Fast forward to high school and math was not only my favorite subject, but the subject in which I excelled the most in. Moving on into college, I've chosen a major that places a large emphasis on statistics and calculus. I'm so glad my parent's helped me work out of the failing-mindset to the not-yet-mindset mentioned in the video.
I appreciate the concept of a Growth Mindset because it recognizes the paralyzing fear of failure that is evident in most students. I love the imagery Carol Dweck used of challenging problems exercising your brain and making it stronger. That really is so true. The ability to memorize facts and regurgitate them to others is decreasingly important with search engines and textbooks available to our generation at the snap of a finger.What is more important that ever is a willingness to learn, an ability to adapt to new challenges, and a problem solving process- all of which the Growth Mindset works to develop.
Photo: You Haven't Failed... You've Learned, Made by: Laura Gibbs with Cheezburger,
Inspired by tweet from Vid Mcevic, Link: here
Hi again! I couldn't help but to continue reading your posts! :)
ReplyDeleteHow wonderful of your parents to encourage you like that! It makes me so sad to see kids give up on subjects (or learning in general) just because they were not encouraged to keep growing and trying. This seems to be especially prevalent with girls and math! I vividly remember a family friend mention that "boys were good at math and science and girls were good at reading and social studies." I immediately made it my mission to be good at math and science! :) Of course, now I'm a letters major, but I'm so happy that, like you, I had parents who taught me a love of learning everything that I was blessed to have the opportunity to!
I think that you're experience share with this is perfect! It shows exactly what it means to have a growth mindset! I have had a similar experience. One of my hardest classes in middle school was learning to diagram sentence grammar, knowing what each part of a sentence is and what it does. Even to this day I have trouble with this, but guess what?! One of the biggest parts of learning Arabic is knowing exactly what part of speech each word in a sentence is, what it can do, what words it's modifying, and how to place it so the sentence is understandable. So despite being horrible at it, you bet I'm trying my hardest to understand and do better!
ReplyDeleteI really liked how encouraging your parents were to show you how to grasp math concepts. Sometimes I feel like parents can be the worst critics and are responsible for putting an immense amount of pressure on their children to be successful. I also admire that you pursued a path in math when you felt like you couldn't handle the challenge before. This shows that you can do anything! I, for once, am not the greatest in math, but I had an awesome math professor who was really engaged in growth mindset. With his philosophy, as long as I tried the math problem, I was successful. Eventually, I was doing difficult calc problems on my own!
ReplyDeleteWow, that was an excellent growth post. It is really important that we do the same as your parents and teach our kids it's okay to explore and be curious. When we learn it's okay to get messy and fail so much can happen. I love the fact that now you are going after something very math heavy. I think often we discourage kids in areas if they show weaknesses early on and that is not okay. We need to allow them to dive as deeper and help show them that it is okay to be wrong.
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