Two years ago, Sarah, a theatre maker, and Alexandra, the founder of Maths on Toast set out to help students overcome anxieties about maths. The result is a theatrical adventure called We’re Stuck! A 70-minute interactive show in which students struggle with maths problems to save the world from killer robots. They share the highlights of the production and the innovative aspects of its development.
Getting Stuck
We asked three classes of ten-year-olds as well as more than fifty adult scientists and mathematicians the same question: “how do you feel when you get stuck?” Many of the responses were like this: “Most of the time I am stuck”, “Frustrated”, “Often confused”, “Angry”, or “I feel as if it is a bit of a personal challenge, like when someone dares you to climb an enormous tree.”
Guess which group made these statements – the children or the adults? In fact, all of these statements were made by the scientists. That includes researchers using the kinds of maths that bewildered us when they tried to explain it. They were describing the same sensations as the ten-year-olds, who often said things like “frustrated” and “angry” too. It turns out that ten-year-olds and top mathematicians are not as different as you might think.
In fact, we discovered that top mathematicians get stuck all the time. Some of them said that maths is exactly that: getting stuck and worrying away at a problem, sometimes for years. That, and getting used to making mistakes. But here’s the thing, when we showed children in schools some of the things the mathematicians had said, they were amazed. They almost didn’t believe us.
What we were grappling with was a set of myths about maths. These myths sneakily suggest that if you are stuck, you must have reached your ‘mathematical ceiling’. Whether your ‘ceiling’ is times-tables, fractions, x and y, integration, or vectors in seven-dimensional space, if you’re not getting it, you’ve probably reached your limit. This myth and the other, even more dangerous one, that maths is more of a boy thing than a girl thing, are part of a wider narrative, which many of us unconsciously accept:
People are either clever or they’re not.