Chapter Two: Overcoming Math Anxiety

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Math in general makes people feel anxious or nervous. Chapter two: overcoming math anxiety touches on several important points; the definition of math anxiety, the explanation of rational emotive theory (RET), some of the most common irrational beliefs, types of self-talk and tips to reduce or deal with math anxiety. Math anxiety is an emotion problem that is unpleasant and interferes with learning or math performance, and causes a person to avoid any exposure to any kind of mathematics, such as problems, and math test. Dr. Ellis Albert, the founder of the rational emotive theory (RET), based the theory with three letters A, B, and C as a representation. The letter A, represents the acting event causing a disrupted behavior, the letter B stands for the irrational belief a person has about an outcome, and letter C …show more content…

Some of the irrational beliefs are as follow, the belief of being competent in everything, therefore a person might say, “I need to acquire skills or be talented at everything.” Another irrational belief, when things do not go my way, then things will end in chaos, my feelings and actions can not be changed due to past experiences, therefore, I am stuck with who I am. One more irrational belief is when something looks risky, I must worry, and be concerned, for example, when first leaning how to drive, a person might be concerned at all times of being hit or the possibility of hitting a car, the worry can make the event happen, in this case hitting or being hit by a car. Irrational beliefs place an unrealistic concept or expectations about one self, however, a way to change irrational beliefs is to be aware of the thoughts or internal dialogue going on, some internal dialogue might be, Catastrophizing: is an irrational belief of making a situation or event catastrophic. A student imagines that failing will be catastrophic and if so the student feels like a

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