The myth of ability

A new study from Germany suggests that intelligence is important only in the beginning stages of mathematics (perhaps in terms of how quickly new concepts are grasped), while factors like motivation and study habits are far more important to long-term learning. 

In this vein, I offer an excerpt from John Mighton's book The Myth of Ability (p. 12). Dr. Mighton is an award-winning playwright and mathematician. After outlining how he taught himself to write (because he found out that Sylvia Plath had taught herself to write by sheer determination - there was no "gift" or innate ability), Dr. Mighton decided to try to realize his own lifelong dream of becoming a mathematician and enrolled in two first-year university math classes.

"When I received the results of my first test, I wasn't surprised to see that I had failed. I knew the test wasn't fair: some of the material had not been covered in class (it was taught several weeks later). As the professor handed back the tests, he read out the names of the few people who had passed and told the rest of us that we should consider dropping the course. Mamy students did exactly that; the ones I talked to believed that the professor had made an objective assessment of their prospects as mathematicians. I stayed in the course, but only because of the confidence I had gained as a tutor.

"I failed other tests from time to time, in other courses, including two of three comprehensive exams for my doctorate. in the beginning, it was very hard to suppress the feeling that I had failed because I had finally reached a level of mathematics that was beyond me. Gradually I saw that questions I once found impossible on a particular test seemed trivial a month or a year later: there was no threshold that separated one level of mathematics from another. Sometimes I did badly because I was nervous (on my comprehensives I made mistakes that were equivalent, in higher mathematics, to 2 + 2 = 5) or because I hadn't had time to digest the material properly. Sometimes the tests were unfair."

As he mentioned in the excerpt, Dr. Mighton tutors children in math and has found that they can all become competent mathematicians. To close, here's a relevant quote from p. 16 of The Myth of Ability.

"I sometimes wish I could travel back to my childhood to regain the time I wasted in self-doubt (and not just in mathematics). But I'm grateful to have found some faith in my abilities. One day, I hope, that same faith will be considered the right of all children, and they iwl not have to wait for some accident, likke a book of letters, or a tutor assigned by mistake, to reveal the vast potential that might otherwise have been lost."

Comments