Conversations: 2008

My daughter Naomi has been a good, solid student since she started school except for one subject. Math. In elementary school she just made it, but as soon as she started high school this issue became critical.

Here in Canada the passing mark is 60%. Naomi came home with a 60% on a good day. Usually it was far below, which meant summer school and tutoring a few times a week for the past years. Having seen these math results since grade 1, we assumed that math was just a weakness and did our best to encourage Naomi when she came home with yet another awful test result.

One day her tutor mentioned to me, that she could not understand why Naomi constantly failed. In her opinion my daughter knew her material very well and was able to solve all the problems she gave her at home. To me the only answer could be test anxiety.

I decided to tap with Naomi on Math test anxiety. We started with these set up phrases using the shortcut version.

Even though I really hate Math…

Even though Math is the worst subject in the world…

Even though I am sure I will write another bad test…

Even though I am so angry with myself, because my Math tests are awful…

Even though I am afraid Mom and Dad will be disappointed about another bad test result…

Once the level of intensity on these issues where down, I had Naomi visualize herself sitting in her classroom, seeing her math teacher come in handing out the test. This brought up new intensities and we tapped on,

Even though I am so afraid of blanking out and forgetting all that I have learned...

Even though I feel the anxiety of my classmates and that makes me nervous...

Even though I am nervous there might be a trick question…

Even though I get anxious when the others start handing in their tests before me…

Even though I am afraid they will laugh at me when I make a mistake…

At this point I asked Naomi if anybody ever laughed at her because she made a mistake in math and she remembered an incident when she was in Kindergarten. She was 5 years old and had to count little "Barney" dinosaurs. Naomi could not count to 100, the whole class made fun of her and laughed, and she felt very embarrassed. I was elated we found this issue and we tapped on,

Even though I was so embarrassed when everybody laughed at me because I could not count to 100 at the age of 5...

We stopped the tapping here, however I advised Naomi to go to the washroom and tap for a few minutes before the next test. (She would have never tapped in front of the class)

Naomi is now in Secondary 3. She is attending a Math and Science school. You can imagine my joy, when she told me last week, that Math is now her favorite subject. The last term her tests averaged between 75% and 85% and she is helping her friends in school when they are stuck in Math.

Conversations

Saturday 12 April 2008

Going crazy

Monday 4 February 2008

Math Anxiety

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