How do we encourage a generation of students to love math after years of telling them not to? 

text by Candace Mittel
illustration by Grace Molteni

Two months ago, poolside and sunburnt, I typed up my Geometry class syllabus, naively thinking that I would soon be teaching 19 teenagers what I entitled “the wonderful world of Euclidean Geometry.” I carefully spelled out the topics my future students would be learning: “planes and lines, axioms and proofs, reasoning and logic…”

Six weeks in, my role couldn’t be more different than what I had expected.

Yes, I am still a high school math teacher, but my ultimate challenge has not been trying to teach my students geometric concepts. I quickly realized my new, and most urgent, responsibility: I am a high school math teacher trying to teach 19 teenagers that they are, in fact, good at math.

If this seems like a simple task, then let me rephrase my statement: I am trying to teach 19 dogs not to pee on the carpet in the house after years of allowing the behavior.

Math confidence is in a sorry state in the United States.

My analogy is dramatic because this is a serious situation that extends far beyond the confines of my little classroom. Math confidence is in a sorry state in the United States.

I made up this term “math confidence” because it sounded right to me, but a little Google search showed me that others, too, are concerned with the concept. At the University of Florida’s Counseling and Wellness Center, for example, there exists a Confidence Group solely dedicated to helping students identify what math anxiety looks like and, ultimately, to develop math confidence. I also discovered Robin the Math Lady, an online character who, upon realizing the dire situation in our country, created an entire business and blog, mathconfidence.wordpress.com complete with a monthly Math Confidence e-newsletter.

The good news is that any student can gain math confidence; any person, young or old, can be trained to have what psychologists and education specialists call a “growth mindset.” Professor Carol Dweck of Stanford University pioneered this idea of “growth mindset,” the belief that you can learn anything if only you put in the appropriate effort, and its direct correlation to living a less stressful and more successful life. She calls the opposite a “fixed mindset,” a belief that your intelligence is based on innate abilities that are beyond your control. This is the mindset students such as mine are plagued with.

Professor Jo Boaler, also of Stanford (Graduate School of Education), also emphasizes the importance of growth mindset but specifically in math learning. Her promotion of math education reform largely centers around the necessity of growth mindset in the math classroom. Moreover, she claims, most students will not gravitate toward this attitude on their own. Teachers need to instill a growth mindset in their students.

On the first day of class at my new place of employment, a private Jewish high school in the suburbs of Chicago, I hung posters in my Geometry room with phrases from Boaler’s website “youcubed: the new movement to revolutionize math teaching and learning.” Although there are many Boaler math philosophies that deserve lengthy discussion (depth over speed; the importance of making mistakes; thinking about math as a creative subject), I believe Boaler’s most critical mantra is the one that directly confronts the confidence issue: “Everyone is a math person.”

Teachers need to instill a growth mindset in their students.

“Did you know that there is no such thing as being a math person or not being a math person?” I asked my students who promptly rejected my proposal, shaking their heads. “Seriously, you guys,” I continued, “you actually have no in-born ability to learn math.” I referenced the recent New York Times article, “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?” which pointed out the fact that the Japanese, despite being one of the top math literate countries in the world, are most often not drawn to the subject from birth: “Perhaps the Japanese are simply the ‘math people.’ Americans aren’t,” an elementary-school teacher named Shinichiro Kurita said through a translator. “Yet when I visited Japan, every teacher I spoke to told me a story that sounded distinctly American. ‘I used to hate math’, ‘I couldn’t calculate. I was slow. I was always at the bottom of the ladder…’”

“Who is a math person?” I asked my students at the end of that first class. “Everyone is a math person,” they droned. Suddenly recalling a Budha bumper sticker I once saw on the back of a burnt orange Volkswagen bus—what you think, you become—I made them repeat it 3 times: “everyone is a math person. Everyone is a math person! Everyone is a math person…”

But when I read my students’ homework that night, a simple questionnaire about their past experiences with math, I was almost in tears.

In response to my question, “When someone asks you if you like math, how do you answer? Why do you answer this way?”, here’s what they said:

“I say I do not like math because I have more recently felt that I am not good at it.”

“I don’t like math since I’m not good at it.”

“I don’t like math because I always feel destined to fail.”

That last one hurt. “Destined to fail.” These are students who have zero confidence in their math abilities. That’s when I understood that one class discussion with their math teacher wasn’t going to even make a dent in their fixed minds. “I’m just not good at math,” my students insist, along with 29 percent of the American population.

Moreover, women are significantly more likely than men to say those detrimental words (37 percent vs. 21 percent), and teenagers/young-adults (ages 18-24) are the most likely to believe that they are just not good at math (39 percent of younger Americans compared to 36 percent of 25-34 year olds).

But if this sort of fixed thinking is, in truth, a myth, a puzzling concern emerges: why do Americans think of math this way?

There are, of course, multiple factors at play here. For one, math is quantifiable, and that makes most students uncomfortable. So accustomed to BSing their way through classes, math is that tap on the shoulder saying, “no, no, no, you are wrong.” You cannot complete a math assignment by skimming a few textbook pages, or using the thesaurus feature on Word, or quickly reading Sparknotes.

Unfortunately, however, students are encouraged to keep up the nonsense by highly influential education institutions such as CollegeBoard. “‘What they are actually testing,’” Les Perelman, former director of MIT’s Writing Across the Curriculum program, said in a recent article from Slate on the dreadful SAT writing section, “is the ability to bullshit on demand.’” There is no such equivalent in math. It is, by definition of the subject, impossible to BS your way through Algebra II.

Factor #2: I have noticed one distinctive characteristic that all of my lowest-achieving math students share: weak willpower. No determination. I know this because in their explanations as to why they do not like math, these students unknowingly expressed a spirited lack of stamina:

“I don’t like math because…”

“… it takes a long time.”

“…it’s confusing.”

“…it requires an excessive amount of work compared to most other classes.”

“…it’s time consuming and stressful.”

“…it’s difficult.”

“…it’s challenging for me.”

My students’ unwillingness to spend a significant amount of time working through problems or on difficult or challenging questions is consistent with the broader American student body. In a recent study, both American and Japanese students were given an unsolvable math problem to work on. On average, the American students lasted about 30 seconds before giving up. The Japanese students? On average, they spent one hour with the unsolvable problem. In case you need help with the math, that’s 120 times the amount of time the American students spent.

If NYT writer Elizabeth Green wanted to take a stab at answering the question of math failure in the U.S., she should have mentioned this study. Instead, the article only gently touched on the matter: “Telling me his story, Kurita quoted what he described as an old Japanese saying about perseverance: ‘Sit on a stone for three years to accomplish anything.’ Admittedly, a tenacious commitment to improvement seems to be part of the Japanese national heritage, showing up among teachers, autoworkers, sushi chefs and tea-ceremony masters.”

That’s it. The article walked away from what could be the juiciest piece of insight into math learning in our country: American culture does not embody or value perseverance like the Japanese do.

Our society’s lack of willpower isn’t news. A quick illustration: more than one-third of U.S. adults are obese, and yet according to an American Psychological Association study in 2011, the most commonly reported goal that year was to lose weight. The kicker: nearly half of adults who reported they wanted to lose weight also had the same goal in previous years.

A lack of math confidence coupled with a lack of determination make an outstanding recipe for failure. The two feed off of each other in a destructive cycle. But what actually allows for this continuous tradition?

For some reason I do not understand, math is unpopular. I mean unpopular in its most rudimentary sense. Nerdy.

Math is the child standing alone at recess with his pants hiked up above his navel, peering through his thick frames at the other children who point and giggle and exclude him from their games.  The other children are the Humanities, like Literature and History, and they are friends with everyone.

In 2010, just .9 percent of all freshmen enrolled in an institution of higher education in the U.S. said they intended on majoring in Mathematics or Statistics. And if you think that number is low, it only gets worse. Out of all earned associate’s degrees in 2009, which are mostly two-year programs at community colleges, just .1 percent were in Mathematics or Statistics. This percentage is staggering and sad, especially since community colleges are oftentimes critical and affordable ways for students to eventually reach higher education.

In 2001, Counterpoint, the joint Wellesley College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) magazine, published a survey they conducted which looked at the percentage of students, organized by their majors, who are virgins.  And who do you guess came in first (or is it last) place?  None other than the math major–a tie with biochemistry, actually. A grand total of 83 percent of math majors were virgins. Zero percent of Studio Art majors were virgins, and only 20 percent of Anthropology majors were virgins.

The subject of virginity and its implications opens an entirely new can of worms and deserves its own analysis, but a useful point of this observational study is that it does a great job of reinforcing and proving the age-old stereotype of the math geek, ghostly and gaunt, the results of 20 years of self-isolation in some dark, damp office like Pierre de Fermat, working on one last theorem. When there’s a new proof to be solved, who has time for things like sex, marriage, relationships, friends, life?

So in addition to (or perhaps as a result of) low willpower and low confidence, many students shy away from math because they associate the subject with the nerdiest of nerds. If you do math, you will grow up to become an unattractive, single, white, socially-inept male.

From personal observation, this is not such an inaccurate stereotype.

My decision to major in Mathematics in college actually relied on the subject’s unpopularity, especially among American women. Looking around my Differential Equations classroom, I remember seeing very few, if any, students like me. There were no American females in the classroom. Being a part of a minority within a minority gave me a uniqueness, a certain kind of confidence that says, “I can do anything.” This is classic growth mindset. I believed that I could achieve the highest levels of mathematics, if only I put my mind to it. However, I must admit that my family is quite invested in math. My mother, my brother and my uncle were all math majors. To say that I didn’t think I also had “math genes” would be untruthful. Even I fell victim to a fixed mindset, thinking that my math abilities derived from my family, which just shows how widespread and contagious this sort of mindset can be, and not just in math. How many writers are sons and daughters of writers? Artists born from artists? Doctors? Lawyers? Psychologists call this phenomenon “the mere-exposure effect.” People establish preferences for things simply because they have been exposed to those things. In other words, we like what is familiar to us.

Even I fell victim to a fixed mindset, thinking that my math abilities derived from my family.

I can now see clearly that my affinity toward math had nothing to do with my genes, but rather the environment in which I was raised. I grew up in both a math-familiar and a math-positive household. Essentially, I lived in an environment in which growth mindset was the norm. I always believed that I could solve any math problem.

Math skills are essential to the top 15 highest-earning college degrees, according to a 2009 survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), which tracks college graduates’ job offers. “Math is at the crux of who gets paid,” said Ed Koc, director of research at NACE. “If you have those skills, you are an extremely valuable asset. We don’t generate enough people like that in this country.”

My favorite fact, however, isn’t about the money. It’s about happiness. When it comes to job satisfaction, according to Career Cast, mathematician ranked number one out of 200 jobs.

But what would it look like if the classroom was the atmosphere in which growth mindset was standardized? Encouraged?

What would this mean for business in our country? For employment rates? According to Students Review, the average starting salary for a math major, as of November 2010, was $45,703, about 17 percent higher than the average for all college graduates, and the average salary of a mathematician was $119,132. Duke University claims that math majors fare better than many other majors when it comes to salary. When compared with an English major, mathematicians earn, on average, 37.7 percent more.

A new classroom framework would have to be set in place in which teachers would establish not just high math standards for their students, but authentic high expectations. Classrooms would be risk-tolerant environments in which mistakes are welcomed, where initial confusion is necessary before learning a new math concept. Teachers would teach their students that intelligence is pliable and would therefore grade for effort, improvement and learning rather than for short-term memory and performance.

If I’ve learned anything from standing at the front of an unruly Geometry class for the past six weeks, however, it’s that this is all so much easier said than done. There are only so many isolated changes you can make within a system if that system is fundamentally damaged. I can implement these growth mindset techniques, but if I am required by the system to grade their quizzes and tests, then what am I to do? If I am forced by the system to use textbooks that are outdated and boring, how am I to encourage creativity? If my students have been told time and time again that they are bad at math, how am I to break their vision of themselves?

There were a number of students who, upon performing poorly on the chapter one quiz, wanted an opportunity to improve their grade. I came up with the following: you will turn in a detailed set of corrections and explanations of your errors; you will meet with me individually; and you will re-take the quiz until you get 100%, even if it takes 10 times. You will learn how to achieve your highest potential, and you will attain math confidence.

Because you, too, I tell them, can will learn to be great at math.

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Candace Mittel is a recent graduate of Northwestern University where she studied Mathematics, Jewish Studies and Creative Writing Nonfiction (and no, they are not connected, but she’s open to suggestions). She currently lives in Chicago and teaches/encourages students to love math. Candace enjoys listening/singing to the Les Mis soundtrack and eating a superbly ripe avocado or mango. Read more of her feature work for The Riveter here and see more of her writing on her website Jerusalem Medley.

Grace Molteni is a Midwest born and raised designer, illustrator, and self-proclaimed bibliophile, currently calling Chicago home. For more musings, work, or just to say hey check her out on Instagram or at her personal website.