Math trauma, Definition: The inability to successfully focus on a mathematical concept as it leads directly to emotional pain associated with previous efforts to open up and attempt to understand school-math that resulted in abject failure, prolonged confusion and finally despair. A compounded, cumulative disorder which slowly manifests itself over the course of many years of school-math.

Disclaimer: None of this is about the common core. the common core is just the list of topics to be covered and their order. The common core is absolutely not the problem.

In 30 years of tutoring mathematics, I have witnessed student after student suffering from the same basic misunderstandings. It does not even matter whether it’s France, Germany or the US. The material is partially 500 years old.

Our Approach

The most important step is to let the students know they are not alone and that it is not their fault that school math often simply makes no sense! Often it is the most gifted and creative who have the greatest issues with blindly memorizing and not understanding in any real way the material being served up to them. To put it plainly, unless you come from an academic background or at least a background that strongly supports academics, chances are you will in fact be put off by school math.

I am in the process of publishing a book about revising the way topics are taught, in hopes of shining a light on this problem.

The market

The tutoring market, of which the lions share is mathematics and takes place in North America, is estimated at $57.92 billion in 2023 ($105.98 billion by 2030). Mathematics education is an unusually large sector to never have been significantly disrupted, as is evidenced by the lack of a clear leader. No company is fundamentally better at helping the kids and their parents than any other company.

Why Everyone Hates Math (WEHM), a manual

This is a manual-not a book, a blueprint of the labyrinth that is school math -not a new way of teaching math, this is an insider guide how to get a great score without losing your mind- not a new approach to math education, finally this is a pragmatic survival guide-not an attempt to change the world.

The WEHM manual is a indexed comprehensive list of the vast universe of school-math confusions, pitfalls, tangled webs and labyrinths that exist in 4-12th grade school-math, that all contribute to math trauma.

A series is envisioned, with grades 4-8 and 9-12 sold as two separate editions.

This manual breaks from the hitherto universal assumption that student’s abilities are the main obstacles in the path of better math literacy, and focuses instead on the mathematical CONTENT presented in school as the underlying issue. Here the students are seen as the injured party to be reassured, comforted, and then lead carefully out of the (not so) mathematical maze they are in. In the vast majority of cases, the students are not to be blamed for their lack of understanding. Rather, the misunderstanding is caused by content that all too often penalizes trying to actually think and promotes blind, meaningless and often non-sensical, memorization.

This is a reference work to be used in conjunction with all the usual school-math materials it does not replace them. It is not a separate system for teaching math, such as Singapore Math or Exeter math.  The goal of the WEHM manual is simply to be there for the student every single time school-math stops making sense! All a confused student has to do is look up the topic in the WEHM manual’s extensive index or search function, which will include all the many, many confounding aliases used for every topic. There is no need to read a whole chapter or previous chapters. A simple search will immediately lead to an entry that gives a precise explanation of what is happening in the students classroom and textbooks and the reasons he or she is most likely confused. Finally, very practical advice on how to best navigate this particular school math situation is offered. The WEHM manual even offers complete workarounds or hacks where they have a reasonable chance of actually being helpful.

There are currently 3 beta versions of the WEHM manual.

The first is the student’s handbook, a short collection of notes for every chapter in the style of the big fat math notebook .

If a more in-depth  discussion of a topic is desired, the student or parent can continued in the more expansive Parents’ edition of the WEHM manual.

Recently I have become more acutely aware of the need to avoid any single unnecessary step for the student/parent just attempting to survive school math at the end of a long, hard day. This has lead to a new bullet-point like format: the two column format.

Please see the samples of each format.

Further notes:

Here is a market analysis (very beta).

Here is a short  list of some topics  that are to be addressed in the completed WEHM manual. All told there are at least 100 such entries not all of the same length, but still requiring a book of some size.

A few examples

The 8-11th grade trek through quadratics specifically quadratic factoring is perhaps the most significant example of what is wrong in school math; what is the purpose of a misleading multi-year emphasis on something that is mathematically irrelevant? When the correct mathematical answer to this question, the quadratic formula, is finally revealed to students it is often played down and called “just a formula”. (Similar to E=mc^2 I suppose.)

Asides from an immensely helpful flowchart for the maze of different factoring cases, the WEHM manual also offers a quadratics table , on overview of quadratics that saves the day both practically and in terms of understanding.

The WEHM manual does offer an “escape hatch ”How to avoid grouping flowchart to those brave enough to try it.

Because of its brevity and clear-cut nature, a better introduction to how the WEHM manual functions might be the astounding case of  Parallel Lines and the Transversal. It is included as a sample chapter in both student handbook and parents’ edition format. For this confusion the remedy is immediate. The simple statement “there are only two angles in the whole picture” does away with all confusion here  in an instant.

I have used this very straight-forward parallel line confusion as a litmus test to review the books in the competitive-analysis . Not a single book or website calls out and clears up the confusion of the 5 angle pair names, they either repeat it blindly or , a select few, just pretend it doesn’t happen at all.

As was said above, goal of this manual is not to change the course of school-math. The WEHM manual simply exposes the confusions of school-math, great and small, and makes a perfect map of this immense labyrinth. Where appropriate shortcuts and even “escape hatches” are offered.