What Is So Scary About Math?

Are you scared to continue being a math major?

This is a question I was recently asked by one of my professors as an end-of-semester reflection. On the one hand, absolutely. I knew the material after that point was only going to exponentially get harder. On the other hand, I was (and am) so excited to continue learning more about math, despite the challenges that I know are ahead of me. Why should I be scared?

There is this perception that math is this difficult subject that only the smartest students are going to succeed in. It’s nothing more than a subject schools force them to learn to progress in school and graduate. It’s something to be feared.

There is some truth to this. Math is an increasingly difficult subject that some students are going to excel in more easily than others, just like every other subject taught in school. And schools do require students to take it, but for many beneficial reasons such as the real-world applications of math and the problem-solving skills that math helps develop.

But why is math so dreaded? Where is this fear of math coming from? What is so scary about math?

In her article, “Math Phobia? Or School-Math Phobia?”, Angela Chan Turrou proposes the idea that it’s not math itself that people are afraid of, but rather the “drill-and-kill” form of math they were taught in school. From a young age, kids are shown that math is nothing but timed tests and memorized steps. The problem is that’s not math; that’s school-math. By putting so much importance on these school-math practices, it’s created widespread fear of the only math these kids know, and thus long-term math phobias are born.

So, the question is, what can we do to change this? Well, for starters, we can rethink this “drill-and-kill” mentality. That’s not how children think. Children are imaginative and curious; their brains aren’t at the place where they should be overly focused on the memorization of mathematical processes. We should focus on prioritizing children and the way they think, building their learning on their “curiosities and ideas”.

Math doesn’t need to be something we are afraid of, but we first need to stop making it something to be feared.

Maegan Questad

References

Turrou, A. C. (2025, January). Math phobia? Or school-math phobia? Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12, 118(1), 80-81.

https://www.prodigygame.com/main-en/blog/why-is-math-important/#:~:text=A%20strong%20foundation%20in%20math%20can%20translate%20into,school.%20Its%20applications%20to%20real-life%20scenarios%20are%20vast.