Why Your Kid Hates Math (And What to Do About It)

We're thrilled to welcome Kalen Meine, owner of Thinkorium Tutoring and Test Prep in Denver, to the Panorama Psychology blog. Over years of working with hundreds of students, Kalen has developed keen insights into what actually builds confidence in learners - and what silently erodes it.

In this post, Kalen explores a question many parents grapple with: Why does my bright, capable kid suddenly "hate" a subject they used to be fine with? The answer, as Kalen explains, often has less to do with the subject itself and more to do with a missed understanding that's been quietly compounding for weeks or months. More importantly, Kalen offers a roadmap for how patient, personalized guidance can help students rediscover the inherent joy of learning—and why that matters more than any grade ever could.

Thanks Kalen for sharing your expertise with us!

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Babies love knocking blocks to the floor. Athletes love when their training plans deliver personal bests. Artists and engineers love seeing their ideas transformed from sketches and blueprints to paintings and machines. Why? Because we like to move the needle, and see our plans turn into practice, our practice into skills, and skills into action that change the world around us. It gives us agency and certainty.

Agency feels good. Enacting change feels good. Watching a plan come together and being good at something feels, well, good. On the flipside, just mashing the buttons feels bad, often really bad, even if it happens to work out sometimes — and it usually doesn't. When it feels like our effort doesn't match the results, burnout, learned helplessness, anger, sadness, and indifference all start to set in.

Why Your Kid Might Hate Stuff

I'm the brains behind a Denver tutoring and test prep organization, and after years of pinpointing what actually creates confidence in hundreds of students, I'm willing to make a bet. Students who say they hate math, or writing, or Mrs. So-and-So are usually just confused.

Mathematicians do math because they enjoy it. They don't enjoy it because they're some special breed of mutants bred for pain — it's because it gives them all the same thrills as a solved puzzle or a sunk basketball shot. Thoughts lead to actions leads to the satisfaction of getting it "right". So why don't more students enjoy math that way? Writers write for the thrill of a story flowing out of their fingers — why don't students feel that way?

Usually, it's because they didn't understand something being taught in class 10 weeks ago, but they've been pretending they did ever since so they don't feel embarrassed.

Hiding their misunderstanding and burying the embarrassment can lead to a lot of shame. When kids start to feel that shame, their response shows up in two ways. They either get stealthy, and do every correction and extra credit project to stay in the good graces of a teacher who will cut them some slack (and a passing grade). Or they rage at the idea of knowledge itself, sore like they'd been rejected by a friend.

The two can coexist, and have little relationship with grades or promotion into harder classes. What gets kids into hard classes, more than love of the subject or deep skills? Parents that want them there, for better or worse.

It can make for strange creatures: the A calculus student that doesn't like calculus, doesn't know what calculus is for, can't perform any math skills learned before this week... and is also convinced that their D in a humanities class is because books are dumb, they weren't born with a good reading brain, and their teacher personally hates them.

What Can Make Them Hate Stuff Less

Learning is fun! The act of acquiring skills and knowledge tickles deep and ancient pathways of belonging and satisfaction. So much of what we do for pleasure is recreational research and development — hobbies, travel, getting better at a sport or game. It's hard to learn something and not enjoy it.

These students, regardless of whether their efforts are getting them good grades or not, are not having that fun — because you can't have that fun if you don't actually understand it well enough. Instead, their energy is going into maintaining a kind of charade — that it all makes sense, and that when it doesn't, they have an idea where to go next.

Somewhere along the way, they didn't learn the why behind the what — or at least, it was never explained to them in a way they cared about. Have you ever had someone explain the jokes to you in a Shakespeare play? It immediately takes a dense, high-brow text and makes it funny. Funny is good. Funny is what reminds kids learning is fun.

Students ask me all the time, "Okay, where in the real world will I use this?" It's reasonable to wonder about, but really it's a sign they're looking for something to make the process more satisfying. It's really the wrong question, though — no matter the motivation, most wonderful things and ideas came into the world because someone liked making them.

Painters like painting. Mathematicians like doing math. Scientists like science-ing. What they really need isn't a practical application. It's to understand what they're doing well enough to find the inherent satisfaction in using their minds.

How to Help Their Motivation

What do we do when we actually want to learn something? When it counts, and means we win a competition, or use our scuba gear safely, or figure out how to write that screenplay we've always dreamed about? Does it look like school? Are there grades that bundle up all elements of our performance into a single lump? Do we berate ourselves for understanding 89% of something instead of 90%? (90% is an A, after all, while an 89% is "only" a B.) Do our parents berate us for that 1%? Do we move on to a new topic next week regardless of our comfort, understanding, or interest in what we learned this week?

That's what happens in the modern college prep high school experience, and it's a recipe for one misunderstanding to spiral into resentment and resistance to all things intellectual. These kids don't just come in for tutoring — they show up in the offices of counselors and therapists too, overcooked and anxious.

Therapy can certainly be the ticket — just like sometimes what's called for is sitting down, one-on-one, with a person that has an enthusiastic relationship with a subject, and learning something for real. Not for grades, not for the quiz tomorrow, not because it might get them into a fancy school, but because it's a good use for a brain, and fun. (Though funny how it seems to help with the grades, quizzes, and the fancy school, too.)

Kids need someone patient to help them rebuild the confidence they've lost (and shame they've gained) from pretending they understand everything their teacher says. It's a delicate process that takes just as much compassion as subject knowledge.

When it works, though, the lightbulb moment of actually understanding something ripples forward through years of classes and subjects that suddenly make sense. (A lot of times, students say, "Oh, man -- why wasn't it explained to me like that in the first place?")

Alas, there's no AI-substitute either. Learning is a social activity, and one-on-one tutoring creates changes in outcomes two standard deviations larger than anything else anyone has ever tried in education— a finding called 'Bloom's two-sigma effect'. Two standard deviations, for the less statistically inclined, is huge.

Of course tutoring has a huge effect. With tutoring, kids work problems until they go down easy, and they ask for more - then someone who cares about them has them try to solve something a little different, just to see if they can. (They almost always can.) Or challenges them to write something a little more beautiful, or informative, or to think a little harder about the parallels between their textbooks and the headlines.

Tutoring gives students the rare opportunity to wander a bit to find explanations and techniques that work well for them, specifically. Along the way, there's a person they trust to correct and challenge them, moment to moment, and celebrate with them when they crack it. They want to feel proud of themselves, and with one-on-one guidance, they do.

Are They In Love With Learning, Yet?

The outcome that doesn't show up in those two-standard-deviations metrics is that happiness happens. My secret? Your kids' happiness and actual enjoyment of learning are the only metrics I actually care about. The results take care of themselves.

The grumpy students are right, sometimes -- they might not ever use the quadratic formula or forget when the Teapot Dome scandal happened. But if they stay curious and willing to poke at things with a stick, then they've won. The tension melts away. The shame recedes. There may be good and bad teachers still, demanding or easy classes, fair or unfair grading. But clever, kind tutoring teaches students to trust that learning is worth it, that they're smart, and that they're capable in more ways than they've imagined.

That trust can do some surprising things. What can it do for your kids?

Kalen Meine is the owner of Thinkorium Tutoring and Test Prep in Denver, where he works with students to rebuild confidence and rediscover the joy of learning.

If you would like to contribute as a guest writer, please reach out to info@panoramapsychology.com.