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Canadian mathematician says numeracy leads to a better society

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All Things Being Equal:

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Why Math is the key to a better world

John Mighton

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Publisher Knopf Canada

It’s more than two decades since Canadian mathematician and playwright John Mighton found himself playing a small role in the film, Good Will Hunting. What he didn’t expect when he took on the job was that he would end up making a vital contribution to a screenplay that would go on to win an Oscar for its writers, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

What happened on that occasion tells you a great deal about Mighton’s commitment to the belief that society grossly underestimates the intellectual capacity of human beings — a belief reiterated with quiet eloquence in his latest book, All Things Being Equal.

The film’s interiors were being shot at the University of Toronto, and Mighton had originally been invited to to serve as consultant on a project that dealt with the trials and tribulations of a young mathematical genius played Matt Damon. The consulting assignment fell through; instead director Gus Van Sant asked Mighton to take on the role of a fellow student who is jealous of the main character, Will Hunting.

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Mighton loved the experience but as shooting continued he became troubled over his involvement in a movie that played “heavily on the idea that geniuses like Will are born and not made.” This was anathema to his own beliefs as a mathematician and he finally summoned up the courage to ask Affleck and Damon if he could write a few extra lines for his character. This speech was the result: “Most people never get the chance to see how brilliant they can be. They don’t find teachers who believe in them. They get convinced they’re stupid.”

At a time of growing controversy across Canada over the teaching of mathematics in school and continuing evidence of diminishing student results, Mighton continues to feel gratitude to the makers of Good Will Hunting for heeding his concerns.

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“A lot of people think that you’re either born with a mathematical ability or not — like the boy in the movie,” Mighton says now. “So the film’s artistic team was very generous in allowing me to add those lines because it counterbalances such a view.”

A key purpose of Mighton’s new book is to confront widespread popular opinion by showing “how easy math can be when it’s taught well.” And his views are backed by his own success as a teacher.

“In North America there’s definitely been either a decline or stagnation in test math scores over the past decade,” Mighton says. “That has an impact on our economy because businesses can’t hire people with the skills they need to do the job — whether it’s a cashier unable to do a simple calculation or someone holding a tech position. Studies have shown that there just aren’t enough people with high enough levels of numeracy.”

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Mighton is on the phone from from Toronto, his voice soft-spoken but still edged with fervour. He pursues two successful careers — as an award-winning Canadian playwright and as a renowned mathematician and philosopher who has devoted a lifetime to developing strategies that foster the intellectual potential of all children through learning math. But even as he talks about his 2001 founding of JUMP Math, a respected charity that offers a radical alternative to conventional teaching of the subject, he’s anxious to remind you that he’s a guy who almost failed calculus at university and who once struggled to overcome his “own massive math anxiety.”

So, notwithstanding the glowing recognition (including five honorary doctorates at last count), he remains conscious of an underlying irony. His own epiphany didn’t happen until he was futilely struggling to make a living as a playwright and began cautiously tutoring schoolchildren in the subject in order to make some money.

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“I was broke,” Mighton says candidly, looking back on those days. He got the tutoring job because he had passed calculus at university — “I neglected to tell them about my marks,” he confesses in the book — but something profound happened once he started working with these students.

“I had always liked math but wasn’t sure at that point that I could learn it at a higher level,” he tells Postmedia. “I was still struggling. I thought maybe I could start tutoring at the lower levels and seeing if I could learn more.”

Recent studies continue to support what Mighton was learning all those years ago — the discovery that “math is a subject that should be accessible to every brain.”

“One of my first students was in a remedial Grade 6 class. He was convinced he couldn’t learn math — and he went on to a doctorate and is now a professor.”

“One of my first students was in a remedial Grade 6 class. He was convinced he couldn’t learn math — and he went on to a doctorate and is now a professor.” There’s a note of quiet satisfaction in Mighton’s voice as he recalls this student, and the book contains many examples of other break-throughs.

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The building blocks of JUMP philosophy were gradually taking shape, sustained by his belief that people can learn virtually anything through practice. But his book does sound some cautionary notes. If students push themselves too quickly out of a zone in which they are currently comfortable, they will suffer from “cognitive overload” and be overwhelmed. Academic “hierarchies” in the classroom are to be discouraged: “Kids can too easily rank and compare themselves, and if some feel they are in an inferior group, their brains stop working — they don’t engage.”

Then comes what he suspects is the most radical argument in the book — that youngsters cannot only learn and succeed at the same level but that “math is a subject that should be accessible to every brain.”

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He states the purpose of his latest book firmly in his final chapter:

“I believe that we would have a more equitable, civil and prosperous society if everyone had a basic understanding of simple algebra, fractions, ratios, percentages, probability and statistics. I also believe that almost any adult could acquire this fundamental; knowledge in several weeks.”

During those early days of tutoring, Mighton wasn’t just seeing changes in his students — he was seeing changes in himself. Which is why, in his early thirties, he returned to university, this time as a mathematics undergraduate, his research eventually earning him a major post-doctoral fellowship.

Now 62, Mighton is still astonished that responding to a job placement agency’s advertisement for tutors led to all this. And he still marvels at what has happened with JUMP, which began humbly as an after-school enterprise in his own Toronto apartment. “I just saw it as a tutoring group. I had no idea it would end up as a classroom program. Once we actually founded it as a charity, teachers started asking us into the classroom to help. So many kids were falling through the cracks unnecessarily.”

— Jamie Portman

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