Math, mindset, and identity

Back in the 1990s, Mattel released Teen Talk Barbie. Each doll was programmed to say four phrases, randomly selected from a list of 270. Alongside comments about shopping, clothes, friends, and pizza was the phrase “Math class is hard.” Controversy ensued. Critics believed that this statement fed into stereotypes that girls can’t do math. Mattel listened and removed the phrase from the possible selections for future versions of the doll.

In the grand scheme of things, this may seem trivial. But it speaks to a long-standing cultural narrative about math, not just for girls, but for everyone. There is, after all, a reason that Mattel called out math class, rather than English or social studies class. People expect math to be hard.

Countering this narrative doesn’t necessarily mean pretending that math is easy. For some students, it is not easy. Students with dyscalculia, for example, may struggle with math in much the same way that students with dyslexia struggle with reading. Telling them that math is easy won’t help them. However, as Natalie Parker-Holliman and Tenisha Marcel-Herbert discuss in this issue of Kappan, there is value in sending the message that math is for everyone. With the right foundation and encouragement, students can succeed in math. It may be difficult, but emphasizing the struggle can leave students mired in the challenge. So they throw up their hands and declare, “I’m just not a math person.”

This identity can stick with them into adulthood. The mindset that some people are math people and some are not can cause adults to panic at the sight of a list of numbers, a mathematical formula, or a geometric diagram. If you’re not a math person, how can you be expected to cope with this information? On the other hand, if you believe everyone is a math person, you might be more likely to take a deep breath, break down what you’re looking at, and figure it out.

One of the challenges in education is that a lot of teachers don’t see themselves as math people. Yet at the elementary level, they’re expected to teach math. So it’s the job of teacher educators and professional development providers to help teachers build new math identities. Paula M. Jakopovic explains how math autobiographies can help teachers understand the sources of their beliefs about math and build new beliefs. Then, they can instill those more positive beliefs in their students.

My own math autobiography is mixed. Math was never my favorite subject, and it was an actual struggle in 7th grade, so much so that my teacher questioned my desire to move on to algebra in the 8th grade. She told me to be prepared to be a C student. I remembered, though, that the unit on variables was my favorite in 7th-grade math, and I knew algebra was about variables. I may not have seen myself as a number person, but I could imagine myself as a variables person. And that mindset helped carry me to top grades in algebra.

Still, I never became a lover of math. For me, it was a puzzle-solving exercise, but not necessarily useful. I think about that a lot when I read about the debates around procedures versus concepts in math. I learned a lot of procedures, but I never understood them. I could manipulate matrices and find limits, but I didn’t know what any of it meant. With a different type of instruction, perhaps my procedural fluency could have led me to build a different math identity.

In his article, Charles Munter encourages teachers to focus less on procedures versus concepts and think instead about how their lessons position students as mathematicians. What kinds of lessons will help students see themselves as mathematicians? And what professional development will enable teachers to provide those lessons? The answers to those questions will help schools give students the math education they need. 

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This article appears in the December 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 4, p. 4.