Recently, I wrote about my experiences of teaching adults. Then, I shared my piece far and wide on social media. I knew that maths negativity/anxiety was common in my classes. That was to be expected – why would you feel positive about a subject that you hadn’t experienced success in during your 11 years at school, and that was now stopping you achieving your career goals?

What I wasn’t expecting was quite so many responses from people who had passed their GCSE, telling me how much they feared the subject too.

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Ingrained feelings

This is a serious issue in the UK and one I sincerely hope we can get right with our children and young people. But how to tackle this with adult learners, whose feelings are ingrained?

1. Talk about it

I’m naturally interested in people and am genuinely keen to hear why somebody has enrolled and how they feel about maths. It can take a huge amount of courage for an adult learner with maths anxiety even to make it through the classroom door. Understanding that you are not alone, that others feel the same and that your feelings will be taken seriously is a good way to turn negative emotions into a positive bonding experience within the group. It also allows learners who do feel great about maths to have some insight and sensitivity into the feelings of the others.

2. Consider your pedagogy

From talking to students and friends, I hear a lot that maths made them scared. What seems to be the cause is the experience of getting put on the spot and having to try to guess what’s in the heads of the teacher and other students "who get it". I do use techniques such as cold call, but rarely and only with considerable thought. Fear takes up a lot of mental space – space I would rather be filled with maths. Questions from Craig Barton’s excellent Diagnostic Questions website have been a game changer for me in terms of in-lesson assessment. They place much less pressure on individual students while giving me a much more accurate picture of what everybody in the class is thinking. If you don’t use them, take a look.

3. Wrong answers are normal and useful

Ultimately, maths is a right or wrong subject. Students know this (see point 2) and to pretend otherwise is patronising and insincere. However, I also want students to know that I can teach them better if I know what misconceptions they have. If the majority of the class have made the same mistake, that’s a reflection on me, not them. Nobody knows everything about everything in mathematics. It’s not a mysterious subject that is in some people’s heads and not others. In our department at college, we are very open about asking each other if we don’t know something or aren’t sure. And I can make the same mistakes the students make if I calculate too quickly or don’t read the question properly…

4. Make the maths relevant

Obviously what’s interesting and relevant to one person isn’t to another. You won’t get this right for everybody all the time but I believe adult lessons need to try to address the “why do I need to know this?” attitude. After all, everybody in the room is proof you can get along with your life just fine without using the cosine rule. A lesson I enjoyed teaching recently was after the Wilder v Fury boxing match. I know nothing about boxing but was able to get some statistics from the internet and use them for some reverse percentage and percentage change questions. Students who did know about boxing were able to explain to the class why these statistics mattered. Their passion was contagious and we all learned something (plus I sneaked in some units of measure revision too).

5. Is it beautiful? 

Some topics lend themselves to being relevant to everyday life. Percentages are a good example. But sometimes the less obvious areas are where the beauty lies. Fibonacci, the perfection of geometry, irrational numbers. Teachers of other subjects in adult education are passionate about the beauty of their specialism. Pottery teachers don’t need to explain to students why they are making plates when we live near Ikea. Maths is obviously an integral part of everyday life. But that’s probably not why we became maths teachers. We mustn’t lose sight of that and continue to share our love, passion and enthusiasm.

Rebecca Atherfold is a full-time maths tutor teaching functional skills and GCSE at the Learning and Enterprise College Bexley