What are some coping mechanisms that might help someone with math anxiety?!
Question:
What are some coping mechanisms that might help someone with math anxiety?
Answers:
I think numbers and math symbols make a lot of people anxious. Keep in mind that numbers and symbols aren't the most important part of math. It sounds stupid, but it's true.
I think of math as just a foreign language that has some characteristics that other languages don't have: math is perfectly logical and perfectly unambiguous. The numbers and symbols aren't the important part, the concepts behind them are the important part. So first understand the concepts behind the symbols without worrying too much about numbers and symbols, and then the rest will come naturally.
Learning math is just like learning French or Spanish; you have to expand your vocabulary to be able to express yourself well. Don't let the vocabulary discourage you, because the concepts behind the vocabulary are usually really quite simple until you get into very, very high math (far beyond elementary calculus), and it's the concepts that are really important, not the vocabulary.