This from Quartz
Is math ability genetic? Sure, to
some degree.
Terence Tao, UCLA’s famous virtuoso
mathematician, publishes dozens of papers in top journals every year, and is
sought out by researchers around the world to help with the hardest parts of
their theories. Essentially none of us could ever be
as good at math as Terence Tao, no matter how hard we tried or how well we were
taught. But here’s the thing: We don’t have to! For high school math,
inborn talent is just much less important than hard work, preparation, and
self-confidence.
How do we know this? First of all,
both of us have taught math for many years—as professors, teaching assistants,
and private tutors. Again and again, we have seen the following pattern repeat
itself:
- Different kids with different levels of
preparation come into a math class. Some of these kids have parents who
have drilled them on math from a young age, while others never had that
kind of parental input.
- On the first few tests, the well-prepared kids
get perfect scores, while the unprepared kids get only what they could
figure out by winging it—maybe 80 or 85%, a solid B.
- The unprepared kids, not realizing that the
top scorers were well-prepared, assume that genetic ability was what
determined the performance differences. Deciding that they “just aren’t
math people,” they don’t try hard in future classes, and fall further
behind.
- The well-prepared kids, not realizing that the
B students were simply unprepared, assume that they are “math people,” and
work hard in the future, cementing their advantage.
Thus, people’s belief that math ability can’t change becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
This was certainly my experience at O level and I'm thankful to a good Christian friend for urging me to ditch the self-pitying "I'm awful at maths" mantra and instead encouraging me to keep working hard in Maths (the end result of which was I moved from a D average to a getting a B in my final exam!)
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