Mark H. Ashcraft, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who researches math anxiety, explained how easily it can be perpetuated at the family homework table:“If parents never understood the math they were taught very well, and then have to figure out a different method their child is learning,” he said, “it’s very math-anxiety provoking for them.”

I know exactly when my severe math anxiety began

I threw up my hands

Clearly the topic hits a nerve.

When I read the new study in Psychological Science

I had flashbacks of Miss S. standing over me in that lonely hall, shaking her head, red pencil at the ready, math-shaming me. I couldn’t help them.

But when Miss S. realized the new student had never been taught three-digit computation, she pressed her lips together, rolled her eyes, and, during math lessons, made me drag a chair past the new, older kids, and sit out in the hall. For weeks.

Math Anxiety? A Reporter Knows the Subject All Too Well

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Simone’s math problem A 7-year-old girl is humiliated by her teacher after failing a math test. How many years will it take to cure her math anxiety, an educational illness that plagues millions?

Still, she’s one of the lucky ones who, chances are, won’t grow up forever haunted by the “I’m bad at math” curse. “I would say I’m reasonably smart in math,” Simone says now. “I sort of like it, but I don’t love it.” But she’s not planning to let it hold her back. One day, she says, she may even pursue a career as a psychiatrist or doctor — two fields that happen to require a lot of math.

According to Elizabeth Gunderson, an assistant professor at Temple University’s psychology department who has researched math anxiety, there is an “adult-to-child transference” that happens — usually unwittingly — so the “math is hard” aphorism is upheld through the ages as gospel truth rather than societal delusion.

“It was about trying to change her attitude, because she was so resigned that she was bad at math and was never going to get good at it, so why spend the time and effort.”

With her mane of strawberry blonde hair, a shower of faint freckles on her pale skin, and a contained kinetic energy that buzzes beneath her thin frame and oversized sweater

Simone’s parents, Pia Hinckle and Chris Mittelstaedt, weren’t about to let sleeping dogs lie.

and worse, ridiculed her for it

Simone’s story offers a  glimpse at how difficult it can be — on child and family alike — to fight the math phobia monster.

“Math is America’s biggest weakness compared to countries around the world,” says Amanda Ripley, author of The Smartest Kids in the World.” Our teenagers rank 26th in math on the PISA test — and 12th in reading on the same test. Even our richest quartile of kids, who have highly educated parents, computers at home, and tricked-out schools, perform 18th in the world in math compared to the richest quartile of kids in other countries.”

Simone Mittelstaedt stared in panic at the paper in front of her. So many multiplication questions — 100 of them! — to solve in such a short time. She was familiar with the paralyzing sense of dread — heart racing, stomach clenching, brain freezing — that seized her when her teacher surprised the class with a pop math quiz. This time, though, it was worse than usual for Simone, a second grader who had been struggling in math for three years at her local public school. The problems staring back at her might as well have been in hieroglyphics. Simone had no idea what she was supposed to do.

Simone’s math problem A 7-year-old girl is humiliated by her teacher after failing a math test. How many years will it take to cure her math anxiety, an educational illness that plagues millions?

It’s so commonplace, in fact, that it’s acceptable to hear educated adults openly declare, “I’m not a math person” or “I’m bad at math,” almost as if it were a boast.

According to Stanford professor Vinod Menon, who co-authored a study on the neurodevelopmental basis of math anxiety, the part of the brain agitated by math anxiety is the same part “that responds to fearful situations, such as seeing a spider or snake.”

Scared and scarred, math for them becomes an ugly four-letter word.

dread — heart racing, stomach clenching, brain freezing — that seized her when her teacher surprised the class with a pop math quiz