It’s this metastasized concept of identity that scares me. The traditional response to “I’m not a math person” was to reassure students that, hey, you don’t hav

It’s this metastasized concept of identity that scares me. The traditional response to “I’m not a math person” was to reassure students that, hey, you don’t have to be a math person to learn and get value from math. (This is where culturally responsive education was understood to come in - it helps students realize that math is useful for them no matter who they are and where they come from.) Now the conventional wisdom seems to be that you do have to be a math person, and teachers had better work hard on cultivating a “math person” identity, because otherwise there’s no way their students can learn math. I think this is a false belief that will make education quite a bit worse if acted on. I would never have learned to write well if teachers told me I needed to identify as a writer first!