Season 3 | Episode 9 – Breaking the Cycle of Math Trauma - Guest: Dr. Kasi Allen

Dr. Kasi Allen, Breaking the Cycle of Math Trauma  

ROUNDING UP: SEASON 3 | EPISODE 9

If you are an educator, you've likely heard people say things like "I'm a math person." While this may make you cringe, if you dig a bit deeper, many people can identify specific experiences that convinced them that this was true. In fact, some of you might secretly wonder if you are a math person as well. Today we're talking with Dr. Kasi Allen about math trauma: what it is and how educators can take steps to address it.

BIOGRAPHY

Kasi Allen serves as the vice president of learning and impact at The Ford Family Foundation. She holds a PhD degree in educational policy and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and its history, both from Stanford University.

RESOURCES

"Jo Boaler Wants Everyone to Love Math" — Stanford Magazine

R-RIGHTS

Learning to Love Math by Judy Willis

TRANSCRIPT

Mike Wallus: If you're an educator, I'm almost certain you've heard people say things like, "I am not a math person." While this may make you cringe, if you dig a bit deeper, many of those folks can identify specific experiences that convinced them that this was true. In fact, some of you might secretly wonder if you're actually a math person. Today we're talking with Dr. Kasi Allen about math trauma: what it is and how educators can take steps to address it. 

Well, hello, Kasi. Welcome to the podcast.

Kasi Allen: Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Mike: I wonder if we could start by talking about what drew you to the topic of math trauma in the first place?

Kasi: Really good question. You know, I've been curious about this topic for almost as long as I can remember, especially about how people's different relationships with math seem to affect their lives and how that starts at a very early age. I think it was around fourth grade for me probably, that I became aware of how much I liked math and how much my best friend and my sister had an absolutely opposite relationship with it—even though we were attending the same school, same teachers, and so on. And I really wanted to understand why that was happening. And honestly, I think that's what made me want to become a high school math teacher. I was convinced I could do it in a way that maybe wouldn't hurt people as much. Or it might even make them like it and feel like they could do anything that they wanted to do. 

But it wasn't until many years later, as a professor of education, when I was teaching teachers how to teach math, that this topic really resurfaced for me [in] a whole new way among my family, among my friends. And if you're somebody who's taught math, you're the math emergency person. And so, I had collected over the years stories of people's not-so-awesome experiences with math. But it was when I was asked to teach an algebra for elementary teachers course, that was actually the students' idea. And the idea of this course was that we'd help preservice elementary teachers get a better window into how the math they were teaching was planting the seeds for how people might access algebra later. 

On the very first day, the first year I taught this class, there were three sections. I passed out the syllabus; in all three sections, the same thing happened. Somebody either started crying in a way that needed consoling by another peer, or they got up and left, or both. And I was just pretty dismayed. I hadn't spoken a word. The syllabi were just sitting on the table. And it really made me want to go after this in a new way. I mean, something—it just made me feel like something different was happening here. This was not the math anxiety that everybody talked about when I was younger. This was definitely different, and it became my passion project: trying to figure how we disrupt that cycle.

Mike: Well, I think that's a good segue because I've heard you say that the term "math anxiety" centers this as a problem that's within the person. And that in fact, this isn't about the person. Instead, it's about the experience, something that's happened to people that's causing this type of reaction. Do I have that right, Kasi?

Kasi: One hundred percent. And I think this is really important. When I grew up and when I became a teacher, I think that was an era when there was a lot of focus on math anxiety, the prevalence of math anxiety. Sheila Tobias wrote the famous book Overcoming Math Anxiety. This was especially a problem among women. There were dozens of books. And