The Math-Class Paradox

... students don’t get the opportunity to see math as a growth subject if they mainly work on short, closed questions accompanied by frequent tests that communicate to them that math is all about performance and there is no room for failure. When students inevitably struggle, most decide they are not a “math person.”

Mathematicians define their subject as the study of patterns. . But students will typically say that math is a subject of calculations, procedures, and rules. They believe that the best mathematical thinkers are those who calculate the fastest—that you have to be fast at math to be good at math. Yet mathematicians are often slow with math. I work with many mathematicians and they are simply not fast math thinkers. I don’t say this to be disrespectful to mathematicians. They are slow because they think carefully and deeply about mathematics.

Laurent Schwartz won the Fields Medal in mathematics and was one of the greatest mathematicians of his time. But when he was in school he was one of the slowest in his class. In his autobiography, A Mathematician Grappling with His Century, he reflects on his school days and how he felt “stupid” because his school valued fast thinking:

I was always deeply uncertain about my own intellectual capacity; I thought I was unintelligent. And it is true that I was, and still am, rather slow. I need time to seize things because I always need to understand them fully. Towards the end of the eleventh grade, I secretly thought of myself as stupid. I worried about this for a long time.