4 steps to unlock your kid’s math potential | Shalinee Sharma

Elise Hu (0:00)

Hey, y'all, Ilyse Huw here. My three daughters just headed back to school with new backpacks, new teachers, and all that first day energy. And back to school season can make me feel like a student again, too. So for this month's TED Talks Daily playlist, we have gathered five of our favorite talks about learning, teaching, and the joy of staying curious. No textbooks required. Happy listening.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. You might have encountered this in your own life or with your kids. The label of being math-oriented or not. I even remember thinking to myself when I was little, I guess I'm just not a math person. Well, in her 2024 talk, math expert, Shalinee Sharma says, the truth is we can all become math people. And she explains how after the break.

And now our TED Talk of the day.

Shalinee Sharma (1:13)

Let me get started with this. I'm a mom and I have 13-year-old twin boys. I want to share a vivid memory from when they were in pre-K. A mom came over at pick up to befriend me, and she started telling me about her daughter. She said, she's like me. She's just not a math kid. But your boys, your boys are math kids. We're just not math people.

I was stunned. I worried if I opened my mouth to disagree, I'd say something crazy. And we all know the price of crazy at pick up.

You never get invited to any play dates. So I bit my tongue.

She was the smartest and sweetest mom. And I remember thinking, how do you know your four-year-old will never be good at math? Can you imagine if we thought the same thing in reading? If a kid struggled and we said, she's just not a reading kid. And then we took away all the challenging books and writing assignments for the rest of her school years. We'd never do that. We'd never be OK labeling some of the kids reading kids and leaving the rest illiterate.

But that's exactly what we do in math. I'm a math learning expert and an education technologist. And believe it or not, I was not always a math kid. But for the last 12 years, I have observed millions of students complete billions of math problems, and I've visited math classrooms on three continents, all to build the math learning nonprofit Zern. And in all that work, I've learned one important thing. We're asking the wrong question in math learning. Instead of asking who can learn math, we should be asking, how do you teach math? Because when we ask who, we imply that math learning is some rare genetic ability. But it's not. We have piles of data that tell us we can all build a math mind, and we all need a math mind. And so I have four steps to offer that begin to answer the question, how do we build a math mind, and hopefully put an end to this labeling nonsense once and for all.

Step one, believe. Remember when I said I wasn't always a math kid? I was in sixth grade. I had just transferred schools, and it was in math class that I fell apart. I had no friends in math class, and the kids who were thriving were a group of boys who wouldn't talk to me. But I would not talk to them either, because they were grody.

One day after a test, my teacher called me over to his desk, and he said, If you try your very best, you could be just as good as the boys.

Elise Hu (4:18)

Eek.

Shalinee Sharma (4:19)

Not an ideal thing to say to a little girl. And the gender gaps in math persist today. But it didn't matter, because my heart exploded. The coolest teacher I had ever met said that I could succeed.

Hyperbole maybe, but I think his words changed the course of my life. Because he believed he started a powerful chain reaction. Because he believed, I built up the courage to ask for extra help. And with that extra help, I did the extra work. And with that courage, extra help and extra work, I became a math kid. And along the way, I learned my experience was pretty normal. All kids, even the math kids, fall behind, struggle or feel math anxiety. But the difference for those kids is someone believes. And so they do the work and they catch up. Actually, in any subject you learn, you can fall behind. But that's usually a signal to work harder. But in math, that same signal is that you don't have what it takes, and we give up and seal our fate. And so that's why the first step is to believe.