Curing Your Math Hiccups is an easy to follow, step-by-step guide that teaches real world concepts. Here are a number of ways this book can help you improve your math skills, ease your anxiety and become a math champion.
- Anyone taking Pre-Algebra or Algebra 1 can use this book as a supplementary text to help with specific aspects needed in these courses. Age is irrelevant. An eighth grader, ninth grader, a home school student, or even a student who is re-entering college later in life to pursue their dreams can learn or brush-up on forgotten concepts needed for beginning Algebra.
- The book offers valuable information regarding career counseling and learning styles that will help students of any age recognize what is the best way for them to study and what possible careers are suited for them.
- A good review of deciphering “stinky” story problems, helping you get the “meat” of the problem instead of the “fat” or the unnecessary wording.
- An intensive review for beginning geometry. You will learn how to “formulate the formulas,” identify different types of geometric figures, and use of fractions, decimals, and percent for finding perimeters, areas, and volume.
- This guide will help you understand the metric system so you can easily recognize the value of it in everyday situations—like driving distances and cooking. Getting a grip on the metric system is necessary in order to keep up with modern and future technologies.
- Explains important research linked to math anxiety, including the myths that have surrounded it since 1971, and possible “culprits” that have contributed to the fears of doing math, not liking math, nor wanting to continue with degrees that are associated with math.
- Math teachers can turn to this book for fresh educational ideas. Although there has been new nationwide curricula taught since World War I, if the simple basics are not understood nor explained easily and relevant to everyday situations, no amount of money or new books and new ways of teaching will solve this problem. It has been very difficult for students because the changes have caused more confusion than consistency. Each generation may know what a fraction is, but the procedures to find the answer has been more confusing. Because many students depend on a calculator or computer to do the work, they never solidly learn the “why’s and what’s what” of using fundamental math. The connection from one concept to another is hardly presented in classes, so students get by on their tests and move on. “Hallelujah,” they say, but in a math course later, students see what they should have learned in Algebra I, but never really understood it and just move on. Now, with Algebra II, there is little time to review and students get swallowed up in the sea of confusion and frustration.
- Parents, grandparents, home schooling, alternative schools, and basic tutoring can benefit from this book by getting a hold of simple concepts. Students can see how concepts are interrelated, instead of seeing different concepts as totally exclusive to one method and one method only.
- Vocabulary has also been a culprit of math anxiety. If one is tutoring, many helpers do not know what these new words are and just give up. This is not easy for many frustrated parents. A good example is the word “reciprocal.” If one is dividing fractions, a problem could be ½ divided by ¾. To work the problem, the ½ stays the same and the ¾ is flipped over and now the problem is ½ x 4/3. The 4/3 is NOW called the “multiplicative inverse”.
- Those words are quite a mouthful. If a tutor does not know the new language, they will just give up in frustration leading both the person being tutored and the tutor to more frustration and heightened anxiety.
- No one needs to know that you are having “math anxiety.“ There are many, many people who would never admit that they fear math, but they do. As both a teacher and a counselor, my eyes are open to the problems people face. Get the help you need with this book, or from a good teacher or mentor. Do not lose out to a fear that can be identified and corrected. It truly can happen to you!