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But many teachers struggle with their own math anxiety, and research shows that they then pass on this anxiety to their students. (That happens with parents too, unfortunately.)

small, incremental steps which made the math accessible to all students and allowed some of them to experience success in math for the first time. “Because they can master the increments, they are getting the checks and building the mindset that their efforts can amount to something. That experience motivates them to continue,” she said. By continuing, they practice more math, get more skills, and become the math people they thought they couldn’t be.

it starts small and progresses in very small steps to a very sophisticated level in a relatively short period of time

collective effervescence,” the joy of knowing they can do it, rather than the joy of just getting a high mark

JUMP is a nonprofit, and all its materials are available on its website

math has been overhyped as hard, and all that students and teachers need is to have things broken down properly. Many have dubbed these simple steps as “drill and kill”. But he says the steps can be made fun, like puzzles.

Everything about school and work in the twentieth century was designed to create and reinforce separate subjects, separate cultures, separate grades, separate functions, separate spaces for personal life, work, private life, public life, and all the other divisions. Then the internet came along. Now work increasingly means desktop computer. Fifteen years into the digital revolution, one machine has reconnected the very things–personal life, social life, work life, and even sexual life–that we’d spent the last hundred years putting into neatly separated categories, cordoned off in their separate spaces with as little overlap as possible.

Digital games allow students to take an active role in their learning and see the visual connection between the game play and the math. The games also provide constant positive or corrective feedback that is "really hard for teachers to provide to individual kids,"

"We shouldn't look to old media such as a paper-and-pencil quiz as the arbiter of knowledge," Klein said. "If a student can do something smartly in a digital environment, that matters, that counts. Even if they can't yet introduce that in paper and pencil, that doesn't lessen the skill. ... It's just a different place for knowledge."