Mathematical Mindsets By Jo Boaler: Summary

In Mathematical Mindsets by Jo Boaler, current and future educators learn all about the different outlooks children have on math and ways their adult piers put unknowingly force that upon them. The author, Joe Boaler, is a mathematical teacher who has had the opportunity of teaching elementary students. She has a doctorate degree from Stanford and has done studies of her own classroom taking a deeper look into how math is most effective in the classroom. Americans tend to have a skewed perspective that math consists solely of equations and rules that must be followed (Boaler 34). Kids are praised for being smart and gifted in math when in fact “…there is no such thing as a ‘math brain’ or a math gift’ as many believe. No one is born know math, and no one is born lacking to ability to learn math” (Boaler 6). This is important to keep in mind as future educators. Every single student that walks through the door is

If positivity is absent during math, students will begin to doubt and devalue their math skills. These positive messages can then override whatever they have heard in the past. Unfortunately, math is different than other subjects, it “…is taught in ways that are not used by other subject teachers, and people hold beliefs about mathematics that they do not hold about other subjects” (Boaler 21). Alongside the negative messages of math comes the crippling exams and tests that come along with math students seem to have high anxieties about. Math is tested more frequently than any other subject in the U.S. (Boaler 21), which can be exhausting and debilitating. That is where the negative message of math needs to start changing. Stop testing children and grading them as if they are an object and teach them to understand and apply real math. What is taught in school is not what a mathematician would recognize as math. Through this, children lose their interest of math hitting elementary