NORTHRIDGE : $450,000 Grant to Aid Teachers With Math

Math anxiety afflicts not only students, but teachers also, according to a Cal State Northridge academic who will oversee a new $450,000 National Science Foundation grant to help local teachers conquer their math fears.

“Math itself is more fearful than other subjects,” said Janice Eckmeir, who teaches math education at CSUN. “We were aware that elementary teachers sometimes did not teach the full curriculum, either because they didn’t feel trained or comfortable, or they neglected it because of anxiety.”

Part of the problem, Eckmeir said, is that the state math curriculum has been expanded far beyond the traditional addition and subtraction problems that most teachers learned as children.

The National Science Foundation program, which begins this fall at CSUN, will train 40 LAUSD teachers in the San Fernando Valley in subjects such as transformational geometry, probability and statistics--types of math newly added to elementary school curriculums, Eckmeir said. The program will also show teachers ways to teach math to students with limited English.

The three-year supply of grant funds will pay teachers to attend all-day seminars, and pay substitutes to replace them, Eckmeir said.

All the teachers enrolled in the program are part of LAUSD’s Mentor Teacher Program. Mentor teachers receive a special state stipend to instruct new teachers, said mentor coordinator Alice Bowens. The idea is that participants will teach the new math skills they learn from the seminars to colleagues to spread the information around.

Eckmeir said grant administrators got an early sample of teachers’ problems with math instruction when they chose the acronym “FATHOM” for the program, for “Functions and Transformations: Higher Order Mathematics”. The title scared potential applicants away, she said, so a less imposing handle was concocted at the last minute--”Friendly and Teachable Hands-On Math.”