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
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 there were a number of problems with that work at the time, and that most of the research people were citing was taking place outside of math education. The work was all really before the field of neuroscience was actually a thing. Lots of deficit thinking that something is wrong with the person who is suffering this anxiety. And most of these books were very self-helpy. And so, not only is there something wrong with you, but you need to fix it yourself. So, it really centers all these negative emotions around math on the person that's experiencing the pain, that something's wrong with them.
Whereas math trauma really shifts the focus to say, “No, no, no. This reaction, this emotional reaction, nobody's born that way.” Right? This came from a place, from an experience. And so, math trauma is saying, “No, there's been some series of events, maybe a set of circumstances, that this individual began to see as harmful or threatening, and that it's having long-lasting adverse effects. And that those long-lasting effects, this kind of triggering that starts to happen, is really beginning to affect that person's functioning, their sense of well-being when they're in the presence, in this case, of mathematics.” And I think the thing about trauma is just that. And I have to say in the early days of my doing this research, I was honestly a little bit hesitant to use that word because I didn't want to devalue some of the horrific experiences that people have experienced in times of war, witnessing the murder of a parent or something.
But it's about the brain. It's how the brain is responding to the situation. And what I think we know now, even more than when I started this work, is that there is simply trauma [in] everyday life. There are things that we experience that cause our brains to be triggered. And math is unfortunately this subject in school that we require nearly every year of a young person's life. And there are things about the way it's been taught over time that can be humiliating, ridiculing; that can cause people to have just some really negative experiences that then they carry with them into the next year. And so that's really the shift. The shift is instead of labeling somebody as math anxious—“Oh, you poor thing, you better fix yourself”—it's like, “No, we have some prevalence of math trauma, and we've got to figure out how people's experiences with math are causing this kind of a reaction in their bodies and brains.”
Mike: I want to take this a little bit further before we start to talk about causes and solutions. This idea that you mentioned of feeling under threat, it made me think that when we're talking about trauma, we are talking about a physiological response. Something is happening within the brain that's being manifested in the body. And I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about what happens to people experiencing trauma? What does that feel like in their body?
Kasi: So, this is really important and our brains have evolved over time. We have this incredible processing capacity, and it's coupled with a very powerful filter called the amygdala. And the amygdala [has been] there from eons ago to protect us. It's the filter that says, “Hey, do not provide access to that powerful processor unless I'm safe, unless my needs are met. Otherwise, I gotta focus on being well over here.” So, we're not going to give access to that higher-order thinking unless we're safe. And this is really important because modern imaging has given us really new insights into how we learn and how our body is reacting when our brain gets fired in this way.
And so, when somebody is experiencing math trauma, you know it. They sweat. Their face turns red. They cry. Their body and brain are telling them, “Get out. Get away from this thing. It will hurt you.” And I just feel like that is so important for us to remember because the amygdala also becomes increasingly sensitive to repeat negativity. So, it's one thing that you have a bad day in math, or you maybe have a teacher that makes you feel not great about yourself. But day after day, week after week, year after year, that messaging can start to make the amygdala hypersensitive to these sorts of situations. Is that what you were getting at with your question?
Mike: It is. And I think you really hit on something. There's this idea of repeat negativity causing increased sensitivity, I think has real ramifications for classroom culture or the importance of the way that I show up as an educator. It's making me think a lot about culture and norms related to math in schools. I'm starting to wonder about the type of traumatizing traditions that we've had in math education that might contribute to this type of experience. What does that make you think?
Kasi: Oh, for sure. Unfortunately, I think the list is a little long of the things that we may have been doing completely inadvertently. Everybody wants their students to have a great experience, and I actually think our practices have evolved. But culturally, I think there are some things about math that contribute to these “traumatizing traditions,” is what I've called them.
Before we go there, I do want to say just one other thing about this trauma piece, and that is that we've learned about some things about trauma in childhood. And a lot of the trauma in childhood is about not a single life-altering event. But childhood trauma is often about these things that happened repeatedly where a child was being ridiculed, being treated cruelly. And it's about that repetition that is really seeding that trauma so deeply and that sense that they can't stop it, that they don't have control to stop the thing that is causing them pain or suffering. So, I just wanted to make sure that I tagged that because I think there is something about what we've learned about the different forms of childhood trauma that's especially salient in this situation.
And so, I'll tie it to your question, which is, think about some of the things we've done in math historically. We don't do them in every place, but the ability grouping that has happened over time, it seems to go in and out of fashion. When a kid is told they're in the lower class, “Oh, this is something you're not good [at]—the slower math.” We often use speed to measure understanding, and so smarter is not faster. And there's some great quotes, Einstein among them. So that's a thing. When you gotta do it right now, it has to be one-hundred-percent right. It has to be superfast. We've often prioritized individual work over collaboration. So, you're all alone in this. In fact, if you're working with others, somehow that's cheating as opposed to collaborating.
We teach kids tricks rather than teaching them how to think. And I think we deprive kids of the opportunity to have an idea. It's really hard to get excited about something where all you're doing is reproducing—reproducing something that somebody else thought of as quickly as possible and [it] needs to be one-hundred-percent [accurate]. You don't get to bring your own spin to it. And so, we focus on answers rather than people's reasoning behind the answers. That can be something that happens as well. And I think one of the things that's always gotten me is that there's only one way. Not only is there only one right answer, but there's only one way to get there, which also contributes to this idea of having to absorb somebody else's thinking rather than actualizing your own.
And I absolutely know that most teachers are working to not do as much of these things in their math classrooms. And I want to be sure in having this conversation that—you know, I'm a lover of education and teachers, I taught teachers for many years. This is not about the teachers so much as the sort of culture of math and math education that we were all brought up in. And we've got to figure out how to make math something more so that kids can see themselves in it. And that it's not something that happens in a vacuum and is this performance course rather than a class where you get to solve cool problems that no one knows the exact answer to, or there's the exact right way, or that you get to get your own questions answered. Things you wonder about. That it's a chance to explore.
So, I mean, ultimately, I think we just know that there's a lot of negativity that happens around math, and we accept it. And that is perhaps the most traumatizing tradition of all because that kind of repeat negativity we know affects the amygdala. It affects people's ability to access math in the long run. So, we gotta have neutral or better.
Mike: So, in the field of psychology, there's this notion of generational trauma, and it's passed from generation to generation. And you're making me wonder if we're facing something similar when it comes to the field of math education. I'm wondering what you think educators might be able to do to reclaim math for themselves, especially if they're a person who potentially does have a traumatic mathematics experience and maybe some of the ways that they might create a different type of experience for their students.
Kasi: Yeah, let's talk about each of those. I'm going to talk about one, the multigenerational piece, and then let's talk about how we can help ourselves and our students. One is, I think it's really very possible that that's what we're looking at in terms of math trauma. Culturally, I think we've known for a while that this is happening, with respect to math, that—you know, I've had parents come to back-to-school night and tell me that they're just not a math family. And even jokingly say, “Oh, we're all bad at math, don't be too hard on us,” and all the other things. And so, kids inherit that. And it's very common for kids to have the same attitude towards math that their parents do and also that their teachers do.
And that's where I think in my mind, I really want to help every elementary teacher fall in love with math because if we look at the data, I think of any undergraduate major, it's those who major in education who report the highest rates of math anxiety and math trauma. And so, when you think about folks who feel that way about math, then being in charge of teaching it to kids in the early years, that's a lot to carry. And so, we want to give those teachers and anyone who has had this experience with math an opportunity to reclaim, regroup. And in my experience, what I've found is actually simply shifting the location of the problem is a really strong first step. When people understand that they actually aren't broken, that the feelings that they have about math don't reflect some sort of flaw in them as a human, but that it's a result of something they've experienced, a lot is unlocked. And most folks that I have worked with over my time working on this issue, they know. They know exactly the moment. They know the set of experiences that led to the reactions that they feel in their body. They can name it, and with actually fairly startling detail. So, in my teaching—and I think this is something anybody can do—is they would write a “mathography.” What is the story of your life through a math lens? What has been the story of your relationship with math over the course of your life and what windows does that give you into the places where you might need to heal? We've never had more tools to go back and sort of relearn areas of math that we thought we couldn't learn. And so often the trauma points are as math becomes more abstract. So many people have something that happened around fractions or multidigit multiplication and division. When we started—we get letters involved in math. I had somebody say, “Math was great as long as it was numbers. Then we got letters involved, and it was terrible.”
And so, if people can locate, “This is where I had the problem. It's not me. I can go back and relearn some things.” I feel like that's a lot of the healing, and that, in fact, if I'm a teacher or if I'm a parent, I love my kids, whether they're my children or my students, and I'm going to work on me so that they have a better experience than I had. And I've found so many teachers embrace that idea and go to work. So, some of the things that can happen in classrooms that I think fall from this is that, first of all, the recognition that emotional safety, you can't have cognition and problem solving without it. If you have kids in your classroom who have had these negative experiences in math, you're going to need to help them unpack those and level set in order to move on. And “mathography” is also a good tool for that. Some people use breathing.
Making sure that when you encounter kids that are exhibiting math anxiety, that you help them localize the problem outside of them. No one is born with math anxiety. It's the math of school that creates it. And if we ignore it, it's just going to get worse. So, some people feel like they can kind of smooth it over. I think we need to give kids the tools to unpack it and move beyond it. But it's so widespread, and I've encountered teachers who were afraid to go there. It's like the Pandora's box. My advice to them is that if you'll open the box and heal what's inside, the teaching becomes much easier. Whereas if you don't, you're fighting that uphill battle all the time.
You know, students will feel more safe in classrooms where mistakes are opportunities to learn; where they're not a bad thing and where they see each other as resources, where they are not alone, and where they can collaborate and really take responsibility for each other's learning. So, some of the most powerful classrooms I've seen where there were a lot of kids who had very negative experiences with math, a teacher had succeeded in creating this learning environment, this community of learners where all the kids seem to recognize that somebody would have a good day, someone else would have a not good day, but it would be their turn for a good day a few days from now. [chuckles] So, we're all just going to take care of each other as we go.
I think some things that teachers can keep a particular eye on is being sure that kids are given authentic work to do in math. It's really easy to start giving kids what we've called busywork, but work that really isn't engaging their brain. And it turns out that that boredom cycle triggers the negativity cycle, which can actually get your amygdala operating in a way that is not as far from trauma as we might all like to think. And so, while it isn't the same kind of math trauma that we're talking about here, it does affect the amygdala. And so that's something we should be aware of. And so, this is something—I think kids should learn about their brains in school. I don't know if it's the math teacher's job. But if they haven't learned about their brains yet, when you get them, I would recommend teaching kids about their brains, teaching them strategies for when they feel that kind of shutdown, that headache, like “I can't think.” Because most of the time, they actually can't. And they need to have some kind of reset.
Another tip, just in terms of disrupting that trauma cycle in the classroom, is that by the time kids get to be third, fourth grade and up, they know who is good at math, or they've labeled each other. You know, “Who's good at math? Who's struggled?” Even if they are not tracked and sorted, they've assessed each other. Sometimes they've put those labels on themselves. And so, if a teacher has the skills to assign competence to those students that may be being labeled as low status mathematically in their classroom—and it takes a teacher that knows their students well. But if you happen to see that a student that maybe has low status with computation, but wow, they are really good at developing the visuals for a math problem, or they're really great at illustrating a story or drawing others out in a collaborative group, but finding an area of competence that's authentic.
Sorry to go on and on. I could sit here and talk to you about this all day, but those are some of the things I would recommend.
Mike: Well, I think there's a few things that jump out, and I wanted to take them in little bits. I'm going to try to summarize, and then I want to come back and pick these up a little bit. So, one of the pieces that you named really struck a chord with me, which is recognizing as an educator that I have a story about mathematics that is playing out maybe just under the level of consciousness that bubbles up here and there. When you mentioned the traumatic experiences, my head went back to third grade with multiplication tables, and I can see myself sitting in the seat. And when you mentioned fractions, again, I could see myself facing the board in third grade looking down at a workbook where we were supposed to be adding fractions with denominators that were not common. And I had this moment of just dread in my stomach because I remember just thinking, “I don't know what is happening at all.”
And I'll say biographically, I think I spent the first seven or eight years of my teaching career carrying those things with me in the way that I approach students. I knew that they weren't good for me, but I didn't really have a compelling sense of what could be different until I actually took some mathematics education courses and really started to understand mathematics and how children's ideas develop. And it did allow me to decenter the problem for myself and say, “Actually, I can make a lot of meaning out of mathematics.” What I experienced was not mathematics. It was memorizing a bunch of stuff and practicing a bunch of procedures. This idea that decentering where the problem is from the educator or in classrooms from the student, really, really feels powerful. I think it's a huge gift that we can give to our students and also to ourselves.
The other piece that I'm really thinking about is this idea of positioning students and finding competency. That really stands out as something that I could attend to as a classroom teacher. I suspect that people who are listening can think about their own class of students. You as an educator probably know who the other kids think of as good at math, and I suspect you also know who they think isn't good at math. Knowing that kids know those stories as well, I could do something about that. I could look at the students who have low status and think about ways that I could raise them up. That feels really tangible. I could take and start thinking about that when I ask students to share their ideas, and I could do that tomorrow. It doesn't take a master's-level course in mathematics to do that. Does that make sense, Kasi?
Kasi: I love all of that so much. One hundred percent. You know, when I was observing teachers—and this tended to happen more with elementary teachers just because of their own histories with math as you were saying here—but the difference between saying, “OK, everybody, we get to do math now. Clear your desks!” and “OK, everybody, I know it's hard, but it's time for math. We're strong. We're going to do it.” But there is this underlying kind of, “I don't really like this either, but we gotta do it.” as opposed to “We're going to discover something new today!” And so really just kind of listening to some of those implicit messages in the words that we choose, that's something we can change in a moment as well.
Mike: Well, I think you and I could probably go on and on and continue this conversation for a long time. If I'm someone who's listening, are there resources you would recommend for someone who wants to continue learning about these ideas?
Kasi: Yeah, absolutely. For me, the OG of this line of thinking is Jo Boaler, who most math teachers will know. She's the first person I ever heard use the word “math-traumatized.” And before I embarked and dove deeper into my math trauma research, I went down to Stanford and met with her, and she was wonderful and encouraging of, like, “Oh, no, no, no. Go, go, go, go. This is great.”
There's a woman named Ebony McGee, who's the founder of R-RIGHTS. [She was] a professor at Vanderbilt. She's doing some work with math identity that I think touches on this subject in a valuable way. I mean, I think this whole area of developing positive math identity is tightly connected to the math trauma work. And honestly, anyone who is doing work around child trauma and neuroscience and how we are seeing the development of the brain is going to provide some interesting resources.
I have to say, my all-time favorite is a book that I believe [...] is out of print, so it might be a thrift books purchase. But Dr. Judy Willis wrote a book called Learning to Love Math. Looks like you might be familiar with it. And I really think she did a lovely job in that book in a way that is absolutely targeting teachers to help us see how these very small actions that we take in the classroom could make a really big difference in terms of how our students see and experience the subject that we care about so much.
Mike: I think that's a great place to stop. Thank you so much for joining us, Kasi. It's really been a pleasure talking with you.
Kasi: Oh, my goodness, Mike, thank you so much. It's really been an honor to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mike: This podcast is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling all individuals to discover and develop their mathematical confidence and ability.