Others give this message to be comforting. “Don’t worry if math isn’t your thing” is, tragically, a common refrain heard by girls. Other students receive this message through faulty and outdated teaching measures, such as the separation of young children into ability groups or an emphasis on speed in learning. Whether it is through the educational system or in conversations directly with educators, far too many of us have been conditioned to believe that we don’t have the capacity to learn. Once people get this terrible idea in their heads, their learning and cognitive processes change.
Jennifer Brich is the mathematics lab director at California State University San Marcos. She lectures in mathematics as well as directing the center. Jennifer works hard to dispel the damaging beliefs that her students hold about mathematics and their brains, one of very few university-level mathematics teachers doing so. Jennifer used to think that “people were born with certain talents, and you were restricted to those talents.” But then she read the research on brain growth and change. Now Jennifer teaches the research on brain growth not only to her own students, but also to graduate students who teach other classes. Teaching the new science can be difficult, and Jennifer tells me that she gets a lot of pushback from people who want to believe that some people are born with math potential and others just don’t have it.
A few months ago, she was sitting in her office going through emails when she heard the sound of sobbing coming from the office next door. Jennifer describes paying attention to the sound and then hearing the professor say: “It’s okay. You’re a female. Females have different brains than men, so you may not get this right away, and it’s okay if you don’t get it at all.”
Jennifer was horrified and took the brave step of knocking on the door of the other professor’s office. She poked her head in and asked if she could talk to the male professor. She discussed the incorrect messages he was giving with him, which caused him to get upset and report Jennifer to the department chair. Fortunately, the department chair was a woman who also knew that his messages were incorrect and supported Jennifer.
Jennifer is taking on the myths about math and learning, and she is just the person for it. She recently told me about her own challenging experience of being discouraged by a professor when she was in grad school:
I was a grad student, finishing my first year. I had started some research for my thesis. I was doing great; I was working really hard and getting good grades. I was in this class, it was topology, and it was really challenging for me, but I was working really hard, and I had done really well on an exam. I was really proud of myself. We had gotten the exams back, and I had gotten like a 98 or something, really close to perfect. I was so happy. Then I flipped to the back of the exam, and there was a note from my professor that said to see him after class. And I was like, “Okay, well maybe he’s excited too.” I was so happy and proud of myself.
When I sat down in his office, we began this conversation about why I wasn’t cut out for math. He wanted to know if maybe I cheated or memorized, to do so well on the exam. He pretty much told me that he didn’t think that I was a mathematician, that it shouldn’t be my future, and encouraged me to consider my other options.
I told him I was starting my thesis that summer and what my grade point average was. So he pulled up my grades and saw that I did both undergrad and my master’s there. Then he pulled up my grade record and started looking at some of my grades. And he just kept asking me questions that all implied that I didn’t earn those grades myself. It tore me apart when he did that, because he was a man I respected, someone I thought was so smart, who was very well known in the math department, very respected. A lot of the male students loved him. After that I went to my car and cried, I was so upset. I just bawled my eyes out.
My mom’s a teacher, so I called my mom. When I reported the conversation, she of course got really defensive and angry. She told me to really just think about it and think about people who do well in math and why they do well. And she made me think about all these different things. I think that was the planting of the first seed that really helped me to start to understand what a growth mindset is. And following that, luckily the fierceness in me kicked in, and the feistiness, and I used that to motivate myself to do even better in that course and in my career. And I made sure to give that professor a big smile as I walked across the stage at graduation.
Jennifer’s encounter tells us of a person, a professor responsible for students’ lives, who believes that only some people belong in mathematics. Sadly, this professor is not alone in his incorrect thinking. The Western world, in particular, is filled with the deeply ingrained cultural belief, pervasive in all subject areas and professions, that only some people can be high-achievers. Many of us have been told this, and we have been conditioned to believe it. Once people believe that only some can reach high levels, it affects all areas of their lives and stops them from choosing fulfilling pathways. The belief that only some people can be high-achievers is insidious and damaging and prevents all of us from reaching our potential.
When teachers and others give people the idea that they don’t have the brain to learn something, it is because they do not know or they refuse to accept the new scientific evidence. More often than not these are STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) teachers and professors, an issue I will return to. I think of these people as stuck inside the “fixed-brain regime.” It is not surprising that so many people are stuck inside this negative place. The neuroscience showing brain growth did not become established until about twenty years ago; before that everyone believed that people were born with certain brains and those brains never changed. Many of the teachers and professors inside the fixed-brain regime have not seen the scientific evidence. University systems of reward mean that professors are most valued for publishing in scientific journals, not writing books (such as this one) for the public or sharing evidence widely. That means the most important evidence is “locked” up in journals, which are often behind paywalls, and does not get to the people who need it—in this case, educators, managers, and parents.
Changing Perceptions and Brains
It is the lack of opportunities for important knowledge to get to the people who need it that prompted Cathy Williams and me to start youcubed. This is a Stanford center and website (youcubed.org) dedicated to getting research evidence on learning to the people who need it—especially teachers and parents. We are now in a new era, and many neuroscientists and doctors are writing books and giving TED Talks in order to bring people new information. Norman Doidge is one of the people who has done a great deal to change perceptions and share the new and important brain science.
Doidge is a medical doctor who has written an incredible book with the title The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. The book is exactly what the title describes; it is filled with inspiring examples of people with severe learning disabilities or medical conditions (such as a stroke) who, although written off by educators and doctors, have undergone brain training and recovered completely. Doidge works to shatter a number of myths in the book, such as the idea that separate brain areas are compartmentalized and don’t communicate or work together and, most important, the idea that brains don’t change. Doidge describes the “dark ages” when people believed that brains were fixed, says that he is unsurprised that people are slow to understand the plasticity of the brain, and suggests that it will take an intellectual “revolution” for them to do so.8 I agree, because over the last few years in my teaching about the new brain science I have met many people who seem unwilling to make the shift in their understanding of the brain and human potential.
The vast majority of schools are still inside the fixed-brain regime. Schooling practices have been set over many years and are very difficult to change. One of the most popular is tracking, a system in which students are placed in groups based on their supposed ability and then taught together in those groups. A study in Britain showed that 88 percent of students placed into tracks at the age of four remained in the same track for the rest of their school lives.9