Why Math Educators Should Care About Talent Development

In math, de-prioritizing talent development leads to major issues.

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The fundamental principles of effective training are similar across domains. But you only see this if you’re actually optimizing for performance.

That’s what’s done in the field of talent development: an individual’s performance is to be maximized, so the methods used during practice are those that most efficiently convert effort into performance improvements.

But elsewhere in education, the norm seems to be optimizing for fun and entertainment while, as a secondary concern, meeting some low bar for shallowly learning some surface-level basic skills.

Which, I guess, is fine if you don’t expect too much from students.

If every student in gym class were expected to be able to do a backflip by the end of the year, things would have to change – but the expectations are so low that meeting them does not require talent development.

But in mathematics, most students are expected to achieve a relatively high level of performance over many years of courses increasing in difficulty, culminating in at least algebra, typically pre-calculus, often calculus, and sometimes even higher than that.

As a result, in math, de-prioritizing talent development leads to major issues.

When students do the mathematical equivalent of playing kickball during class, and then are expected to do the mathematical equivalent of a backflip at the end of the year, it’s easy to see how struggle and general negative feelings can arise.

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