Abstract:

Today teaching is one of the most stressful professions globally with potentially harmful effects on teachers’ well-being. This is further exacerbated by the negative attitude of leaners towards certain subjects. Some of the prominent behaviours of these leaners include but not limited to dislike, fear, anxiety and even hatred (Neale, 1969:631). Mathematics educators are not an exception given the age “cohort/progressed leaners” in South Africa. We conducted a case study research on the attitude and disposition of commerce-mathematics/commerce stream leaners towards mathematics in one of the Free State High schools in South Africa, to determine whether they had negative or positive attitude towards mathematics. The results were aimed at presenting possible interventional strategies to curb negative attitude situation should it exist and prevent it from infiltrating into poor performance in Mathematics and thereby having domino-effects on system’s stakeholders. Our case study used quantitative data to achieve the said objective in which case the results calculated a 0.617 Cronbach’Apha coefficient for reliability which is in the lowest acceptable range. It was hypothesised that these leaners have negative attitude, but surprisingly the results rejected this hypothesis. Therefore the selected school is not vulnerable to damaging effects of negative attitude of the commerce-mathematics leaners which would contribute to the school’s disfunctionality.