Last night, we dragged the whole family out through the rain to “Family Math Night.” There are sports families and whatever this is, right? Wrong, apparently. What I thought was going to be an event for the kids, the first part was a message pointed to the parents. The content was, “Stop ruining your kids for math.” They didn’t say that directly, but they did question attitudes and phrases like, “I am not a math person,” “I don’t have a head for numbers, and “Math isn’t for everyone.”

It turns out they think school is for learning stuff you don’t already know. The phrase they used was “growth mindset.” This is opposed to “fixed mindset” where you think some people are born with it, so the rest of us should just give up. Rather than quitting when something gets hard, they encouraged taking a new approach. There’s apparently many ways to solve for “x.”

I too encounter anti-learning attitudes while teaching at college, especially at a minority serving as institution. So many of my students have been told that “college isn’t for them” and maybe they should do something else less rigorous, and less challenging, and less rewarding. But it is just not true, I have taught people from every continent, every neighborhood, both sexes and every age group. While it helps if you had parents who spoke two languages, read thick books or attended college themselves, none of that is a requirement to learn.

Not everyone learns the same way. Some people are visual learners, some are auditory, and some like to dive in first and discover things themselves. A lot of the math that I use, I learned from working in retail and baking with imperial measurements. In medicine they use a “see one, do one, teach one” approach.

Older learners are different than younger learners. My young ones have fresher brains, but are easily distracted. My mature students are better at time management, but struggle with looking awkward. Learning requires you to be willing to be bad a something new.