because everybody's brains are different and you do all learn differently.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: But if you can think, well, I've got a method that can help me, you've still got the answer, and it's about just might have found it in a different way.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it's about them having the confidence that they know the three times five and they know the eight times three, and they can put them together, and those numbers will come out with the same answer.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the problem is having that confidence and that understanding of that place value and what those numbers actually mean.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Completely.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, bringing it back to the topic of having this maths anxiety, I think it's go back to basics, like we said, make sure the foundations are there completely, and think, well, am I re-going over the same thing?
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: But you're not going to unlearn it by redoing it again, you're just going to keep bedding it further and further in.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: The more if you walk the same path every day, you'll get there quicker because the path is then clear.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you keep using those same pathways in your brain to recall information, it will come back to you quicker every single time because you keep visiting those same pathways.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it's definitely repetition, and I think that does make it a lot faster.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are all kinds of games out there that I know the schools, the schools love this timetable rock star.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: The problem being that unless your children have the foundation, guessing the numbers won't work.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: They have to do the learning first before they go on the game to start to start guessing, because guessing's not getting them anywhere.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, also on that one, what I would say is turn the timer off because having the timer on doesn't always help because they're panicking, the timer's gonna go off.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Turn the timer off, let them take their time and feel confident in their answer.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: I know when we come to exams, there's a time thing on, but they've got a long time to get to that.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let them feel confident in the skill first, definitely.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, definitely.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: But definitely, so you know, the more games you play at home, whether it's adding two dice up when you're when you're playing a board game, or whether it's um asking them to add up, you know, we we mentioned once before in a podcast, car number plates, or or adding up the smarties on the table before they divide them out, it doesn't matter what that is, but just keep them using maths to make sure they're confident with those two.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: Dice are excellent.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: And my mum used to do it with my eldest quite a lot.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: Two dice, adding the two numbers up to find out how many moves you can make on the board, and it's so fun.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: They forget they're doing maths because they just want the highest number so that they can win.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: And they can but they're counting not only are they quickly counting up to 12, they're also having to physically move something the right number of number of spaces, and a game like Monopoly is vital.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Monopoly is the best game ever in the terms of those skills because they're handling money, they're moving spaces, it's 10, it's 10 places on a board, so they they should be able to work out where they're going to end up before they land.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's great for children, it's absolutely great.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: No, it is.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Monopoly is not a good one in my house because I always lose.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I didn't say about winning, and and I like to be bankered, which means I don't always lose, but you know, of course I don't cheat, of course not.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you know, maths, maths, maths are a vital skill, and having anxiety about maths is it's it shouldn't be allowed in today's world.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's no reason to be anxious, there's so many different ways of learning and so many fun ways of learning, and even as an adult, to come back to learning maths, and I know I did when I had to start teaching primary kids, I relearned maths and that had this real eureka moment, how easy maths was.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason maths was so easy was that there's only one way to do things.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what happened originally when you know, when you when you write, and I'm I'm a humanities, I love writing English, there's more than one way to write English, but in maths, technically, there's only one right answer when you get to the end of it, you know, and and that was like, oh, actually, this is really super easy, and I think you know what we are seeing with teaching these days, and as a parent, parents are looking at it going, that's not how we learnt to do it.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: No, but that's fine because how you learnt to do it has often created this anxiety.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: So you want a fresh new way for your children to do it, and there's so many free good resources out there, so many good websites that if you're thinking, I know they've got this topic coming up at school, go online and have a look yourself, and then say to your child, I found this tutorial video or this resource website, and sit and go through it with them.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's one that you keep recommending, which is the one that you keep recommending for the maths for the GCSE, one that my students used to use in the UK was Corbit Maths.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Corbit Maths, that's right, and and it's free, isn't it?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, so that's a great one to go on to.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: But BBC Bite Size also has lots of things on there, and the BBC's learn time, all of those little iPad games, even for doing maths.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: And while I hate iPads for English, because I hate that whole writing with one finger, don't get math started on those.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Maths iPads are great because they literally are counting blocks and they literally are moving one thing at a time, and I think they they're really, really great way to learn tables.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: And for the younger ones, and going back to um another episode that you're doing on screen time, if the children are watching TV and they're younger, please put number blocks on.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: I was just gonna say number blocks as well.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: I have the young child, they are so engaging, but they're so colourful and bright, and there's little rhyming songs.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, and they are really good.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: So if you do have to do that, because you just need to get some jobs done if they have to watch the number blocks.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: I I really I love even now.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: I I quite often play it for children that are really struggling, it just takes that anxiety away completely.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so thank you very much for joining us to talk all about maths today on our podcast Let Them Fly.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Another winged episode, but we are now getting to grips with technology, and I think you know we may be moving forward a little bit.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you, Angela, for joining us today, and we look forward to more advice.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, before we finish, sorry, I'm just going to ask what's your takeaway from maths anxiety today?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Is don't overcomplicate it.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Go very back to basics and just do it a little bit at a time for yourself and for the child.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and my takeaway would very much be about give them confidence.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: Maths is so easy as long as you're confident that you can do it.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much, and we look forward to you joining us for our next episode.