There’s one key difference between kids who excel at math and those who don’t
People
in China, Japan, and Korea are more accustomed to criticism as a means
to self-improvement, whereas Westerners avoid it or resent it. Reuters/Lee Jae Won
“I’m just not a math person.”
We
hear it all the time. And we’ve had enough. Because we believe that the
idea of “math people” is the most self-destructive idea in America
today. The truth is, you probably are a math person, and by
thinking otherwise, you are possibly hamstringing your own career.
Worse, you may be helping to perpetuate a pernicious myth that is
harming underprivileged children—the myth of inborn genetic math
ability.
Is math ability genetic? Sure, to some degree.
Terence Tao, UCLA’s famous virtuoso mathematician, publishes dozens of
papers in top journals every year, and is sought out by researchers
around the world to help with the hardest parts of their theories.
Essentially none of us could ever be as good at math as Terence Tao, no
matter how hard we tried or how well we were taught. But here’s the
thing: We don’t have to! For high school math, inborn talent is just much less important than hard work, preparation, and self-confidence.
How
do we know this? First of all, both of us have taught math for many
years—as professors, teaching assistants, and private tutors. Again and
again, we have seen the following pattern repeat itself:
Different
kids with different levels of preparation come into a math class. Some
of these kids have parents who have drilled them on math from a young
age, while others never had that kind of parental input.
- On the first few tests, the well-prepared kids get perfect scores, while the unprepared kids get only what they could figure out by winging it—maybe 80 or 85%, a solid B.
- The unprepared kids, not realizing that the top scorers were well-prepared, assume that genetic ability was what determined the performance differences. Deciding that they “just aren’t math people,” they don’t try hard in future classes, and fall further behind.
- The well-prepared kids, not realizing that the B students were simply unprepared, assume that they are “math people,” and work hard in the future, cementing their advantage.
Thus, people’s belief that math ability can’t change becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
