Giftedness??

 

 

The idea of giftedness is not only inaccurate and damaging; it is gender and racially biased. We have many different forms of evidence showing that those who believe in fixed brains and giftedness also believe that boys, men, and certain racial groups are gifted and girls, women, and other racial groups are not.

One of the forms of evidence that shows this clearly was collected by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who focused his attention on google searches. His study revealed something very interesting and disturbing. He found that the most commonly googled word following “Is my two-year-old son . . .” is “gifted.” He also found that parents search the words “Is my son gifted?” two and a half times more than the words “Is my daughter gifted?” This is despite the fact that young children of different genders have equal potential.

Sadly, the problem is not limited to parents. Daniel Storage and his colleagues conducted analyses of anonymous reviews on RateMyProfessors.com, and they found that students were twice as likely to call male rather than female professors “brilliant” and three times as likely to call male rather than female professors “geniuses.”20 These and other studies show that ideas of giftedness and genius are intertwined with racist and sexist assumptions.

I am convinced that the majority of people who have gender or racial biases do not think about them consciously or perhaps even realize they have them. I also contend that if we were to dispel the idea that some people are “naturally” gifted and instead recognize that everyone is on a growth journey and can achieve amazing things, some of the most insidious biases against women and people of color would disappear. This is needed in the STEM fields more than anywhere else; it is no coincidence that STEM subjects evidence the strongest fixed thinking and the starkest inequities in participation. 

Part of the reason so many students are dissuaded from thinking they are capable of learning math is the attitudes of the teachers and professors who teach them.

Kids Use Reason, Adults Rationalize

 

Written by Cory Doctorow (LitHub)

My journey to becoming a YA writer started with my colleague and friend Kathe Koja, an incredibly talented and versatile writer who went from being one of the most celebrated authors of extremely graphic horror novels (the “splatterpunk” subgenre) to equal success as an author of spare, stripped-down, understated and devastating YA novels. Kathe came to speak to a Clarion SF Workshop class that I was teaching near her Michigan home and she talked about school visits: about meeting kids who wanted to discuss her work with her in light of their lived experience, to resolve the conflicts between the world as it seemed to them and the world as it appeared in her novels. Kathe explained that while adults tend to read to amuse and entertain themselves, kids read to figure out how the world works. I felt like I’d just had an anvil dropped on my head. In a good way.

The fantasy writer Steven Brust once told me, “Telling someone you think they wrote a bad book is like telling them they’ve got an ugly kid. Even if it’s true, it’s too late for them to do anything about it, and chances are they did everything they could to prevent that outcome anyway.”

While I think Brust has a point, I always make an exception for adolescents, on the basis of Kathe’s philosophy: kids don’t disagree with your books because they lack social skills—they disagree with them because they take them seriously.

My Little Brother books (Little Brother, 2008; and Homeland, 2013) tell stories that kids have grappled with seriously. They’ve been in print long enough that there are grown adults with real jobs who have approached me to tell me that they chose their current careers—human rights workers, cyber-lawyers, security researchers, programmers—because they read my novels that warned of the nightmare of technological oppression and dangled the possibility of technological liberation and they resolved to fight back the former and deliver the latter.

This is an awesome responsibility to bear, and a humbling honor.

Adolescents, after all, are capable of being first-class reasoners, but they can never have the context that comes with life experience. That’s why you get child prodigy mathematicians and chess-players—disciplines where you can start from a small, easily taught group of precepts and use your reason to build up towering edifices upon their foundations—but not child prodigy lawyers or historians or doctors (Doogie Howser is science fiction: fight me!). No matter how smart you are at 11 or 14 or 17, you just haven’t had enough time to do the reading to practice law.

Becoming an adult doesn’t merely mean acquiring the context for your reason to work upon, after all. It also means perfecting your ability to rationalize your way into one small compromise after another, accumulating a kind of ethical debt, one whose balance steadily mounts, making it harder to confront head on. If you have a debt that you don’t service, you will eventually default, and that’s what Masha, the (anti)hero of Attack Surface is going through.

We adults don’t merely read for entertainment, either. Today, the debt generated by stories we’ve told ourselves for a generation—stories about our helplessness before the climate emergency, mounting totalitarianism, out-of-control inequality—are headed for bankruptcy.

What kind of stories? The unitary hero story. The personal responsibility story. The ethical consumption story. The story that says that you can’t claim to care about climate change if you use plastic or fly in an airplane. The story that says you can’t claim to care about monopolies if you order from Amazon. The story that says you can’t claim to care about inequality if you have a 401(k). The story that says you can’t claim to care about human rights if you own things made in China.

In other words: the story that says that change comes from the heroic sacrifices and feats of individuals. The story that says that Naziism was defeated by Superman, an immortal golem created by a pair of Jewish kids horrified by the unfolding horror across the Atlantic—when they were really defeated by the largest collective action in human history.

The climate emergency demands a moonshot, but the moonshot wasn’t undertaken by science heroes working in their solitary labs: Neil Armstrong walked on the moon because of the collective, state-sponsored efforts of millions of people. If we hadn’t gotten to the Moon, the fault would have been with the system, not with Armstrong’s failure to build a rocket ship.

Today, we’re done with those stories and we’re in search of new ones: tales of moral reckoning, of new beginnings, of redemption.

There are times to teach and times not to teach

One day I returned home to my little girl’s third-year birthday party to find her in the corner of the front room, defiantly clutching all of her presents, unwilling to let the other children play with them. The first thing I noticed was several parents in the room witnessing this selfish display. I was embarrassed, and doubly so because at the time I was teaching university classes in human relations. And I knew, or at least felt, the expectation of these parents.

The atmosphere in the room was really charged—the children were crowding around my little daughter with their hands out, asking to play with the presents they had just given, and my daughter was adamantly refusing. I said to myself, “Certainly I should teach my daughter to share. The value of sharing is one of the most basic things we believe in.”

So I first tried a simple request. “Honey, would you please share with your friends the toys they’ve given you?”

“No,” she replied flatly.

My second method was to use a little reasoning. “Honey, if you learn to share your toys with them when they are at your home, then when you go to their homes they will share their toys with you.”

Again, the immediate reply was “No!”

I was becoming a little more embarrassed, for it was evident I was having no influence. The third method was bribery. Very softly I said, “Honey, if you share, I’ve got a special surprise for you. I’ll give you a piece of gum.”

“I don’t want gum!” she exploded.

Now I was becoming exasperated. For my fourth attempt, I resorted to fear and threat. “Unless you share, you will be in real trouble!”

“I don’t care!” she cried. “These are my things. I don’t have to share!”

Finally, I resorted to force. I merely took some of the toys and gave them to the other kids. “Here, kids, play with these.”

Perhaps my daughter needed the experience of possessing the things before she could give them. (In fact, unless I possess something, can I ever really give it?) She needed me as her father to have a higher level of emotional maturity to give her that experience.

But at that moment, I valued the opinion those parents had of me more than the growth and development of my child and our relationship together. I simply made an initial judgment that I was right; she should share, and she was wrong in not doing so.

Perhaps I superimposed a higher-level expectation on her simply because on my own scale I was at a lower level. I was unable or unwilling to give patience or understanding, so I expected her to give things. In an attempt to compensate for my deficiency, I borrowed strength from my position and authority and forced her to do what I wanted her to do.

But borrowing strength builds weakness. It builds weakness in the borrower because it reinforces dependence on external factors to get things done. It builds weakness in the person forced to acquiesce, stunting the development of independent reasoning, growth, and internal discipline. And finally, it builds weakness in the relationship. Fear replaces cooperation, and both people involved become more arbitrary and defensive.

And what happens when the source of borrowed strength—be it superior size or physical strength, position, authority, credentials, status symbols, appearance, or past achievements—changes or is no longer there?

Had I been more mature, I could have relied on my own intrinsic strength—my understanding of sharing and of growth and my capacity to love and nurture—and allowed my daughter to make a free choice as to whether she wanted to share or not to share. Perhaps after attempting to reason with her, I could have turned the attention of the children to an interesting game, taking all that emotional pressure off my child. I’ve learned that once children gain a sense of real possession, they share very naturally, freely, and spontaneously.

My experience has been that there are times to teach and times not to teach. When relationships are strained and the air charged with emotion, an attempt to teach is often perceived as a form of judgment and rejection. But to take the child alone, quietly, when the relationship is good and to discuss the teaching or the value seems to have much greater impact. It may have been that the emotional maturity to do that was beyond my level of patience and internal control at the time.

Perhaps a sense of possessing needs to come before a sense of genuine sharing. Many people who give mechanically or refuse to give and share in their marriages and families may never have experienced what it means to possess themselves, their own sense of identity and self-worth. Really helping our children grow may involve being patient enough to allow them the sense of possession as well as being wise enough to teach them the value of giving and providing the example ourselves.

Utangaç Çocuklar

Utangaç bir çocuğun ebeveyni çocuğunun geleceği konusunda genellikle endişelidir. Bilim insanları da bu endişelerin yersiz olmadığını söylüyor, çünkü araştırmalar, çocuklardaki çekingenliğin ileri yaşlarda kaygı bozukluğuna dönüşme riski taşıdığını gösteriyor. Ebeveynlerin utangaç çocuklarını koruma çabalarının ise durumu daha da kötüleştirmesi de mümkün.

Psikologlar ve çocuk gelişimi uzmanları, utangaç çocukları desteklemenin yollarını arıyor. New York Üniversitesi’nden psikolog Sandee McClowry’ye göre yapılması gereken şey, çocukların temel yapısal özelliklerini değiştirmeye çalışmadan, onları kendilerini rahat hissettikleri bölgelerin dışına çıkmaya ikna etmek. Onları oldukları gibi kabul etmek, utangaç çocuklar için çok önemli.

Psikologlar utangaçlığı sosyallikten kaçınma, sosyal etkileşimlere maruz kalınması durumunda ise sıkıntı ve gerginlik hissedilmesi olarak tanımlamaktadır. Utangaçlık üzerine çalışan araştırmacılar,  hem insanlarla tanıştıklarında, hem de ilk defa karşılaştıkları durumlarda kaygıları tetiklenen çocukları daha iyi teşhis etmek için daha geniş bir kavram olan davranış tutukluluğundan yararlanıyor.

Utangaçlık, çocuklarda bir karakter özelliğidir. Psikologlar bu gibi karakteristik özelliklerin oldukça ısrarcı olduğunu belirtiyor. 1988 yılında Child Development dergisinde yayınlanan bir araştırmada 4 yaşında çocukların davranışları incelenmiş, aynı çocuklar 7 buçuk yaşındayken bir inceleme daha yapılmış. Araştırma sonucunda 4 yaşındayken utangaç olan çocukların da girişken olan çocukların da 7 buçuk yaşına geldiklerinde yine aynı davranışları sergiledikleri gözlemlenmişti.

**

Aşırı korumacı ebeveynlerin aslında onlara zarar verdiğini belirten McClowry, anne ve babaların davranışlarında belirli bir denge tutturması gerektiğini vurguluyor. “Yapı iskelesi” olarak adlandırılan teknik, utangaç çocukların ebeveynleri için oldukça uygun görünüyor. Eğitimde kullanılan “yapı iskelesi” tekniği, öğrencilere başta yoğun destek verip bu desteği yavaş yavaş ve düzenli olarak azaltarak onların daha bağımsız hale gelmesini sağlamak anlamına geliyor. Bu teknik, utangaç çocukların kabuklarından çıkmalarına yardımcı olabilir.

McClowry, bu teknikle ilgili olarak kamp örneğini veriyor. Örneğin bir çocuk kampa gitmek istiyor ancak geceyi evden uzakta geçirmekten korkuyorsa, anne ve baba işe, çocuğun arkadaşlarını evlerinde kalmaya davet etmekle başlayabilir. Ardından bir geceyi büyükannelerinin evinde geçirerek çıtayı yavaş yavaş yükseltebilirler. Elbette anne ve baba “yapı iskelesi” tekniğini uygularken çocuğun rahatsızlık hissedip hissetmediğini de kontrol etmeli, çocuk daha fazla katlanamaz hale gelirse onu zorlamamalıdır. Ayrıca çocukların daha büyük olduğu durumlarda ebeveynler bu tecrübeyi onunla konuşabilir, ona nasıl hissettiğini, neyin daha iyi hissetmesini sağladığını ve bu adımdan sonra ne yapmak istediğini sorabilir.

Kaynak: Herkese Bilim Teknoloji

Middle School Misfortunes Then and Now

By: Benjamin Conlon, waituntil8th

Let’s imagine a seventh grader. He’s a quiet kid, polite, with a few friends. Just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill twelve-year-old. We’ll call him Brian. Brian’s halfway through seventh grade and for the first time, he’s starting to wonder where he falls in the social hierarchy at school. He’s thinking about his clothes a little bit, his shoes too. He’s conscious of how others perceive him, but he’s not that conscious of it. 

He goes home each day and from the hours of 3 p.m. to 7 a.m., he has a break from the social pressures of middle school. Most evenings, he doesn’t have a care in the world. The year is 2008. 

Brian has a cell phone, but it’s off most of the time. After all, it doesn’t do much. If friends want to get in touch, they call the house. The only time large groups of seventh graders come together is at school dances. If Brian feels uncomfortable with that, he can skip the dance. He can talk to teachers about day-to-day problems. Teachers have pretty good control over what happens at school.

Now, let’s imagine Brian on a typical weekday. He goes downstairs and has breakfast with his family. His mom is already at work, but his dad and sisters are there. They talk to each other over bowls of cereal. The kids head off to school soon after. Brian has a fine morning in his seventh grade classroom and walks down to the lunchroom at precisely 12 p.m.

There’s a slick of water on the tiled floor near the fountain at the back of the cafeteria. A few eighth graders know about it, and they’re laughing as yet another student slips and tumbles to the ground.

Brian buys a grilled cheese sandwich. It comes with tomato soup that no one ever eats. He polishes off the sandwich and heads to the nearest trashcan to dump the soup. When his sneakers hit the water slick, he slips just like the others. The tomato soup goes up in the air and comes down on his lap. 

Nearby, at the table of eighth graders, a boy named Mark laughs. He laughs at Brian the same way the boys around him laugh at Brian. They laugh because they’re older, and they know something the younger kids don’t. They laugh at the slapstick nature of the fall. The spilled tomato soup is a bonus. The fall is a misfortune for Brian. That’s all. It’s not an asset for Mark. A few kids hear the laughter and look over, but Brian gets up quickly and rushes off to the bathroom to change into his gym shorts.

Mark tries to retell the story to a friend later. The friend doesn’t really get it because he wasn’t there. He can’t picture it. In fact, Mark seems a little mean for laughing at all.

After lunch, Brian returns to homeroom in his gym shorts. No one seems to notice the change. He breathes a sigh of relief. The cafeteria fall is behind him. He meets his sisters at the end of the day and they ask why he’s wearing gym shorts. He tells them he spilled some tomato sauce on his pants. They head home and spend the afternoon and evening together, safe and sound, home life completely separate from school life. Brian doesn’t think about the incident again. Only a few people saw it. It’s over. 

Now, let’s imagine Brian again. Same kid. Same family. Same school. He’s still in seventh grade, but this time it’s 2018. 

When Brian sits down for breakfast, his dad is answering an email at the table. His older sister is texting, and his younger sister is playing a video game. Brian has an iPhone too. He takes it out and opens the Instagram app. The Brian from 2008 was wondering about his position in the social hierarchy. The Brian from 2018 knows. He can see it right there on the screen. He has fewer ‘followers’ than the other kids in his grade. That’s a problem. He wants to ask his father what to do, but there’s that email to be written. Instead, Brian thinks about it all morning at school. While his teacher talks, he slips his phone out and checks to see how many ‘followers’ the other kids in class have. The answer doesn’t help his confidence. At precisely 12 p.m., he heads to the cafeteria. He buys a grilled cheese. It comes with tomato soup that no one ever eats. 

At the back of the lunchroom, Mark sits with the other eighth graders. He holds a shiny new iPhone in one hand. Mark has had an iPhone for five years. He’s got all the apps. Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. He’s got lots of followers too. He doesn’t know all of them, but that’s okay.

A few years ago, Mark made his first Instagram post. It was a picture of his remote control car. Mark used to really enjoy remote control cars. Mark checked Instagram an hour after putting up that first picture. A bright red dot showed at the bottom of the page. He clicked it. Someone had ‘liked’ the picture of the car. Mark felt validated. It was good that he posted the picture. A little bit of dopamine was released into Mark’s brain. He checked the picture an hour later. Sure enough, another ‘like’. More dopamine. He felt even better. 

For a while, pictures of the remote control car were sufficient. They generated enough ‘likes’ to keep Mark happy. He no longer got much joy from actually driving the remote control car, but he got plenty from seeing those ‘likes’ pile up. 

Then something started to happen. The ‘likes’ stopped coming in. People didn’t seem interested in the pictures of the car anymore. This made Mark unhappy. He missed the ‘likes’ and the dopamine that came with them. He needed them back. He needed more exciting pictures, because exciting pictures would bring more views and more ‘likes’. So, he decided to drive his car right out into the middle of the road. He had his little brother film the whole thing. He filmed the remote control car as it got flattened by a passing truck. Mark didn’t bother to collect it. He just grabbed his phone and posted the video. It was only a few minutes before the ‘likes’ started coming in. He felt better. 

Now it’s eighth grade and Mark has become addicted to social media.  Sure, he needs a lot more ‘likes’ to get the same feeling, but that’s okay. That just means he needs more content. Good content. Content no one else has. That’s the kind that gets a lot of ‘likes’, really, really fast. Mark has learned the best content comes from filming and posting the embarrassing experiences of classmates. 

When he notices that water slick at the back of the cafeteria, he’s ready.  Each time someone walks by and falls, their misfortune becomes an asset for Mark. A part of Mark wants them to fall. He hopes they fall.

Brian walks across the cafeteria with his soup, minding his own business. Suddenly, his feet slide out from under him. The tomato soup goes up in the air and comes down on his lap. He’s so embarrassed, that when he stands up and rushes off to the bathroom, he doesn’t notice Mark filming.

Mark’s fingers race over his iPhone screen before Brian is out of sight. That was a great video he just took, and he wants to get it online. Fast. He knows he’s not supposed to have his cell phone out in school, but the teachers really only enforce that rule during class. They all use Twitter and Instagram too. They understand. 

Mark doesn’t know who he just filmed, and he doesn’t care. It’s not his fault the kid fell on the floor. He’s just the messenger. The video is a kind of public service announcement. He’s just warning everyone else about the water spot in the cafeteria. That’s what Mark tells himself.

He gets the video uploaded to Snapchat first. No time for a caption. It speaks for itself. He has it up on Instagram seconds later. By then, the ‘likes’ are already coming in. Dopamine floods into Mark’s brain. There’s a comment on Instagram already! “What a loser!” it says. Mark gives the comment a ‘like’. Best to keep the audience happy. 

This has been a rewarding lunch. The bell’s going to ring in a few minutes. Mark sits back and refreshes his screen again and again and again until it does.

Meanwhile, Brian heads back from the bathroom, having changed into his gym shorts. He’s still embarrassed about the fall. It happened near the back of the cafeteria, though. He doesn’t think many people saw. He hopes they didn’t. But when he walks into the classroom, a lot of people look at him. One girl holds her phone up at an odd angle. Is she…taking a picture? The phone comes down quickly and she starts typing, so he can’t be sure. 

Class begins. Brian is confused because people keep slipping their phones out and glancing back at him. He asks to go to the bathroom. Inside a stall, he opens Instagram. There he is on the screen, covered in tomato sauce. How could this be? Who filmed this? Below the video, a new picture has just appeared. It’s him in his gym shorts. The caption reads, “Outfit change!”

Brian scrolls frantically through the feed trying to find the source of the video. He can’t. It’s been shared and reshared too many times. He notices his follower count has dropped. He doesn’t want to go to class. He just wants it to stop. 

He meets his sisters outside at the end of the day. Several students snap pictures as he walks by. Neither sister says a word. Brian knows why. 

Home was a safe place for Brian in 2008. Whatever happened in school, stayed in school. Not now. Brian arrives at his house, heart thundering, and heads straight to his bedroom. He’s supposed to be doing homework, but he can’t concentrate. Alone in the dark, he refreshes his iPhone again and again and again and again.

Brian’s family is having his favorite dish for dinner, but he doesn’t care. He wants it to be over so he can get back to his phone. Twice, he goes to the bathroom to check Instagram. His parents don’t mind, they’re checking their own phones.

Brian discovers that two new versions of the video have been released. One is set to music and the other has a nasty narration. Both have lots of comments. He doesn’t know how to fight back, so he just watches as the view counts rise higher and higher. His own follower count, his friend count, keeps going in the opposite direction. Brian doesn’t want to be part of this. He doesn’t like this kind of thing. He can’t skip it though. It’s not like the dance. And he can’t tell a teacher. This isn’t happening at school.

He stays up all night refreshing the feed, hoping the rising view count will start to slow. Mark is doing the same thing at the other side of town. He has lots of new followers. This is his best video ever. 

At 3 a.m., they both turn off their lights and stare up at their respective ceilings. Mark smiles. He hopes tomorrow something even more embarrassing happens to a different kid. Then he can film that and get even more ‘likes’. Across town, Brian isn’t smiling, but sadly, he’s hoping for exactly the same thing. 

From the Author

I started teaching in 2009. At that time, public school was very much the way I remembered it. That’s not the case anymore. Smartphones and social media have transformed students into creatures craving one thing: content. It’s a sad state of affairs. 

But there’s hope. 

Over the last few years, my students have become increasingly interested in stories from the days before smartphones and social media. In the same way many adults look back fondly on simpler times, kids look back to second and third grade, when no one had a phone. I think a lot of them already miss those days. 

Smartphones and social media aren’t going anywhere. Both are powerful tools, with many benefits. But they have fundamentally altered how children interact with the world and not in a good way. We can change that. In addition to the “Wait Until 8th” pledge, consider taking the following steps to help your children reclaim childhood.

1. Propose that administrators and teachers stop using social media for school related purposes. In many districts teachers are encouraged to employ Twitter and Instagram for classroom updates. This is a bad thing. It normalizes the process of posting content without consent and teaches children that everything exciting is best viewed through a recording iPhone. It also reinforces the notion that ‘likes’ determine value. Rather than reading tweets from your child’s teacher, talk to your children each day. Ask what’s going on in school. They’ll appreciate it.

2. Insist that technology education include a unit on phone etiquette, the dark sides of social media and the long-term ramifications of posting online. Make sure students hear from individuals who have unwittingly and unwillingly been turned into viral videos.   

3. Tell your children stories from your own childhood. Point out how few of them could have happened if smartphones had been around. Remind your children that they will some day grow up and want stories of their own. An afternoon spent online doesn’t make for very good one.

4. Teach your children that boredom is important. They should be bored. Leonardo Da Vinci was bored. So was Einstein. Boredom breeds creativity and new ideas and experiences. Cherish boredom. 

5. Remind them that, as the saying goes, adventures don’t come calling like unexpected cousins. They have to be found. Tell them to go outside and explore the real world. Childhood is fleeting. It shouldn’t be spent staring at a screen.

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (3):The Power of Mistakes and Struggle

Every time a student makes a mistake in math, they grow a synapse. (Carol Dweck)

Psychologist Jason Moser studied the neural mechanisms that operate in people's brains when they make mistakes (Moser et al., 2011).

Moser's study shows us that we don't even have to be aware we have made a mistake for brain sparks to occur. When teachers ask me how this can be possible, I tell them that the best thinking we have on this now is that the brain sparks and grows when we make a mistake, even if we are not aware of it, because it is a time of struggle; the brain is challenged, and this is the time when the brain grows the most.

**

In Moser and his colleagues' study, the scientists looked at people's mindsets and compared mindsets with their ERN and Pe responses when they made mistakes on questions. Moser's study produced two important results. First, the researchers found that the students' brains reacted with greater ERN and Pe responses—electrical activity—when they made mistakes than when their answers were correct. Second, they found that the brain activity was greater following mistakes for individuals with a growth mindset than for individuals with a fixed mindset. Figure 2.1 represents brain activity in individuals with a fixed or growth mindset, with the growth mindset brains lighting up to a much greater extent when mistakes were made.

**

The fact that our brains react with increased activity when we make a mistake is hugely important. I will return to this finding in a moment.

The study also found that individuals with a growth mindset had a greater awareness of errors than individuals with a fixed mindset, so they were more likely to go back and correct errors. This study supported other studies (Mangels, Butterfield, Lamb, Good, & Dweck, 2006) showing that students with a growth mindset show enhanced brain reaction and attention to mistakes. All students responded with a brain spark—a synapse—when they made mistakes, but having a growth mindset meant that the brain was more likely to spark again, showing awareness that a mistake had been made. Whether it is mathematics, teaching, parenting, or other areas of your life, it is really important to believe in yourself, to believe that you can do anything. Those beliefs can change everything.

**

Moser's study, showing that individuals with a growth mindset have more brain activity when they make a mistake than those with a fixed mindset, tells us something else very important. It tells us that the ideas we hold about ourselves—in particular, whether we believe in ourselves or not—change the workings of our brains. If we believe that we can learn, and that mistakes are valuable, our brains grow to a greater extent when we make a mistake. This result is highly significant, telling us again how important it is that all students believe in themselves—and how important it is for all of us to believe in ourselves, particularly when we approach something challenging.

**

“Peter Sims, a writer for the New York Times, has written widely about the importance of mistakes for creative, entrepreneurial thinking (Sims, 2011). He points out: 

“Imperfection is a part of any creative process and of life, yet for some reason we live in a culture that has a paralyzing fear of failure, which prevents action and hardens a rigid perfectionism. It's the single most disempowering state of mind you can have if you'd like to be more creative, inventive, or entrepreneurial.”

He also summarizes the habits of successful people in general, saying that successful people:

Feel comfortable being wrong

Try seemingly wild ideas

Are open to different experiences

Play with ideas without judging them

Are willing to go against traditional ideas

Keep going through difficulties”

**

One of the most powerful moves a teacher or parent can make is in changing the messages they give about mistakes and wrong answers in mathematics.

**

Another strategy for celebrating mistakes in class is to ask students to submit work of any form—even test papers (although the less we test students the better); teachers then highlight their “favorite mistakes.” Teachers should share with students that they are looking for their favorite mistakes, which should be conceptual mistakes, not numerical errors. Teachers can then share the mistakes with the class and launch a class discussion about where the mistake comes from and why it is a mistake. This is also a good time to reinforce important messages—that when the student made this mistake, it was good, because they were in a stage of cognitive struggle and their brain was sparking and growing. It is also good to share and discuss mistakes, because if one student makes a mistake we know others are making them also, so it is really helpful for everyone to be able to think about them.

Mathematical Mindsets [Jo Boaler] (2):The Brain and Mathematics Learning

In the last decade we have seen the emergence of technologies that have given researchers new access into the workings of the mind and brain. Now scientists can study children and adults working on math and watch their brain activity; they can look at brain growth and brain degeneration, and they can see the impact of different emotional conditions upon brain activity. One area that has emerged in recent years and stunned scientists concerns “brain plasticity.” It used to be believed that the brains people were born with couldn't really be changed, but this idea has now been resoundingly disproved. Study after study has shown the incredible capacity of brains to grow and change within a really short period (Abiola & Dhindsa, 2011; Maguire, Woollett, & Spiers, 2006; Woollett & Maguire, 2011).

When we learn a new idea, an electric current fires in our brains, crossing synapses and connecting different areas of the brain.

 
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If you learn something deeply, the synaptic activity will create lasting connections in your brain, forming structural pathways, but if you visit an idea only once or in a superficial way, the synaptic connections can “wash away” like pathways made in the sand. Synapses fire when learning happens, but learning does not happen only in classrooms or when reading books; synapses fire when we have conversations, play games, or build with toys, and in the course of many, many other experiences.

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The new findings that brains can grow, adapt, and change shocked the scientific world and spawned new studies of the brain and learning, making use of ever-developing new technologies and brain scanning equipment. In one study that I believe is highly significant for those of us in education, researchers at the National Institute for Mental Health gave people a 10-minute exercise to work on each day for three weeks. The researchers compared the brains of those receiving the training with those who did not. The results showed that the people who worked on an exercise for a few minutes each day experienced structural brain changes. The participants' brains “rewired” and grew in response to a 10-minute mental task performed daily over 15 weekdays (Karni et al., 1998). Such results should prompt educators to abandon the traditional fixed ideas of the brain and learning that currently fill schools—ideas that children are smart or dumb, quick or slow. If brains can change in three weeks, imagine what can happen in a year of math class if students are given the right math materials and they receive positive messages about their potential and ability.

 
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The new evidence from brain research tells us that everyone, with the right teaching and messages, can be successful in math, and everyone can achieve at the highest levels in school. There are a few children who have very particular special educational needs that make math learning difficult, but for the vast majority of children—about 95%—any levels of school math are within their reach. And the potential of the brain to grow and change is just as strong in children with special needs. Parents and teachers need to know this important information.

 
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I am often asked whether I am saying that everyone is born with the same brain. I am not. What I am saying is that any brain differences children are born with are nowhere near as important as the brain growth experiences they have throughout life. People hold very strong views that the way we are born determines our potential; they point to well-known people who were considered geniuses—such as Albert Einstein or Ludwig van Beethoven. But scientists now know that any brain differences present at birth are eclipsed by the learning experiences we have from birth onward (Wexler in Thompson, 2014). Every second of the day our brain synapses are firing, and students raised in stimulating environments with growth mindset messages are capable of anything. Brain differences can give some people a head start, but infinitesimally small numbers of people have the sort of head start that gives them advantages over time. And those people who are heralded as natural geniuses are the same people who often stress the hard work they have put in and the number of mistakes they made. Einstein, probably the most well known of those thought to be a genius, did not learn to read until he was nine and spoke often about his achievements coming from the number of mistakes he had made and the persistence he had shown. He tried hard, and when he made mistakes he tried harder. He approached work and life with the attitude of someone with a growth mindset. A lot of scientific evidence suggests that the difference between those who succeed and those who don't is not the brains they were born with, but their approach to life, the messages they receive about their potential, and the opportunities they have to learn. The very best opportunities to learn come about when students believe in themselves. For far too many students in school, their learning is hampered by the messages they have received about their own potential, making them believe they are not as good as others, that they don't have the potential of others. 

When students are given fixed praise—for example, being told they are smart when they do something well—they may feel good at first, but when they fail later (and everyone does) they think that means they are not so smart after all.

 
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The impact of the praise students receive can be so strong that it affects their behavior immediately. In one of Carol's studies, researchers asked 400 fifth graders to take an easy short test, on which almost all performed well. Half the children were then praised for “being really smart.” The other half were complimented on “having worked really hard.” The children were then asked to take a second test and choose between one that was pretty simple, that they would do well on, or one that was more challenging, that they might make mistakes on. Ninety percent of those who were praised for their effort chose the harder test. Of those praised for being smart, the majority chose the easy test (Mueller & Dweck, 1998).

Praise feels good, but when people are praised for who they are as a person (“You are so smart”) rather than what they did (“That is an amazing piece of work”), they get the idea that they have a fixed amount of ability. Telling students they are smart sets them up for problems later. As students go through school and life, failing at many tasks—which, again, is perfectly natural—they evaluate themselves, deciding how smart or not smart this means they really are. Instead of praising students for being smart, or any other personal attribute, it's better to say things like: “It is great that you have learned that,” and “You have thought really deeply about this.”

 

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There is no preordained pace at which students need to learn mathematics, meaning it is not true that if they have not attained a certain age or emotional maturity they cannot learn some mathematics. Students may be unready for some mathematics because they still need to learn some foundational, prerequisite mathematics they have not yet learned, but not because their brain cannot develop the connections because of their age or maturity. When students need new connections, they can learn them.

How to prepare your kids for jobs that don’t exist yet

Ruth Reader, FastCompany

With total robot domination seemingly impending, preparing the next generation for the future of work can feel like a lost cause. But fear not, the future may be brighter than expected.

“There’s three job opportunities coming in the future,” says Avi Goldfarb, coauthor of Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. He divides them up into people who build artificial intelligence, people who tell the machines what to do and determine what to do with their output, and, finally, celebrities. This last category comprises actors, sports players, artists, writers, and other such luminaries surrounding the entertainment industry.

A 2017 report from Gartner concludes that artificial intelligence will create more jobs than it kills. In particular, the report singles out healthcare and education as areas ripe for growth. But the handling of artificial intelligence is where Goldfarb thinks an overwhelming number of those new jobs will be created. He thinks even human-centric positions in nursing and education will require a proficient understanding of artificially intelligent tools as the technology becomes a more routine facet of those jobs. For example, to assist with home healthcare for elderly populations, little robots have emerged to help patients remember to take their medications or go for a walk. These bots are still nascent, but it’s not hard to imagine a world in which nurses have to understand how to help patients set reminders or even be able to communicate with these devices remotely as a way of checking in on a patient as part of their jobs.

“The most valuable combinations of skills are going to be people who both have good training in computer science, who know how the machines work, but also understand the needs of society and the organization, and so have an understanding of humanities and social sciences,” he says. “That combination, already in the market, is where the biggest opportunities are.”

So how does one prepare to lead these artificially intelligent machines into the new world? Oddly enough, a liberal arts education might be the best antidote to automation, says Goldfarb. While he believes that most people will need a basic understanding of computer science, he thinks that studying art, philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience could be key to preparing for the future. These studies will help young people to have a broad range of knowledge that they can use to put artificial intelligence to its best use.

Experts who study the future of work agree that our ability to make sense of the world is our biggest asset in the wake of automation. While artificial intelligence is good at narrow, repetitive tasks, humans are good at coming up with creative solutions. Anything you can do to get your child thinking creatively will no doubt help prepare her for joining the working world.