Teaching Goals

Science is an incredible field of study that gives us the tools to investigate the world around us and feed our curiosity. I hope to inspire all my students to develop a life-long love of science, even (especially!) if they go into a different field.

My broadest educational goals are

  1. to help students develop their self-advocacy and self-care skills,
  2. to make science exciting and accessible to all students, and
  3. to ensure that all my students graduate with the strong scientific literacy that will empower them as citizens.
To accomplish these goals, I must be committed to diversity and accessibility, to challenging my students to push themselves, and to challenge my students to take care of themselves.

On My Soapbox: Math Anxiety

Math anxiety may come from having math-related learning disorders, from stereotype threat, or from having more general performance anxiety. And math anxiety is a big reason people choose not to go into science. Upon telling others I majored in astrophysics, I often hear something along the lines of, "Oh, I love space! But I'm so bad at math I could never study it." This is an artifical barrier that we need to break down! The good news about math anxiety is that, like other forms of anxiety, it's treatable. And there are some interventions for math anxiety that are easy to implement in classrooms of any level. But first ...

A HUGE CAVEAT

I am a well-intentioned non-expert with personal experience with mindfulness practices and the ability to read journal articles. So, students with very strong math anxiety should absolutely speak with a counselor or therapist specializing in anxiety for treatment options and other coping tools. Good anxiety treatment is about building a toolbox with lots of strategies to deploy when things get hairy, and the strategies I've mentioned, while often effective, are not one-size-fits-all. Good anxiety treatment is also about understanding the roots of your anxiety and re-evaluating your thoughts around them, and that takes lots of therapy and practice. So please consult a real professional about math anxiety! I am just a person on the internet.

Okay! So with that said, let's talk about

Techniques for Reducing Math Anxiety

Students with math LD can struggle not just academically, but also emotionally. They can develop math anxiety because general education math classes do not meet their needs, and so they consistently underperform. And because math education begins early, math anxiety can also begin early and stay with you for the rest of your life. In his article on math LD in Child Neuropsychology: Concepts, Theory, and Practice, Brian Butterworth included interviews with 9-year-olds with math LD about their experiences in math class:

Child 5: It makes me feel left out, sometimes.

Child 2: Yeah.

Child 5: When I like—when I don’t know something, I wish that I was like a clever person and I blame it on myself—

Child 4: I could cry and wish I was at home with my mum and it would be—I won’t have to do any maths.

And while math anxiety very frequently co-occurs with math LD, there are many students with no learning disabilities who still struggle with math anxiety. Every student deserves equal access to a math education that works for them, and addressing the needs of people with learning disabilities or anxiety is already an issue of equity: neurotypical students are not the only people whose needs must be met. But that issue goes even deeper when one realizes that a student's math anxiety may be borne out of stereotype threat, which is the sense of anxiety one experiences when they're worried about playing into a stereotype.

It is clear that, from purely a mental health standpoint, interventions to alleviate these students’ anxiety are absolutely necessary. But there is a further, more pedagogical motivation here, too: anxiety strongly affects academic performance and working memory, so addressing it will both help students take care of themselves and learn more effectively.

Fortunately, many interventions for other anxiety disorders are shown to work well for students with math anxiety. Practices rooted in mindfulness, like focused breathing exercises, have been shown to both allay students’ fears about math and improve their performance on math assignments.

There are lots of structured breathing exercises that have been shown to alleviate anxiety, such as guided visualizations (for instance, keeping an imaginary feather aloft with your breath) and four-corner or tactical breathing: breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, hold for four seconds.

After enough practice, breathing exercises can be a quick and easy way to ground yourself, making them especially easy to implement in the middle of something stressful and time-sensitive. Meanwhile, more time-consuming interventions like guided visualizations or guided meditation can be a good practice before a major assessment. MyLife (formerly Stop, Breathe & Think) is a nice, free tool for introducing yourself to these techniques.

Journaling is another great tool used in treating anxiety, and has been shown to be very effective for math anxiety. In their study on math anxiety in undergraduate students, Park, Ramirez, and Beilock told student volunteers that they were about to take a math test, and asked students to “write as openly as possible about your thoughts and feelings regarding the math problems you are about to perform.... really let yourself go and explore your emotions and thoughts.... Please try to be as open as possible as you write.” They then allowed students to freewrite for seven minutes before they completed the test.

Of the students with math anxiety, those who were highly expressive about their anxiety had higher performance gains than those who used less specific language, and all of those who journaled did better than those who did not. That high-expression aspect suggests that emotional honesty is key to this process. Implementing this in a classroom means that it is essential to emphasize to students that no one will read their journals, so they can feel free to be as honest as possible.

Sample Lesson Plans

These are all appropriate for high school physics or college physics for non-majors.