“But I’m not a math person!”
Did you ever use that excuse as a kid? I know I did. Alas my mother did not tolerate my lame attempts to leverage available excuses like being a girl.
She still teaches from a core belief that if mastery comes from practice anyone can develop competency with effort and repetition. She will not entertain discussions of inherent talent even if it’s true. That’s no excuse.
I practiced till I was a math person. I’d level up into a new subject area and fail all over again. i repeated that process till I graduated university with a lot mathematics under my belt.
Whether or not American children are learning remains a hot topic. A infamous Bushism “is our children learning” comes from a misquoted line in a 1990 speech by George W. Bush, who actually said, “rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?”. And well, we are often asking the question both then and now.
Moontower’s Kris Abdelmessih financial newsletter has an excellent essay on how Americans are grappling with the upsetting realization that our children cannot read or write. His essay on the topic of mastery and competence is worth a few minutes of your time.
And while we’ve been complaining about our educational system my whole life it certainly looks as if the now adult graduates are innumerate and illiterate.
And that is embarrassing for all of us. The more we dig into the why’s and how’s of it, the more likely we reveal to ourselves that we have our own shortcomings with literacy and numeracy.
Buckling down and developing competency is a hard thing to do when we are young and capable. Doing it as a tired middle aged adult is even worse. But if we want to ask questions about whether any of us are learned we have to accept that maybe none of us were educated well in the first place.