Have any of you managed to get past severe math phobia to get that one math

[yellowdogintexas]

class (or two) that you have to have to get a degree?

My daughter is severely math impaired. I believe she may be worse than I am, which is pretty damn bad. Hey, if I could do all that higher math, I would be a physician today. The biology was not just easy , it was fun.

anyway kid wants to go back to school and what she wants to do will require her to get a couple of math classes passed.

she is terrified and depressed.

all help will be appreciated.

[Dangerously Amused]

1. What does she want to do?

[yellowdogintexas]

3. bachelor's in psychology, and if she manages to do that, then art therapy,

which will require a Masters.

The math is that old CORE curriculum math that you have to take even if you are majoring in dance or theatre or art.

[mitchum]

8. I'm an English major who was able to take Intro to Logic and Intro to Computers...

in order to satisfy my math requirements. Have your daughter see if her school also offers similar "math classes for athletes and humanities majors"

[yellowdogintexas]

11. right now she is starting w/ Community College, because her BF is in chef school

in Arizona right now, then they will relocate when he gets an externship. So once she gets to the place where she will actually finish school she can look for that kind of loophole.

My college actually allowed you to graduate without any math, if you took enough science. I took biology and anatomy to get my hours. I was an English major. I checked the current catalog and they no longer do that; but they offer some baby math

[ulysses]

2. Ms Uly did.

Re-restarted school at 40. Finally passed that one damned math class with an A, and got straight As this semester. Tell your daughter to keep her chin up.

[yellowdogintexas]

5. my wholehearted admiration. What did she do to finally conquer the math?

I wish she had gotten her father's excellent math genes, or at least enough to make it through the requirements.

Geometric types of problems do not bother her, she can see the shape and apply the formula; I am the same way. Beyond basic household math and checkbook math I am lost. Flunked algebra in college, was normally a Dean's List student.

[ulysses]

10. stubbornness,

plus she was finally able to let me help some (there were some problems with that early on). She damned near *likes* math now.

[yellowdogintexas]

13. Thank you all for your feedback!!!! I think this will be an ongoing

discussion as time goes by.

[Shine]

4. she needs to work on her self-efficacy skills, too.

:D

basically that means she needs to believe in her own ability to be successful.

I know of what I speak.

I recently decided to go back to school again myself, after 22 yrs, to get a 2 yr master's degree in counseling psychology. I've got some pre-reqs to fulfill during the first year, one of them being a Research Methods course, which is essentially math and statistics.

I'm terrified, but I also know that I can do anything if I put my mind to it and have the intention to be successful. I plan on asking for help and getting tutoring if necessary.

ANYthing is possible with the right frame of mind. :toast:

Best good wishes to her.

[yellowdogintexas]

9. she has been so depressed by her previous failures in math that she feels like

a failure before she starts the class.

Put a pen or marker in her hand though and she is like Superwoman, no lack of confidence there. She has been working as a tattoo artist since she was 18 and she is pretty good.

Here is her art site

http://suzannewood.deviantart.com/

[Shine]

12. Cool! She IS good.

:thumbsup:

Perhaps this math class can be seen as an opportunity for her to re-visit those past failures and create a different reality for herself.

The past does NOT equal the future.

[yellowdogintexas]

15. thank you, on her behalf. I have reminded her she wasn't always this good,

that she was frustrated at age 12 with her art skills.

Her answer is that she knew she could figure out the art and the practicing of the art gave her a way to vent frustration, teen angst, anger, etc. Math on the other hand is like learning a foreign language.

I can't draw, at all.

[Shine]

18. She sounds like my dtr.

She's 12 and incredibly artistic, too.....but not very math-oriented. She's struggled with it, but the art gives her a place to shine, so to speak.

Kids need that. :D

:hi:

[yellowdogintexas]

20. yes, they do. So do adults

:hi: :thumbsup:

[XemaSab]

6. I hated math until I got to trig and calculus

Then I realized what it was all FOR.

It is possible. :)

[Midlodemocrat]

7. I did. I am severely math impaired, but I did it to get my master's

and my doctorate. Did I ace them? Not even close, but I passed and got by.

Based on what I wanted to do with my degrees, my doing well in math wasn't truly going to make a huge difference. It really was only an issue in pharmacology and that is simple math without any of the other blah, blah, blah.

[Shine]

17. you needed it for pharmacology?

wow.

I'm one qtr into a 2 yr master's program in counseling psych, and I'll have to take a psychopharmacology class next year.

In the meantime, though, during this first year of the program, I'm plowing my way through 3 pre-req courses, including a research methods class I'll have to take in the spring. Ugh.

It's been a looooooooong time since I've done math, so I'm dreading it. :scared:

[Midlodemocrat]

40. Yeah. getting my doctorate, I needed it. Not very hard math, though.

And I thought stat and research methods was going to be the death of me.

[leftyclimber]

14. Is it a memorizing formulas problem?

I went back to school at 34 for a second bachelor's and accidentally ended up in a doctoral program (long story). I suckedsuckedsucked at math in high school prior to that (have a BA, managed to avoid math during my Bachelor's program) and was pretty nervous to take business calc during my postbac.

I've been at 2 universities during this long slog and both of them allow students to bring formulas into exams. Between that and the calculator, math has not been a problem. My issue turned out to be a complete inability to memorize formulas (which is weird considering that at one point I'd memorized over 20,000 lines of verse for a Shakespeare play ... just couldn't memorize math).

If she can slog through, spend lots of time at the math help center and with her TAs (they get paid for office hours whether anyone shows up or not, so she might as well bug them), and get the minimum grade she needs for the degree, she's fine.

Also, if she can talk to some folks who have already taken the classes to find out what instructors/professors are considered "good", she'll be ahead of the curve. She may have just had bad math teachers. (I took a second quarter of stats during postbac because of the guy that was teaching it and wrote on the teaching eval that I wouldn't have taken the class if someone else had been the instructor -- it made that much of a difference.)

And I suppose there are enough math/stats whizzes (and people who can slog through it) here that she could always log in and we could try to explain things....

If she can grind things out, she can get through math. She may have to spend a little more time on it than she does for other classes, but it's possible.

(Edit: apparently I'm not all that hot at spelling, either.)

[yellowdogintexas]

19. that is part of it, probably a good part of it. Yet she has the ability to memorize

poetry, lines for a play, etc like lightening. I could not memorize those formulae either, but was quick with the written stuff. However, part of my problem was that I reached a point where I could not put the pieces of the formula together. It was like there was a hole in my thought processes where the neurons just did not connect. I have often thought it must be how a dyslexic might feel when learning to read.

My daughter says that is how she feels, that she might as well be looking at a pile of mud.

[leftyclimber]

23. Can she do crosswords?

That was the breakthrough for me. If I have the formula there and look at it like I'm filling in the missing letters in a crossword I can process the problem.

Another thing that may be in her favor is that math classes in college any more tend to be pretty discipline-specific, so the problems will likely be based around real-life things rather than a bunch of numbers, letters, and squiggles floating around in no-man's land.

[Dangerously Amused]

16. Can she do it the other way around?

Bachelor's in art, then onto psych?

There's no math in art school. At least, there wasn't when I went. And even if there is, they're going to be pretty clued in to all their right-brained, anti-math people. They'll have to be.

[yellowdogintexas]

24. that would depend on the school. If it is a regular college, it would be in the

core curriculum.

A bona fide art school would be different, I have heard that art schools have more 'right brained' classes. Where did you go to art school?

[Dangerously Amused]

26. I'll PM you.

[vixengrl]

21. I kind of got through freshman Calc. because I was dating a math major.

Kind of. Not entirely. He helped me with one take home test. But I got respectable, passing "C's" both semesters by having someone around who was a very good "explainer." If she can find a good tutor, who can take the time to answer questions and doesn't make her feel "dumb", it really can make all the difference.

A lot of times the hang-up comes from feeling like "I'm the one who isn't getting it," when the problem might just be, "I haven't had things taught to me in a way I understand/that makes sense to my way of thinking." People who are strongly verbal (like me) or very abstract thinkers have to be walked s.l.o.w.l.y. through the steps before we get the relationships between the numbers and the equations--why are we plugging *this* figure in *here*? Ironically, we actually are the ones who really *like* word problems.

I work in, more or less, accounting right now. :)

[yellowdogintexas]

27. she is looking for a tutor. I would like to see her just work her way through

it very slowly until she masters one piece of it at a time.

[SeattleGirl]

22. It got really bad for me in college.

I was also a psych major, and in addition to math (pun intended!), I had to take Statistics. I'd walk into the classroom to take a test, and my mind would just freeze up.

My psych prof recommended that I try biofeedback, so I did. And I'll be danged, it worked! It was still something of a struggle for me (readin' and writin' come much easier), but I no longer had brain freeze. I could actually THINK, and REASON. My test scores got better, and even more importantly, I really began to UNDERSTAND statistics!

So, that might be something she could do.

It basically just teaches her ways to control her physical reactions to math.

[Shine]

29. Fascinating.

I'm recently in a 2 yr master's program in counseling psychology and I've gotta take a pre-req in research methods in the spring. I'm a bit nervous about it, since it's been sooooo long.

:hi:

[FormerDittoHead]

25. Yes. Operations Statistics. It was the one course and they only offered it once a year.

My whole life, as it were, was on hold for a year just for this damn class.

It wasn't operations statistics. It was something to do with operations but it was dealing with problems like loading up a ship to maximize profit while balancing out the load.

My problem was that the methods that were being taught were all VERY antiquated. The problems had like 3-4 variables (like distance, cost, sale price & weight) and manually, took like 40 minutes just to write down. In the real world, they explained, all of these problems are done with dozens of variables, not 3 or 4 and would be otherwise impossible (or wholly impractical) not to do them with computers, which can do such things easily.

The standard Excel "solver" add-in makes it a snap.

Mentally, I just couldn't get past having to learn something which in no way would I ever, EVER have to use in real life because in real life, they do it a completely different way and, excuse me, one would never NOT have a computer to do it, and "understanding how it works" wouldn't make my ultimate answer arrived at by computer any more or less accurate.

It was no different from having to solve square roots, knowing that a $4 calculator can do it in a snap, and my mind just wouldn't get past the objection. I know what a square root is. I understand it absolutely perfectly. I don't need to be practiced at solving them to 4 decimal places.

When I re-took the class, however, I was lucky enough to get a grad student teaching it who basically skipped over these problems (as opposed to "really getting into them", like teacher #1 did) and has us learn the math software instead (I forgot the package, it ran on a mainframe).

[KitchenWitch]

28. I overcame it and took College Algebra, Pre-Calculus, 1 year of Calculus

and one semester of Statistics.

How I overcame it? I started to think of math as a foreign language, with its own alphabet, syntax, grammar, and notations.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

30. Advice from a former math dunce

I made it through high school math only with the help of my classmates and successfully avoided math in college.

At age 32, I first thought of becoming a translator, and I was told that I would have greater potential as a translator if I had a technical background, and that meant (shudder) math.

However, in the meantime, I had learned how to do theoretical linguistics and a little old-style computer programming, and this time, I managed to pass courses in trigonometry and college algebra. I crash landed with calculus, because of a bad instructor, but I lost my math phobia.

Here is the secret: Stop studying math as if it's a humanity. In studying literature or history, you go for the broad concepts. In studying math, you go for the details in a logical progression.

In my dunce days, I used to do my homework at home and then compare answers with good students. If we disagreed, we both reworked the problem, talking each other through the steps.

[BlooInBloo]

31. My #1 job teaching math was always to get people to stop fucking "clenching"...

It was so funny when I actually got them to calm down and just work little-step-by-little-step, to see the expression on their faces like "what the fuck - why couldn't I do that before???"

:rofl:

Don't clench. It's all downhill from there.


EDIT: Forgot the word "when".

[yellowdogintexas]

32. I do not think she has ever had a teacher who approached it in that fashion

I know I never did

[BlooInBloo]

34. I'm a little bit offbeat as far as teachers go - But the proof is in the pudding, so they say...

My biggest problem after that was getting kids, all excited over their new-found superpowers, to go just ONE step at a time, instead of going 5 steps at once, and predictably fucking the shit up. You can do 5 steps at a time when you're *fluent* in the language - not when you're still mentally translating.

[foxfeet]

33. I'm convinced my math circuits didn't kick in until I was 25.

Hated math through high school and undergrad (my poor engineer father couldn't understand how none of his three kids could "get" math-- a succession of lousy teachers didn't help). When I applied to grad school I got a quite respectable math score on the GRE's. Suddenly things that earlier had been an utter mystery now made intuitive sense. I aced statistics and research methodology in grad school. So the point of all this is that it may be a developmental issue for your daughter. Her brain is still maturing. A supportive, patient tutor could be a big help. Best of luck to you both!

[leftyclimber]

35. Same here.

I think that going back as an older student was the magic bullet for me. The "math" part of my brain matured a helluva lot slower than the artsy part.

[foxfeet]

38. Hey, leftyclimber! I grew up in WV.

How's Morgantown these days? :hi:

[leftyclimber]

39. Wet. Very wet.

Icy for a bit yesterday.

Students are gone right now, so it's blissfully quiet. :hi:

[bicentennial_baby]

36. If she's interested, I can tutor her online/over the phone

I'm an experienced tutor. Math, Science, Language, Economics, etc. I've tutored remedial arithmetic through college algebra. PM me if you want to work something out. :)

[yellowdogintexas]

37. Thanks, BiBaby. She will be here in a few days, and we will talk about it.

I will let her read this thread and all the wonderful advice and comments from everyone. I put it in my journal so I don't lose it. :toast:

[RFKHumphreyObama]

41. I cannot help you personally

I was hopeless at and hated maths at school and avoided it like the plague once I left.

However, I do know some of my friends who were not particularly good at maths and/or didn't enjoy maths while they were at school but who loved it despite their initial fears when they had to do it as a pre-requisite for whatever they were studying at university or tertiary college. That was I think because the approach to math taken in the course was much more mature and selective than it was in the younger years -with a lot more of an academic focus rather than much of the generalized maths they do at school. I know that some people who were terrified of maths in school loved it when they did it at a later stage of their life.

OK, not really any help but just relating my experience

[old mark]

42. I took my basic courses at a community college - they test all new

students to see what they feel you need to function at a college level. They told me I had almost no math ability at all, which explains why I did so poorly at college algebra last time I went to school...
I took a math course designed for those who were not likely to use higher math again and barely passed it, but I did pass. It was more of an annoyance, since it was taught by a real math head prof who just could not understand why those of us who were "low functioning" in math were not fascinated with the beauty of numbers....

Just do it and get throuh it and it will be over.
Good luck.

mark

[tigereye]

43. there must be some good classes or supports to help her

unis are much more open-minded about helping folks with learning issues than they used to be.... check out websites for the unis she wants to attend. She doesn't need to be scared - there is help out there!


:hug: for her.

[Heidi]

44. I had a tutor.

My dad was a former math teacher, but he couldn't deal with me just not "getting" it, and my mom couldn't deal with my tears and my dad's frustration. So they got me a tutor.

[MrCoffee]

45. It took me four attempts to pass College Algebra

In fact, I still haven't passed it, the teacher took pity on me the last time and gave me a C for effort.

[Tikki]

46. Yes...one of the hardest things I've ever done....

Can still bring tears to my eyes when I think about that struggle....but I did it.


Tikki