why people hate math

Numerophobia. Arithmophobia. Math anxiety. If you know someone who doesn't think math is for them, then this video is for you because Sabrina (a math grad who hates math) explores this phenomenon and finds a way to beat it.

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SOCIAL MEDIA
Sabrina
Melissa
Taha

CREDITS
Produced by Sabrina Cruz
Video Editing by Sam Anghelides
Motion Design by Sabrina Cruz

MUSIC

RECOMMENDED READING
Maths on the Back of an Envelope by Rob Eastaway
Measurement by Paul Lockhart

TIMESTAMPS
00:00 surprise attack
00:18 my degree is a lie
01:51 sabrina (rgb gamer edition)
03:32 the return of glorified book reports
05:05 why math breaks your brain
06:16 my villain origin story
08:14 exposing sabrina and you won't believe what happened next
09:14 techniques for faster math
10:50 paying the bills
12:40 training montage
12:58 sabrina (taylor's version)
14:26 do math pls
19:03 share this video with someone who could learn to love math

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Welcome to the joke under the fold!

We know that six is afraid of seven because seven ate nine, but do you want to know why seven did that?

Because seven is supposed to eat 3 squared meals a day!

Leave a comment with the word SQUARE to let me know you were here ;-)

[answerinprogress]

Hope you enjoyed the video! You can find the math game on our Patreon
If you aren't in the position to support us on Patreon just yet, we'll be releasing the game with the next edition of our free newsletter

- Sabrina

[maybeanonymous]

90% of my experience with maths was bad, but the other 30% was pretty good

[timtimo]

Sometimes "math anxiety" is just a symptom of being abused as a consequence of being wrong during our formative years.

[jomsies]

I actually loved math until the teachers would tell you that you need to follow and write down this specific long complicated route to get to the answer when you already have a simple one in mind.

[ItsBelvietine]

I have a friend who is better at computing mentally than me so my friend would give me random math question whenever im near them and expect me to answer right away. And whenever I stress out and tell them a wrong answer, they would laugh and tell me "Its so simple??, my younger sibling could do that in 2 seconds!". This made me so scared of being with my friend that i started avoiding them. Whenever we were forced to get together (group project or partners), i would get SO MUCH anxiety by just being beside them. But whenever i take my time and learn, i actually understand 90% of it, thats why my math exams scores are high.

Im VERY slow at computing mentally BUT I KNOW WHAT IM DOING AND WHAT IT IS, JUST GIVE ME A SECOND PLEASE AND DONT MAKE FUN OF ME FOR NOT ANSWERING IT CORRECTLY IN LESS THAN 2 SECONDS.

[octaverambles]

When children are taught that fast mental math is being successful in maths (think of the “60 seconds” quizzes) and that you can’t be wrong (the insistence on having high grades or you get scolded/punished), it’s no wonder that people have math anxiety

[MrSpeakerCone]

For me it was a series of unpleasant, aggressive teachers. I'd ask "what is this used for?" and they'd answer something dismissive like "it'll become clear later" which ... look, it's algebra. It's used to build spaceships and make video games and program computers and aim lasers and make music come out of speakers. One sentence "this is what makes the lighting work in Quake" would have engaged me enough to love it.

[_karla._]

I was _completely_ traumatized in school and math got ruined for me very early on. I've always had severe adhd but just recently got a diagnosis at age 23 and I was severely berated by teachers for my entire time in school. From an early age I had an extreme fear of math. Now I must pass math in Uni. I've already failed the exam a few times and the lectures were awful for me. I've finally got myself to actually studying (because if I don't pass next semester I'm gonna be expelled), so I'm currently studying completely on my own terms in my own pace and it's so different. Nobody to pressure me, nobody to berate me. This world wasn't made for neurodivergent people and we are being fucked over so often. If I had been in a more positive and tolerant environment as a child I probably would have really enjoyed math. I do enjoy it now.

[veronica]

I literally was always really good at memorizing words…but numbers didn’t seem to have meaning so I was always bad at remembering anything related to numbers

[mxstrikk]

"People hate math"

And this is why I'm trying to be a teacher who's actually good at their job

[JK_JK_JK]

Math, by its nature, is extremely precise and unforgiving of mistakes. It is easy to understand why people dislike working hard on a long math problem and still getting it wrong due to making one small mistake in one of the steps to solve the problem.

However, I think that a bigger issue, based on my experience, is the fact most teachers can't teach effectively. Teachers may have deep specialized knowledge in a certain field, but this does not mean that they can communicate that knowledge effectively to students. Furthermore, I think that because they have devoted themselves to a certain field, they really don't understand why students don't love the field as much as they do and find the field difficult.

[jacobmakesthings]

im good at math but i get anxious sometimes. the thought that theres only one correct answer and infinitely many wrong answers haunts me to this day

[Kerosyn]

the worst part about math anxiety for me is that I don't actually have it. I have dyscalculia, but my teachers were convinced that the only reason I couldn't do the sheets of 100 problems under time pressure was anxiety, and that assertion has followed me around and become a source of anger and mockery ever since. it has been completely impossible to explain to people that it's not scary, I'm not afraid of the math, I even recognize and appreciate its important, I simply cannot process it beyond the most basic of basics without giving it my full focus and a very long time... but even then, some advanced math will never be within my mental grasp, it all becomes static. man am I glad we're all walking around with calculators in our pockets every day after all

[The_DCR]

Simply put, I hate math because I’m not given nearly enough time to learn it or understand it

[erikaantonsson]

I stopped hating math when I got a teacher that encouraged us to learn and started with the very basics. He didn't think any questions were stupid (even the ones that should've been obvious or easy for our class) and always let us sit in his classroom, even when he had other classes. If we had bad days, we were allowed in his office and he'd always listen if we wanted to talk, and he always, ALWAYS, helped us when we didn't understand.

In my last year of high school, I skipped a lot of classes and stayed home a lot due to chronic pain and mental health issues, but came back the last few months. Since I had missed most of his class, he sat me down one afternoon and we made up a schedule where he'd be able to teach me enough of the class to at least give me a proper grade. He took a lot of his free time to help me and he didn't even seem to mind. That was really what did it for me - he thought math was so much fun that he didn't mind working overtime to teach us. He made math fun and his class felt a lot like the first few years of school did, when you want to learn everything, all at once. I went from an E or a D to an A in the span of a few months.

I wasn't the only one, either. When he was going to quit his job to take another one in a town over, most of the students begged him to stay. He did stay, in the end. I think he's still there and he's one of the best teachers I've ever had.

[ToasteBlade]

I first started being bad at math in 4th grade under similar circumstances. We’d be told to do a lot of problems from our math book and we had 50 minutes or else it’d be homework. I NEVER finished within that 50 minutes and I was the only one (that I saw). It was embarrassing especially since I was seen as the “smart” kid until then. It eventually just turned into me writing down all the problems so I wouldn’t be seen taking that giant math book home with me. Ever since then it’s been an embarrassing subject for me.

[votreadelphe]

1) I was sent to a private school where students would make fun of you for not being good at math. We also had different groups in 4th and 5th grade mostly separated by math aptitudes and I ended up in the class everybody called retarded and that we would be jobless without strong maths.

2. Math teachers were fucking brutal and humiliating. One of them would select one student per class to count up odd numbers in front of the class and berate them for making a mistake. Exams were so hard and long other teachers from other subjects even had to shorten their own exams for the math exams during the end of semester period.

3. As I said earlier we were made to feel worthless and stupid if we weren’t good at math. You had to way more effort in Math than History, English, or Art combined. If you cared about those subjects or were good at them people would make fun of you too and say you’d amount to nothing in life without math.

5. I felt like I had to cram too much information too fast. Now when I’m an adult I’m learning math again but at my pace without the pressure I used to feel.

6. I was good at math in Science classes because I found it practical and could see how I could use math in the real world.

[RareEarthSeries]

I hated it because I couldn't BS my way to a B- without having read the material like I could in English class

[tetsubo]

It's been my experience that a whole lot of adults seem to have utterly forgotten whet it was like to be a child. Parents, teachers, etc. This has *always* baffled me. I'm fifty-seven years old and I *still* remember. Teach children the way you wanted to be taught when you were a kid.

[butterfly]

I definitely relate to this. I did fine in math classes (yay calculators) but have always struggled with mental math. For several years, pre-pandemic, I volunteered at my local library book sale once a month, as a cashier, and we didn't have a real cash register, like that would do the math of giving people change for me, so I had to figure it out myself. If people gave me exact change, no problem, but if they needed change back, I literally had to use a calculator a good portion of the time, because I was so untrusting of my ability to do subtraction in my head. And sometimes people would give me additional money "to help" with the change back. Like I think if it the cost was $2.35, some people would give me $5.35 so that I just had to give them $3 back, but I'd already been planning to give them $5 minus $2.35 and then I would panic and forget how math works and try to figure out $5 - $2.35 + .35, and would think "This isn't helping, you're just making me do math twice!!" Anyway. I should probably do some practice math questions lol.