I suck at math.
I always have. Equations, formulas, variables, graphs, calculators...pencils, you name it -- everything associated with it makes me sweat. I've cycled through teacher after teacher for 14 years and left each class thinking the same thing: "I'm not a math person." I still feel this way to some extent, however, I know that I'm not at all alone in thinking this. How many times have you studied confidently for a math test just to do poorly? How many problems have you spent what seems like an eternity working on, just to have the whole thing ruined by one simple mistake? Hard things are hard, and they always will be. The reason why so many of us seem to despise math is because we're exposed to it in a competitive setting, and when we continue to fail at something that many of our peers succeed at, our mistakes start to affect how we view ourselves.
When we label ourselves as a certain type of person, we tend to put a lot of our energy into making sure we become that person. Math is especially difficult because it's cumulative, a lot of times if you're lost in the upper-level math classes, it's because you've forgotten a key concept that you learned way back when, which can create a lot of frustrating extra work. It's reasonable that after failing to progress in math, you might start to feel stupid or like maybe you'll never understand it. I'm sure you've heard it a thousand times: "When are we ever gonna use this stuff in real life?". The sad fact of the matter is that unless you're going into a math-intensive field, the answer to this question is almost always never. But, for many non-math people, that question can be life-defining because they consider math to be a stressful part of their life that they want gone. I know that when I was thinking about my major back in high school, the number one criteria was that I wouldn't have to take math again (or at the least only a semester's worth).
The biggest problem with the way math is taught is that students aren't often enough rewarded for the process. You know how God-awful it feels to get an entire question wrong for missing a negative sign? A lot of teachers prep students for the test and not the actual concepts. Now, in their defense, teaching is hard enough as it is, so I can only imagine how stressful it is to try and find a way to turn the class that everybody hates into the class that everybody likes. However, when students aren't rewarded for going through the mathematical process and coming to whatever answer through logical means, then they think that their best effort isn't good enough and the only thing that matters is if they mark down what the teacher wants to see. That's how people get discouraged and try to disassociate themselves with math completely.
Between being forced to take it from elementary school to high school, and knowing that there's a high chance that the material will be irrelevant to you post-high school, it's no wonder that so many people hate math. It's perfectly fine to want to avoid things that we dislike, but we've been conditioned to hate ourselves as a result of hating math because of how our education system is set up. Is the teacher teaching in a way that I do not understand? Am I still not working hard enough? How come everybody else gets it? Am I stupid? We non-math people find ourselves struggling with these questions on a day-to-day basis. The thing is, math doesn't have to be catastrophic. It's slow, it's scary, and it's [probably] useless, but it's not the end of the world. As it turns out, we have a right to fail at something without hating ourselves for it.
