Helping all Students Become Einstein’s using Bibliotherapy when Teaching Mathematics to Prepare Students for a STEM World

Abstract

Today, being confident and having a sound understanding of mathematics is critical in an age of STEM. Teachers must play in important role in seeing that all students display their confidence in their ability to do mathematics. This paper explains the process of using bibliotherapy when teaching mathematics to address both the math anxious or the math gifted student to build more math confidence in a STEM world. Often gifted students of mathematics can be made to feel bad by their peers just because they know mathematics and things come easy to them. Today there are many students in school that have math anxiety. Children's and adolescent literature has been recognized now as a means to teaching mathematics to students through the use of stories to make the mathematics concepts relevant and meaningful. Literature can also be used as a form of therapy, bibliotherapy, to reach students who may be frustrated with children picking on them for knowing a lot of mathematics or who are math anxious. Story and picture books such as Counting on Frank, Math Curse and A Gebra Named Al are now available to use in the classroom as forms of bibliotherapy in helping students come to terms with issues that haunt them as it relates to mathematics. Children's books can be beneficial to address the math anxious and even the gifted. In this paper the author proposes using reading and discussion (bibliotherapy) to help all students become confident in mathematics in the STEM world we live in.