Maths: Scared to Ask for Help - Annalise’s Story

Annalise looked victorious.

Whilst she’d always been a very cheerful and positive student, thriving on making her teachers happy and proud of her, her experience with maths hadn't always been so easy.

But this time, as she came to her private tuition lesson with me, she was triumphant.

Allow her to tell her own story…

Maths and I had always had a little bit of a rocky relationship. Even from primary school, the constant fear of failing in class scared me, because I felt there was the expectation to understand everything and not ask for help. Therefore, in some ways, I could say that it created a stigma around how I looked at maths.

However, this lack of understanding left me falling behind compared to those in my class, even though I hadn’t completely realised it. I was actually stopping myself from improving just because I was afraid of asking for help when I needed it.

"I was actually stopping myself from improving just because I was afraid of asking for help"

Eventually this caught up with me, and at the end of my last year of primary school I was dropped down a class. This negative wording of “dropping down a class or set” made me feel like I was failing and that I would never be as smart again (although actually it was for my benefit to go slower).

I continued this negative outlook of maths into my secondary school years 7 to 10. During this time, I never answered or participated in a class unless I knew I was one hundred percent right. It was in year 10 that I realised once more that I couldn’t seem to understand what others in my class managed to do right away. This resulted in me giving up straight away if I couldn’t answer something, and so I didn't have any drive to continue.

When exams came and I scored below average, I knew that once again I would drop down. This deteriorated my confidence surrounding maths completely.

However, this lower class was slower and explained more. I found that I began to understand better. Gradually, I realised that maths wasn’t something I needed to be afraid of but something that I just needed to work on through my confidence and resilience. After working in classes, at home and with support, I began to succeed more and started seeing better results in how I was even able to tackle work in classes and homework.

Recently, thanks to teachers, I moved back up a set where I completely understand and am not scared to ask for help. Through this, I had incredible teachers showing me that it was okay to not understand at first or to get things wrong because, even though I hadn’t seen it before, many people felt the same way.

"Just start where you are and keep going"

Maths can look scary but taking a step back and looking at the problem as a puzzle rather than an overwhelming challenge to solve, and just starting instead of skipping, was the best advice I was ever given. Just start where you are and keep going.

[This is slightly abridged from the original post in the forum by Annalise]