We're a math-traumatized people, Jo Boaler says (although she uses the British locution “maths-traumatized”). It’s a belief she sees confirmed in everything from students crying over long division to MRIs that reveal young brains reacting to numbers as if they were snakes or spiders. And it’s something she hears just as clearly in the resignation of that common refrain: “I am not a math person.”

Boaler, a professor at the Graduate School of Education, sees math altogether differently — as a subject of beauty and creativity in which any student can thrive. Indeed, her Britishness only partly explains why she prefers “maths.” The plural, she says, is more apt for mathematics’ depth and variety. “Math” strikes her as narrow and constricted. “Maths is so much more than that,” she says.

It’s easy, though, for her to evoke math anxieties in listeners, often with little more than an elementary school worksheet. The sight of a three-minute test dense with 50 multiplication problems reliably stirs nervous memories in ways it’s hard to imagine an elementary reading assignment doing.

“I just spoke to a whole incoming group of freshmen last week at Stanford,” Boaler said in the fall. “I put this on the screen and the whole room broke out: ‘Blah, isn’t this terrible?’ ”

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