Growing to love or hate math?

Have you ever met anyone who feels, "I hate math", or "I don't understand math at all", or "I'm not a math person" ?

Wonder when and where those feelings got started?

I recently read an article called Formula to bring back thrill to math.
The author argued that calculus should be reserved to college studies, not high school. His point was, while the nation is suffering from a shortage of math teachers, the good math teachers are needed, not at advanced-placement calculus classes, but instructing 'the masses' so that they would learn to love math.

He also said that besides a drastic shortage of math teachers, there is also a severe shortage of math majors. In other words, fewer and fewer kids are studying math as their major in college, and there are fewer and fewer (qualified) math teachers... Of course the result is that schools then hire just about anyone to teach math.

I just wonder, is there a connection between the lack of good math teachers and the common feelings of students of not liking math? And then, less and less youngsters choosing to study math? Is this a vicious cycle?

So what makes one love math or hate math? What makes people hate math?

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Comments

Anonymous said…
Before 8th grade, math was not real interesting. Then in 8th grade I had a math teacher that no one liked, and I don't think I learned much that year. But then in 9th grade I had a really good math teacher who was a comedian and taught in a way to understand all the concepts, not just memorize formulas, and I have really loved mathematics since.
9:06 PM, January 03, 2006
Anonymous said…
hi
your idea is very pretty.
5:38 PM, January 04, 2006
Rebecca said…
I believe there are plenty of good high school math teachers and too many lazy students who have tuned out the idea of learning math. It sounds like a broken record hearing them say when will I use this in real life.
6:06 PM, December 02, 2008
Angie said…
In highschool I was astounded to learn that girls don't do well in math. I decided to prove them wrong. It turns out that I really love math! This was in 9th grade and I had a math teacher who would talk about history (his personal pre-WWII history - this was in 1985 so he was pretty old). He also had a very dry sense of humor which I LOVE! He taught me that I could teach myself math from the books, which came in really handy with that horrible statistics teacher in college ;)
11:11 PM, March 14, 2012
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