Fear and Confidence

The interviews often involved learners’ emotional responses to learning mathematics. Although any attempt at a unified summary of the participants’ related experiences would be misleadingly simplistic, it is fair to say that most participants indicated a gradual transition from fear to confidence. The narrative presentations frequently connected this improvement with the application of mathematics in the real world, and the quotes in the previous section offer many discursive markers of a growing assurance. This connection was often quite explicit:

I: Something you said in your questionnaire is you had to overcome the fear of maths… What do you mean by ‘fear of maths’?

G: You know, somebody asks you a question at work, I need to take off 10%, or I need to take off 15%, or 25%, or… and I was sitting there thinking, ‘God, please don’t ask me that question.’ I wouldn’t even attempt it, I wouldn’t, I’d feel stupid and ridiculous if someone asked me something about maths, and I hated that feeling, really…and that situation has actually cropped up recently, and although I couldn’t remember the exact thing he was asking me, I went and I sorted it out, and I reminded myself of how that formula worked.

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Although they may have not returned to learning mathematics with the intention of challenging their mathematical self-image, many found themselves reassessing their mathematical abilities:

E: Before I think I looked at it and thought, ‘I can’t do that’, but I feel I, I can do it, and I’m willing to try as well, and I don’t want to just switch off and say ‘no’. I’m willing to try.

C: You know, I did my first class, and I just felt ten feet tall. I thought, ‘I can do this, I can go back to school and learn!’ You know, I’m not past it, at twenty-nine years old, I’m not incapable, and after my first maths class it was just ten-fold, because I couldn’t do maths. And all of a sudden I sat down, I felt like I’d learnt something, and… you know, it was fantastic all of a sudden – this thing I couldn’t do, it was like, ooh, well maybe I can do this actually…doing those two courses

(Numeracy and Literacy) inspired me to go on and do the ‘access to higher

education’…

A: Yeah, I do feel different, I feel more confident with giving someone change without using a calculator thing and going on the till– obviously, you’ve got to go on the till and put the transactions through, but now I could just pick up the change if someone’s given me a tenner and I know what to give back to them…

Such accounts are positive comments on adult education in and of themselves: for instance, D moved from ‘not being comfortable’ with mathematics to ‘adoring’ it in the space of her GCSE course; next year she is beginning A-Level Mathematics.

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It is clear that these participants’ views of themselves as potential users of mathematics have improved, but from the structure and content of their narratives it is also possible to argue that this improvement is part of a reflexive repositioning of the nature of mathematics itself. There is similar evidence that in instances where the learner has not been able to recast the mathematics, their confidence has failed to develop. Participant G, who elsewhere claimed to have overcome a ‘fear of maths’ and who demonstrated a considered and enabling approach to the application of mathematics had one outstanding concern:

G: That’s the one thing I really struggle with, algebra… I suppose from a scientific point of view, or those people that need it… I’m sure that obviously it’s a really useful tool, but… you know, ‘a’ plus ‘b’, apples plus bananas equals ‘ab’, you know, they’re apples and they’re bananas to me… I still see it as pointless.

This is quite suggestive, and indeed much of the interview with participant G appeared to demonstrate tension between two views about mathematics. This was clear from the start of the interview which contained a suggestive slip with the definite article:

G: I think it’s the – a really difficult subject, and I think it’s something that lots of people aren’t very good at. I think you’re either really good at maths, and like it, or you really can’t stand it – it’s a bit like Marmite, I think… I don’t know, I do like maths, I like the ways things figure out – I find it hard still, but it’s an answer to a question that you’re asking… it is as it is… it’s black and white, isn’t it, maths?

As we have seen, G went some way towards resolving this tension by differentiating between ‘useful’ and ‘pointless’ mathematics. Participant B

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worked in a primary school and made a similar distinction, referring to “this kind of maths”. Whilst it is necessary to consider that these divisions may derive from the different cognitive demands made by areas of the curriculum such as algebra, it is plausible that this demarcation is, at least in part, a psychological construct, deployed to reconcile a learner’s recent successes with inferences about, or difficulties with, mathematics. In this way such partitioning could be related to the discourses surrounding the purposes of mathematics education.

Finally with regard to the emotional responses it was interesting to note, though not surprising in light of the questionnaire findings, that few participants expressed any fear of examinations. Many recognised that assessments had a valuable place in the learning experience, and some, such as E, recognised some strengths of the modular system: “you complete something and you’ve got that instant ‘well done’… you think, ‘OK, I’ve done really well, so let’s push a bit further.’”