Chapter 8: Counteracting the Language of Math Ability: Prospective Teachers Explore the Role of Status in Elementary Classrooms

The prospective elementary teachers in our teacher education classes are quick to notice wide differences in the mathematical skills and knowledge among the elementary students in their internship classrooms. They are not surprised by what they see: this was the way it was in their own elementary classrooms a decade or more earlier. They have a ready explanation for the differences they observe: some people are born with an ability to do math—they are “math people”—while others are not. Prospective teachers rarely ascribe the differences among students that they observe to anything that has happened at school.

Like other teacher educators, we want teachers and prospective teachers with whom we work to believe that all the children in their classes are capable of learning mathematics with understanding. As long as they see differences in skill as evidence that some children have an innate ability to do math while others are not so blessed, they are likely to feel limited optimism about teaching all of their students to understand mathematics.