Show intro: Hi, I’m Vanessa Vakharia aka The Math Guru, and you're listening to Math Therapy - a podcast that helps guests work through their math traumas, one problem at a time. When I was in grade 11, I failed math not once, but twice because I was told that I just wasn't a math person. Thanks to a math intervention in the form of an amazing teacher, I ended up scoring 99% in grade 12 math, and now I run The Math Guru, my very own math tutoring studio in Toronto. I started Math Therapy to take this conversation global and I like to think of it as not just a podcast but a movement. Whether you think you're a math person or not, you're about to find out that math people don't actually exist, but the scars that math class left on many of us definitely do. Oh, and don't worry - no calculators or actual math were involved in the making of this podcast.

Episode intro: Okay guys it is the last episode of the season and normally that would make me super sad but let me tell you, I have such a treat for you, I almost don't care. What you don’t know is that behind the scenes our poor editor David has had to edit out every single time I have brought up John Mighton on every single other episode. Yeah, who’s John Mighton? Cool, you’re about to find out but key point, clearly I'm so obsessed with the guy that I managed to subconsciously bring him up two million times while talking to every other guest. Don’t believe me? Just listen to this:

Renee Powers (S2E07): Exactly, if I had textbooks of math problems…
Vanessa: I can send you one of those, I can send you John Mighton’s “JUMP Math” (laughing).
Renee Powers: I don’t know if I have got the time for that right now.

Vanessa: We just had John Mighton here and we’re very excited because he’s my math idol.
Tamica Marcano (S2E05): Oh really?
Vanessa: Matt Galloway just interviewed him, so whatever Matt, cool.
Tamica: You just did the interview? 
Vanessa: Yeah. He literally just left. I’m REALLY riled up…
Tamica: Yep!

Sunil Singh (S2E08): The more math you know, the more you are going to be able to figure out facts and truths about life.
Vanessa: That's what John Mighton’s all about by the way. This exact thing.

There’s one question I didn’t ask John Mighton that I’m really mad that I didn’t. And honestly, sorry to bring up John Mighton again, bringing him up again, he’s always like, we do not use evidence based research … 
Miguel Escobar (S2E03): No.
Vanessa: … in order to make curriculum changes.
Miguel: Yeah.

Vanessa: Okay, after nine full episodes of bringing him up constantly, this week I bring you the man, the myth, the legend himself, Canada's very own Dr John Mighton. Okay, I know you guys might be like, what are you talking about, who dis? But let me tell you guys I’ve been a fan of this guy for over a decade. I've been waiting my entire career for this interview and I'm not even joking right now. Playwright turned mathematician, John founded Jump Math as a charity back in 2001 and it is legit a transformative program that teaches kids math by breaking down concepts to basics, but not in a boring way. The guy has been given not one but six honorary doctorates, like what? His latest book, “All Things Being Equal” is mindblowing. For those of you wondering why it's important to think about getting acquainted with math again in your adult life, this is the book for you. Oh also, did I mention he was in Good Will Hunting? He knows Matt Damon personally. Okay, so the hype is real guys, here we go.

Vanessa Vakharia: Dr. John Mighton, you are famous.

John Mighton: No I wouldn't say so (Laughing).

V: Well okay. I mean my definition of you being famous is, I mean I’ve known who you were for a decade. Ever since I started being interested in teaching math. So do you feel famous? I just actually want to know.

J: No.

V: Really? Okay so I just want you to know that in my eyes, you are. We couldn’t sleep last night, I was like John Mighton is coming here. So if there’s anything you take away today, you’re famous and I’m fully asking for your autograph after.

J: Oh well… It’s not worth much (Laughing).

V: Whatever, it’s very exciting. You’ve been a big inspiration to me.

J: That’s really nice to know.

V: Okay, you were on Good Will Hunting. You were in it.

J: Yeah.

V: So I want to just talk about that for one second but before I do, what is Matt Damon like in real life?

J: He’s an amazing person. I think it was the assistant director, someone said that the crew and everyone working on the movie had felt that they had never worked with such nice people. It was really amazing, the atmosphere on set and everything.

V: So I want to talk about what you did in Good Will Hunting. I actually did my Master's in math education and feminist theory. I have a marketing background and my entire thesis and a lot of the work I do is around media representations of mathematicians. So my work is really focussed on the fact that I think that the way math is represented in the media is very discouraging to kids, especially young women and that it really turns them off. It's funny because I would always use Good Will Hunting as an example, I used it throughout my thesis and when I go talk to schools I use it because I say, “You know when we look at mathematicians in popular media, they're always positioned as these crazy geniuses that were just born this way and they're going so crazy and can't find love and this is the only thing they have in their lives.”, and most kids are like, why would I ever want to be that? Math must not be for me. So your line in the movie, can you tell us about that? Do you want to say it? Like, how you said it in the film. 

J: I can’t remember it exactly.

V: Stop!

J: I don’t know it was something like, “Most people never get a chance to see how brilliant they can be, they don't find teachers who believe in them, they get convinced they’re stupid.”.

V: That’s literally the line exactly. (Laughing)

J: Oh good. (Laughing) I also agree with you and I even said this to the writers, that the movie could give the impression that you're either born genius or you’re not. To counterbalance that, I asked if I could add those lines and they were very open which was fantastic.

V: That’s incredible. 

J: Yeah.

V: Yeah, I struggle a lot with how we’re going to change that. Again, I’m very media obsessed, media focussed, I’m like perpetually a 16 year old. I work with teenagers all the time and I see how powerful the media is for them. So I think it's cool that you had the opportunity within a major Motion Picture, to actually say something that could change someone's mind around it.

J: Yeah I hope so. I agree that the media doesn't help and all our received ideas about genius and talent don't help. I think that’s changing finally.

V: Well it’s so funny, that walking analogy, I heard someone say this during a talk, this guy was saying, if a kid’s learning how to walk, a parent will do literally anything until their kid walks. You can tell that a parent believes that their kid can walk no matter what. At no point is the parent like, you know what, I guess Johnny’s just not a walker, right?

J: Yeah.

V: But with math, after a bit of struggle, a parent will be like I guess Johnny’s just not a math person. What I’m seeing is with every passing year, there are more labels being dropped onto these kids. Forget like gifted or learning differences that we used to have, those were the only things. Now there's millions of more labels so what do you think about that? I think we agree that it's so damaging to call someone gifted. I think you're just like, where do we even go from here? What are you teaching a child, what are you teaching their peers, to be like, oh well so and so is gifted? But do you really feel like that's going away?

J: You might be right, there is this trend towards differentiating more and labelling kids more. It’s a complicated issue. We did a case study once with grade 5 kids and coming into grade 5, on standardized tests, there was about a 70 point difference between the top and bottom kids. There were kids as low as 9th percentile to as high as the 75th, and the average mark was in the 54th percentile. So it was a whole distribution around the 54th percentile and that was at a private school where parents were paying money to produce that difference, which shows as a society we think there's always going to be very strong students in math and very weak students. And so we think that that belief is a problem because once a child decides they’re not in the talented group, their brain stops working. They just stop engaging or remembering.

So the teacher, as an experiment, tried to equalize the class, made them all feel equally capable, gave them all the support they needed and used evidence based methods of teaching and a year later, the average mark was in the 98th percentile and the lowest in the 95th. A year later, they all wrote the Pythagoras math competition and all but three got awards of distinction. That’s the talent, or the potential that’s in kids in mathematics. 

Grade 5 is very late to intervene so you can imagine if you caught kids earlier. So that's one issue is we've seen evidence and there's evidence in cognitive science that people are far more alike than different in mathematics. We learn the same way, we all suffer from cognitive overload, we all need practice, and we all have roughly the same capability. So in my book, I argue that in order to establish equity in society or bring more equity, we have to start seeing kids as more alike than different. That's a famous phrase from the cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham. I don't know other subjects, I’ve taught other subjects and I could make this argument in other subjects but in math especially, that's the one subject where you can equalize the classroom most quickly. It's a gift to teachers.

V: Well I love that because I read that in your book and I thought it's so interesting because my conversations with people are usually about like, ‘Well you know my kid, that's where they lost all their confidence, that’s what’s screwing them’. It’s always like math ruined their life somehow and you say the exact opposite. You say that actually in math we have the most perfect opportunity to build confidence to show kids that through failure, you can actually build your curiosity. I literally always say this, what is the best skill for someone to have as a kid or an adult in 2020? Curiosity and the desire to solve problems. All that being said, what is going on? Because what you're saying, first of all I love that it's evidence based cuz for me it’s based on my empirical evidence and my very strong opinions, but you actually have added that to back it up. I’d love to know why is no one listening to you? Why are schools actually even more focussed on differentiated learning?

J: So recently I had a kind of revelation that’s not in the book.

V: Oh my god, yes. Are we going to get some dirt?

J: Well I don't know if this makes sense but imagine you're in a country where everyone wants to learn to play chess for some reason and people think that's important. If you're a teacher, you're offered two different ways of teaching chess - one is that everybody plays the full game from the beginning of the year and they struggle and some become great players, others just find their level. So they basically play at the same degree of rigor and complexity for the full year, just the full game. Or would you rather give kids mini games with just a few pieces. and that are well-designed to draw their attention to patterns or strong positions? Let them play that til they see that and then gradually add more pieces and more complexity. Which would you rather be in? I haven’t surveyed teachers yet but I think universally they would say, we pick the more graduated…

V: Wait I was thinking of my answer.

J: Oh yeah, go ahead. What would you think? 

V: You already kind of hinted (Laughing), but I would pick the second option.

J: The second option, that’s what the research in cognitive science says overwhelmingly, that you need to scaffold learning. Kids need practice to master each conceptual level, all those things. So I think that's the central problem is that we mistake where we want to get to, the full game of chess, with how to get there and people can't see around that.

V: Ooh I love that.

J: People just cannot see around that because they'll even argue, kids have a right to engage with full problem solving right from the beginning of the year but the research in cognitive science is saying that's the way you make them not want to problem-solve.

V: This is so insane to me. I get asked all the time, you know everyone right now, we're in Ontario for everyone listening, there are all sorts of curriculum changes happening or not happening or whatever. One of the changes, one of the more recent changes, was to move to a more abstract problem solving strategy right from the beginning which is kind of what you’re saying not to do. 

J: Well I have no problem with problem solving. That’s the sad thing, people think that Jump is some kind of program where …

V: Yeah tell us about Jump. Let’s actually talk about that now.

J: So Jump we call the method, “structured inquiry”, so no matter what the kids are learning, they’re doing the thinking, not the teacher. The teacher will introduce a concept, allow the kids to come up with the answer or see a pattern or a connection, and then they'll move on and vary one element of the problem and then allow the kids to solve that. So they're always problem solving but it's like playing mini-games in chess rather than the full game. It's still problem solving. In fact, it’s the most efficient way to learn, is to play the mini games that have been well structured to draw your attention to the salient features of the problem and what you need to learn, to see the deep structure, to build the basic concepts, all those things. The full game is too random - when you give kids full, rich problems, it’s too random. Their attention isn't being drawn to the things they need to learn. Too many things are being varied at once and we can't learn that way so the mistake is to think problem solving should look the same from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. If kids take one step themselves or can see one connection or see one pattern, that's problem solving.

V: I love this because you know what I actually even love more? Is that you know when you ask a kid what they hate the most about math, they’re always like, I hate word problems. They usually say that. And I love this idea of showing them and this is what I try to do whenever someone says that, I'll make up a random story like, “I'm in a rock band and before every single set, me and my band members get into a fight about what song we should play first. What should we do?” and you'll see kids light up. They’ll be like, “Oh my god, you could all put your names in a hat or take turns and every single show somebody else decides what the first song is.”. I’ll just stop and be like, guess what you guys all did? You just solved a word problem.

I really like that idea of introducing problem solving to kids in these small bite-sized chunks just to constantly say guess what you're doing? You're solving problems. You're right, it doesn't have to look the same, you can be using different skills throughout the year. At the end, the problem might be much richer with many more factors, but to get them used to the fact that they can say out loud, “Yeah I like solving problems and I like coming up with different ways to solve problems than the person next to me.”, 

J: Exactly and one way in math that you can do that, in grade 3 for instance, kids struggle with part whole problems, like where you might have 10 marbles altogether, seven are red, how many are green? Kids see the word more and they think more means add, but it could mean subtract depending on which person has more. So giving them more word problems doesn't often help them see the structure so what we did is we gave them little grids where they could shade in the number of marbles and we'll just say like, 7 green, 4 red, show the difference. Shade in the boxes and count how many extra boxes you have, which of you have more?

Let them switch between all the problem types in this little mini world where they can see, they have a visual representation of the two amounts, they can see everything, they understand the problem to its full depth, and they feel this insane sense of mastery and confidence cuz they can switch between the problems. You can start to make the numbers a bit bigger and then you can gradually introduce a language that's far more efficient than giving them unstructured word problems over and over again and you can get an entire class. That's one of the reasons we see such differences between kids because some kids are stronger readers, some are more confident, some may have a tutor at home, you don't know. You want to level the playing field and equalize it in the classroom so that all kids can feel, ‘I can move along with the whole class. I'm as capable as anyone else.’. 

You take away any barriers and then the whole class starts to move together and you get this group excitement that no one would believe in math. It’s called collective effervescence, we never feel anything more intensely than we feel something as a group. Because I'm a playwright, when I started volunteering in intercity classrooms, I saw the kids as an audience. The only advantage we have of putting kids in the group is they will never get more excited as a group, but when you have a visible hierarchy in the classroom, where some kids are struggling and some are afraid to show off, there's no excitement or engagement. That's the most radical thing I think about Jump, is that if you reduce the visible hierarchies and allow all kids from the beginning of the year to solve problems at the same level, and to learn at the same level, then their brains work in a whole different way. That's the thing people find hard to believe, that all kids could move together in math.

V: This has been blowing my mind forever because we have a ton of students from schools that actually use your program, so they use Jump. They will all be like, “Yeah we use this program called Jump. Have you heard of it?”, and I’m like, “Um hi”, like whatever obviously but every school that I know that’s using it has seen tremendous improvement. 

J: Oh that’s good.

V: You’re doing something right. I’m seriously baffled just because we continue to have issues with math. Math continues to be more important, there continues to be more pressure on kids because jobs, this, that, society, AI, we’re all robots, whatever. So there’s more pressure in math yet kids seem to be performing worse and worse. Why!? Also, people always ask what I would do to the curriculum and I’m like, nothing, I would literally throw it in the garbage and start again. I don’t want to talk about introducing more of this and that, I literally want a new one. It seems like you've literally created a curriculum that seems to be working for most people. Is that too crazy to say?

J: When it’s used well. Yeah. We’ve done tons of studies, even a randomized controlled trial where we did better in problem solving. 

V: Why are you not in charge?

J: Well I think there’s a number of reasons. First of all, somehow, people got the impression that Jump is a workbook program. 

V: Oh my god you need a rebrand John.

J: That you just Xerox the worksheets, and that breaks my heart because the most important part about Jump is the teacher's guide lessons. The teachers just ask question after question and the kids figure it out, and then they do exercises to show off and the teacher always gives bonus questions. Jump isn’t Jump if the teacher isn’t constantly raising the bar.

V: Okay but I honestly feel like maybe you need a rebrand. Because seriously I only bring this up because as I’ve mentioned, I’m obsessed with marketing. Truly, when I started the Math Guru, it was literally all based upon the fact that anyone can do math and I wanted to provide an inclusive environment to show kids that doing math doesn’t mean you need to separate from your core identity, you can still be completely chill and wear sweatpants and drink tea and light candles, and be great at calculus. But I remember when I started it, and I didn't even notice this, so many people would say to me, “I was attracted to it because of the marketing and the logo and it looked different”, and this and that. 

When we are marketing to teenagers... Think about vaping, think about how vaping has been marketed to teenagers. We were about to have a culture where nobody smoked, no kids smoked, and everyone vapes completely based on marketing. However, we do not put any of that same type of marketing into education, period. Have you seen educational ads? They’re disgusting. Have you seen a textbook? You don’t want to open that! It’s gross. Our target market is literally children and teenagers and education is the only sphere that considers itself some weird monopoly, and they’re like, “Guess what? Kids have to go to school anyway so I'm not going to put any effort into marketing to my target demographic or to giving them a product we want because we don't care.”. It's sick! And you see it in privatized education. You see now the difference, private schools are very clear on the fact that they want to attract students because they're a business to make money. Have you seen those marketing campaigns? They’re beautiful. Their environments are gorgeous, they have live tree walls and all sorts of …

J: So that’s a really complicated issue because we don’t want to market directly to kids but we do want to get the word out that kids prefer being taught a certain way. I’ll give you an example, I was in Louisiana where Jump is really taking off and I was coming out of a Middle School and this bus went by, and a bunch of elementary kids stuck their head out the window and yelled at me, “We love Jump Math!”. They had only seen me once at their school and the teachers across the board are reporting that the kids love math better than they did. We're finally getting district adoptions, sometimes whole districts and we're setting up partnerships with multiple school districts for next year to run pilots for the first time.

V: Amazing! I really think it’s your time. People are looking for something.

J: We’re really trying to do it properly. Too many programs get dumped on teachers without enough professional development or support and so in our pilots that we’re doing, we're trying to work with early adopters who really want to try and use it well and love the ideas behind the program. We’re excited about that, we hope to set up demo schools eventually where teachers can show that. That teacher I mentioned who shifted the bell curve so dramatically, which was actually written up in the New York Times, it was written up in the Scientific American Mind, we’d like every teacher to be able to do that. We want to start with these demo schools where teachers can show no matter what your classroom is, no matter what kind of teacher you are, you can bring out this love of math in children and you can help them all achieve at roughly the same level.

V: Oh my god I’m getting goosebumps, this is so cute, I love it. Okay question, do you think it’s possible, and is it your goal, for Jump to replace the current pedagogical nature of how math is taught in schools?

J: Well it’s our goal to have every child reach their full potential in math, whether or not people are using Jump. Right now about 6% of Canadian students are using Jump in English speaking classrooms, we think if we can continue to grow and have great implementations and form partnerships with universities, for instance in Calgary we’re working on a project called Math Minds with the University of Calgary Math Ed department. They’ve been doing research for 6 years now, filming teachers, observing them and figuring out how if they're using Jump, they can use it to full effect, what works, what doesn’t. They’re helping us improve the program so we hope that through pilots and research partnerships like that, we can demonstrate within the next few years, that virtually every child could be at grade level or beyond, loving math. If we can demonstrate that in enough schools, whether people want to use Jump or not, and if we can also convince them to use evidence-based methods and we’re constantly refining our understanding with our research partners, if we can convince everybody that every child has this potential and that it can be elicited using the right methods, we’ll have achieved out mission. Even if not all schools are using Jump. 

V: I think that is the most honourable mission because I think we're very aligned that way and I always say I actually don't care if anyone does math. I don’t care if kids go into STEM, but what I care is anyone growing up with the belief that they can't do it.

J: Right, that they have a choice.

V: That they have a choice, yeah. That is what Math Therapy is about. I'm sure you have met so many adults now who because they were taught at such a young age that they couldn't do math or they weren't, and I’m using quotations, a “math person”. I always say, imagine if you believe that about yourself, what else do you believe you can't do when you're faced with an obstacle.

J: If everyone is aware that there's a problem and that there's a simple solution, and it's not just Jump it’s, ‘Are you teaching kids in a way that doesn't cause cognitive overload that overloads your brain? Are you giving them enough to think and master things?’. There is evidence around what that zone is and it’s different for novice learners and that’s the other thing, we mistake novice learners who are just learning something for the first time and advanced learners. Advanced learners can struggle - the zone can be quite big. They can synthesize several concepts as one, novice learners can’t. Most kids in math are novice learners, every year they're coming in and they’re novice learners at a new level.

I'll give you one example, it really clarified my thinking, it's from Daniel Willingham’s book, “Why don't students like school?”. He talks about this study with physics students where first year students were asked to classify these physics problems and put them in groups and they looked at very superficial features of the problem, they'd say these are all about springs or these are about inclined planes. The graduate level students saw a much deeper structure. They would say these are all about conservation of energy, even if one's about a spring and one’s about an inclined plane and that’s how we solve them. 

Novice learners can't see the deep structures, they only see the superficial features so they can’t solve problems, they need to develop mental representation so they can see deeper. You need to guide them to develop those mental representations and that's the difference between a novice learner and expert learner. They have completely different needs and we're treating kids as if they're expert learners, constantly. People don't have a clue that that's the least efficient way you can learn.

V: How do they not have a clue? This is what makes me insane. How are you sitting here right now telling me this based on research and yet people in charge of educating children and creating learning methods in curriculum don’t know this? How

J: Because most people who are making those buying decisions aren’t aware of the research. People make buying decisions based on expecting a flat structure through the year, same degree of rigor, same degree of complexity through the year.

V: Who’s teaching these people how to make buying decisions? This is actually really stressing me out right now. Don’t you think this is kind of nuts?

J: There’s hope though, teachers are organizing themselves. There’s a conference I talk about in my book called Research Ed, where teachers organize these conferences around evidence-based practices, so teachers are trying to inform themselves. That's one of the missions of Jump, is to get that literature in the hands of teachers.

V: It just makes me so insane to think about everyone I know who’s going through teacher’s college right now, like I went through a teacher's training program myself and didn’t learn anything remotely as helpful as this. I’m concerned.

J: That’s where I’m optimistic too. We’ve got partnerships now with a lot of teacher’s colleges, Calgary has been spectacular, they’ve taught us so much. They’re helping us improve our materials, they've taught us how to improve our professional development, they’ve kept data on the kids so they can see which teachers are getting better results using Jump and which aren't. So I'm optimistic around teachers colleges too, they can change and they're starting to. They’re starting to put the principles that they're learning, they’re even building at the University of Calgary math ed department led by Brent Davis…

V: Oh my god, yeah I know him. Because I went to UBC so I feel like…

J: Yeah he’s there. So he’s led the research team and they’re even building an online course for teachers that’ll be free with videos embedded and everything around these principles of instruction that work. It’s changing.

V: Amazing. It’s changing, that’s good, there’s hope. Okay, wait I’ve got a couple more questions I have to ask. I want your response to this only because I need a response to this and I feel like you will have a smarter one and I can use it. What do you say, because this drives me insane and I feel like I get really dramatically over-reactive to it and I need to calm down. What do you say when people are like, “Oh you know, my son is just so naturally good at math and my daughter isn’t.”? What's the vibe? How does your body feel right now? You seem so calm, you’re not even moving.

J: I had to become very zen and calm all the time because I’ve been struggling to build Jump for 20 years and faced disaster, it’s been a real struggle, so I had to become pretty zen. 

V: So when someone says “natural ability”, what do you say? Is there such a thing as natural ability? 

J: That's a complicated question. I think there's very little genetic component to math, there may be but I don’t think it’s strong or maybe it doesn’t have any influence. They did brain scans, part of my book is about this, they did brain scans of mathematicians recently and they thought they were using really high-level semantic processing language areas of brains, they got a real surprise when they found mathematicians, like myself, are using a part of the brain that has the same sense of space and number that kindergarten kids do. The very primitive part of the brain and logicians proved that a hundred years ago - I could have told you that without the research. Logicians proved a hundred years ago that all math can be unravelled into these trivial concepts that are the same as counting or putting objects in sets. 

They're accessible to any brain so that’s why I feel there is very little genetic component, it’s largely social. As early as kindergarten, kids start comparing themselves to each other and deciding who's smart and who isn't. If we're good at anything as a species, it’s knowing where we are in our pecking order and that's where all our problems come from.

V: I love that, yes yes yes.

J: Anthropologists call us status seeking primates. That’s the one talent we have, is knowing where we are in a pecking order. If not all kids could learn math, then they’d have to accept by kindergarten, grade 1, that’s they’re not in the talented group. But what if all kids could learn math? We couldn't have devised a better system for shutting down their natural abilities.

V: Oh my god. Is there some weird conspiracy do you think?

J: No! It’s just human ignorance. We had slaves a hundred years ago, people thought women couldn’t… Humans are just an ignorant species when it comes to observing ourselves. We see people who are struggling or don't like something, and we think that it's natural...

V: Right!

J: That there's nothing you can do about it, it's wired in their brains. But what we think is wired in our brains is our ability to rank ourselves in a hierarchy and give up, to shut our brains down, and that’s what’s happening. It’s not the difficulty of the math. As I’ve said we’ve got evidence that we can close the gap as late as grade 5.

V: Can I tell you my response? Tell me if you think this is acceptable because I feel like I need approval from someone. This is what I say, and you’re going to be the person who is going to approve. I say, I think there is a nature and nurture component to everything but that nature is grossly overrated and really, anything that has been provided by nature can be overcome with enough nurture.

J: Yeah and I don’t feel comfortable outside of math although I would say, I’ve taught creative writing this way.

V: Okay, let’s say math.

J: I know the most data for math. In math, it’s largely nurture and it’s never too late for anyone to catch up, even adults.

V: Oh my god we have to talk about that next!

J: So I could teach an adult calculus in an hour so they get a sense of what it means and how it works. It's never too late and if you actually engage in the math, you'll see that you have the capacity, the things you need, the parts of your brain that you need to learn math are all functioning perfectly well.

V: Ugh, I love it. Okay, wait I have to tell you some crazy news. I was actually about to do this. I feel like this is The Ellen Show but we're not as famous. Okay so, last season we had this woman named Yvonne on the podcast. She’s actually one of our students, she’s in her sixties - is she in her sixties? Fifties, sixties, you know what is age, it’s just a number. Anyways, so we had her on the podcast because she is an adult in her fifties or sixties, we don't know, who has decided that on her bucket list is to learn math. Honestly you should listen to this episode. It's so beautiful, it's all about how she was saying that her bucket list contains items that she thinks will lead her to freedom. So for example, one of them is swimming, one of them is riding a bike, and this other one is math. Are you ready to literally cry? She said that one of the reasons she felt this way is because she actually saw you speak and she brought her son to see you speak and you gave some inspirational talk and this actually alerted her to the fact that she was like, “You know what? I can do this.”. She failed math, she literally failed math over 10 times, and she’s now decided in her adult life, to not just learn math, but all the way through to calculus. Are you crying?

J: Yeah, that’s such a beautiful story.

V: It gets better (Laughing). Because our podcast is Math Therapy, we had this whole thing last season where every episode we’d give our guests a prescription, we’re not going to give you one - it got really annoying. But her prescription, her task at the end, was to write you an open letter. So she wrote you this whole letter.

J: Oh wow.

V: I know. So she wrote this: “The myth of ability inspired me to take up the task of lifelong learning in math which is no easy feat as I have the mother of all math phobias. Your book gave me hope where none existed. I had put the possibility of learning math far behind me.”, stop, so cute. Also, her son came and she was saying they sat in the front row and the son did not want to be there and you right away picked on him, like right away got him to answer a question and he was so engaged and because of you she says her son just finished his undergrad in math.

J: Oh wow, that’s fantastic news.

V: Look at you! Oh my god. How do you feel? My question is, what is your reaction to that? But I’m looking at you so I can tell.

J: My reaction is really complicated because it moves me deeply to hear that but it also makes me sad because that kind of change I saw in kids for the last 20 years. I once taught a grade 3 class fractions well beyond their grade level and after a couple months, they all wrote a test, they had to sit there for about 40 minutes, even kids with attention problems. They wrote a test that a lot of high school kids would have struggled with in fractions, and they all got over a 90 on it but the most amazing thing was the kids who missed the test begged to write it because they knew it wouldn’t be a punishment or a ranking - it would be a reward for their hard work and that's what tests should be.

V: Yeah I love that! I always say tests are an opportunity to show off.

J: Yeah, exactly. So here's why I'm a bit zen right now, because I saw that 15 years ago and I saw that within a couple months, you could take grade 3 students well beyond grade level and they would be loving math, cheering for math, begging to do extra math but I haven't been able to make it happen really. So I had to shut down part of my brain to do this work because you see kids falling through the cracks daily, just falling through the cracks, so I'm incredibly inspired to hear a story like that and I'm so glad that this woman has decided to finally reach her full potential, but it breaks my heart that she had to wait till that age and that the vast majority of kids will either never get that opportunity, or will have to wait a long time before they realize they have the talent.

V: I completely feel that way too anytime I get a message like that but at the same time I’m like, whatever, if you can make one person's life on the planet better, it’s better than nothing.

J: So that’s why it’s thrilling, but it also is so sad that she had to wait til then and that if we don’t change things, a lot of kids are going to have to wait.

V: Are you into manifestation at all? 

J: I don’t know what that is.

V: Really?

J: I’m kind of spiritual, but it’s a weird spirituality.

V: Like what kind of weird?

J: So I never feel more of a sense of spirituality than when I'm doing math or science because you realize that there's this beauty and depth in the design of the universe that just transcends human imagination. We would think kids are stunted if they didn't see any beauty in a mountain or a star, we’d think there was something wrong with their education, they're missing something, but we think it's natural for the vast majority of people to graduate from high school without any appreciation of the invisible beauty of the world which you can only see through mathematics and science. 

It’s like walking through the most beautiful park you could imagine and there's just endless vistas and endless things to explore. That's my spirituality and I think it's a tragedy that kids don't grow up with that spiritually, that understanding of nature at a much deeper level and that understanding of the invisible beauty of the world. That should be a right of every child and that’s what’s taken away from them.

V: This is so beautiful. On that note, I saw that you have Euler’s theorem on the back of your book.

J: Yeah.

V: I have a tattoo on my finger. I just feel like that ties in perfectly because the reason I got Euler’s theorem tattooed was for that exact reason. I mean you probably know more about the proof than I do but I was always taught that the story was, if the human race was eradicated and we came back to Earth, would we discover the same math? Or was the math here for us to discover? Euler's theorem, to me, from what I read, was his proof that nothing could exist in such perfection and beauty, like there's no way, and that must mean that there's a higher power that has created it. 

J: Hm. Yeah I don’t know it’s so complicated. There’s a great science fiction writer who said he had a problem with a lot of science fiction because the assumption is always that if we met aliens, we would understand them, they'd have kind of the same motivations as us and be at least comprehensible. He wrote these science fiction stories that are great because the aliens are just incomprehensible to us, their motivations, how they exist. I think it's the same with a higher power, I think everything's metaphorical but the one thing we can experience, this really intangibly is the beauty of mathematics and the beauty of science, the beauty of nature on every level - not just visible nature but invisible. That's in Euler’s formula, it's a breathtakingly beautiful formula because it connects things that you can't even imagine are connected.

V: Yeah and I definitely don’t even understand it.

J: Well yeah I barely understand it. (Laughing)

V: (Laughing) Okay good that makes me feel better. 

J: It’s not my branch of math but I could understand it and you could understand if you spent a week or so.

V: Oh my god should we do an Euler’s boot camp? Maybe we need to do that.

J: Yeah if you know basic calculus, you can understand.

V: Okay, I can rock a derivative.

J: You can get an idea of where it comes from.

V: Okay, amazing. Final two questions. First question, if you could name one thing you think that schools need to change about the way they teach math, what would it be?

J: They need to adopt more evidence based practices of teaching and make sure people who are making decisions around what programs are being used, have some knowledge of cognitive science, and also some willing to test things. Why only take one program into a district? Why not test several, do them all properly, and see which ones work?

V: Great answer. Okay so, quick question since we’re both artists... I failed math twice, grade 11 math, I always wanted to be a famous rockstar and marry Keanu Reeves - still do. I think he's actually single because he brought his mom to the Oscars last night. I am now in a rock band, it’s all happening, but I was always taught that I wasn't a math person. So when I failed math twice, everyone said it was because I was more of an artsy type. You also come from an arts background, you were a playwright. Did you ever get that type of label or did you ever think that because you were a playwright and into the artsy stuff that you were not mathematically competent or enthusiastic?

J: No actually the playwriting helped me realize I was mathematically competent.

V: How?

J: Well because when I was about 21, I didn’t do well in math or creative writing. Occasionally I did but I had a really fixed mindset because I was afraid of working too hard because I’d meet my limits so I didn't. I'd sometimes do terribly in both subjects and then I read Sylvia Plath’s letters to her mother, she was a poet and it was clear she became a writer by sheer determination. She would memorize poems, write imitations of poems, and as she learned her craft you could see her voice start to come into her poetry. She became one of the most original poets of the century so that was a revelation to me at age 21, that you could actually develop a skill for something, that you didn’t have to be born with it. Through practice and imitation. So it was through doing that in playwriting that I realized eventually that I could learn, I became a professional playwright, and that’s partially what gave me the confidence to go back into math later. I thought maybe I can do the same thing in math.

V: That is so cool. It's funny because it was the opposite for me. I ended up having a teacher, I told her that I wasn’t a math person and she just looked at me and said, “You're not a what?”, and I ended up getting a 99 in math.

J: That’s so lucky that you met her.

V: We’re best friends to this day. I actually messaged her and told her John Mighton’s coming over, and she was like oh my god! Anyways, once I had the confidence to do that I thought I could learn anything and that's actually why I ended up starting a band.

J: Oh wow, exact opposite.

V: Yeah, the exact opposite but it’s still that idea that we're both talking about of instilling confidence and showing kids, or adults or whoever, that through hard work and practice, literally anything is possible.

J: Here’s the interesting part, if you learn that in one subject, you can transfer it to any subject and that’s the tragedy with math. I once taught a grade six class where there was a 3 grade level difference between the top and the bottom, but by the end of the class, within 40 minutes they were all doing roughly the same problems.

V: Within 40 minutes!?

J: Yeah because there's only a few things that you have to assess or catch them up on and then they can get to grade level. I couldn't do that in reading. Reading is far more complex. In mathematics I can always equalize a class within a lesson or two, right up to grade nine or ten usually. It’s the only subject you can do that in, it's the only subject that can be reduced into such simple concepts and usually there’s not a lot of scaffolding you need to get to grade level.  That’s the tragedy, kids could be learning that sense of self-efficacy, that they could do anything through hard work and practice in math more quickly than any other subject,

V: Which is so crazy!

J: Which is why we should be using math as the great equalizer. That’s the subject where you can reduce hierarchies most quickly and teach every kid to have a sense of wonder, a sense of curiosity, a sense that they could master anything.

V: And isn’t that the most important skill we could possibly teach a young person?

J: Yeah and you can teach it in math in a couple lessons.

V: That’s crazy!

J: Most people wouldn’t believe that math is the strongest predictor of academic success for young kids, even more than reading. There's all kinds of research showing it's connected to your financial health, even your physical health, numeracy, our economies suffer, we have trouble even developing sustainable economies because we don't make good decisions. All  we care about is gross national product, doesn't matter if we're producing toxic plastic flamingos, if we're doing a good job producing it, we have a great economy. Those are terrible measures. We don’t understand risk, we had a financial crisis because people couldn’t figure out what happened when their mortgages went up.

V: It’s simple math to figure that out!

J: Very simple. We can't take any action against global warming because we don't understand how serious the risk is so those are all incredible losses we suffer from not being numerate but the deeper loss is our sense of wonder, self-advocacy, a loss of potential, that’s for me the deepest loss. Everyone should have a right to realize their full intellectual potential.

V: Ugh, I could not agree more! Literally you are saying what I would say but way more articulately. Love it. Okay last question, what would you say to someone who says they are not a math person?

J: What I say to kids is, “What's your favourite sport?”,”You love hockey, imagine someone taught you very young that you couldn't play hockey, they made you hate the game. Imagine how much less rich your life would be and if that ever happened to you, you couldn't even imagine how good of a hockey player you could be. It’s the same thing in math, you don’t know how much fun you’ll have, how much you’ll love learning math unless you actually try it.”.

V: Amazing. This has been the highlight of my life! Top 10, not full highlight but top 10, you get top 10 for sure. Thank you so much.

J: Oh you’re welcome, thank you.

V: Wow wow wow wow wow. I don't even know what to say because there were so many things that just blew my mind but I think what really stands out is the idea that math is actually the greatest equalizer but we treat it like the most divisive subject. Oh my god, see how many math terms I just used? Educational policy makers, if you're listening, please hire Dr. John Mighton to help redesign the curriculum. The system is broken and we need to fix it. 

Okay cool, I’m going to stop yelling at you now but if you want to know more and if you want more John in your life, grab one of his books, “The Myth of Ability” or “All Things Being Equal”, and don't find him on social media because he doesn't use it, as I’ve discovered the hard way. As always, you can find everything we talked about on our show notes at themathguru.ca/maththerapy . Follow us on all social media @themathguru for more Math Therapy and more of me until next season starts again. 

Of course, a reminder that Math Therapy is hosted by me, Vanessa Vakharia, produced by Sabina Wex, and edited by David Kochberg. Our theme song is Waves by Goodnight Sunrise which is my band and guys, it's been a good one. I can't believe we did it. We made it through season 2, our second season of this amazing podcast and we couldn't have done it without you. So if you know someone who needs math therapy or just needs to listen to someone else get it, please please please share the podcast, write a review on any podcast app that you use, and stay in touch. I am determined to change the culture surrounding math and I know you are too and you guys are helping me so much, so keep on spreading the word. Well, that's all for this season but don't worry, we'll be back. That sounds like a threat but I meant it as a promise. Until then, get out there and do some math or at the very least, get out there and know you can do math if you ever want to. Peace out guys! Xoxo, Gossip Girl!