The Math Plague: How to Survive School Mathematics.

Sherry Mantyka recognizes that there are many learners with math anxiety that hinders mathematical learning even in the lower grades. In The Math Plague, she provides learning strategies to help students become math achievers.

These learning strategies are summarized as follows: (i) Train our youth to have strong mathematical skills to be able to function in a technological world; (ii) Have our children master basic mathematical skills to the point of automaticity in order to devote all their working memory capacity to come up with a strategy to solve the problem; (iii) Make successful math students by encouraging them to be attentive in classes, to spend more time practising basic skills, to persist with learning the parts of math that they find difficult, and to believe that they have an innate ability to learn and use math; (iv) Rescue students from their total dependency on calculators; (v) Remind them to retrieve explicit rules and use their higher order thinking to confront an unfamiliar math problem; (vi) Discuss their long-term commitment to the math subject, because math is indeed practical; (vii) Provide a supportive learning environment for each learner; (viii) Require students to do more practise of basic skills outside the context of problem solving; and (ix) Create motivation by connecting math to their interests.

To make the mathematical learning experience easier for students, Mantyka brilliantly uses quotations related to real-life situations, thus creating motivation by linking math to the interests of most young learners. For educators, she explains alternative teaching strategies and includes practical examples that can be used in classrooms. For parents, she looks at the issues and problems related to Canadian educational programs and why their children may be struggling with math. Recommended.