July 8th, 2024
I think it took until several years into my teaching career for me to fully understand the impact of mindset on how kids learn math. In a few of my high school physics classes, when I decided to teach lessons on positive language around math and science problem solving, I asked students to raise their hands if they had ever heard an adult close to them claim to be bad at math. Virtually every student raised their hand.
This reality is striking, but with the understanding that we see ubiquitous math achievement gaps across race and class in America, it makes perfect sense.
Math, arguably more so than any other subject in school, is falsely and unproductively considered a subject that people are either “good at” or “bad at.” Even many educators seem to accept this idea. In reality, math is a creative and useful pursuit that anyone can participate in with the correct support and practice. Math is just taught in a way in American schools that only effectively supports a very small percentage of learners.
There is a complex network of reasons math is considered an exclusive subject that only very few people feel “good at.” Some reasons might include the narrow set of strategies our school system uses to teach math, the white-centric and creatively lacking learning goals in our math standards, or the consistent discrimination against all but wealthy, white males in math education.
Unfortunately, most reasons for this disenfranchisement are out of parents’ control as they try to encourage their children to find joy and success in math. One of the few things parents can control, however, is how they encourage their kids in math and how they talk about their own math learning, both present and future, as an example for their kids.
Parents have a multitude of resources and strategies at their disposal to encourage their kids effectively and set positive examples, and I will explore those ideas in depth in future articles. I think a fantastic starting place is to interrogate, or ideally reject, the idea that there are people who are “good at math” and people who are “bad at math.”