I’m biased; I love math. So I plan to talk a lot about it. And here, I want to try to disprove a common belief.

It’s the common belief that there are “math people” and people who just don’t get math.

And sure, there are some genetic predispositions to intelligence. But we are by no means limited to them.

It’s a label that was given to me all throughout high school: “the smart kid.” I never really liked it. Especially in my elementary and middle school years, I was mostly shy, never really looking for attention.

Basically, what this label meant was that if anyone ever needed help for anything, they would come and ask me (This has paid off, as I am now a tutor making decent money at PSU KnowHow downtown).

But the truth is, I’m really not the “smart kid.” The widely considered best measure of intelligence is the Intelligence Quotient. In what I believe to be the most reliable IQ test I have ever taken (it is hard to find a good one for free), my intelligence is considered to be between the 60^th and 70^th percentile.

For the anti-math folk, that means that approximately 30-40 percent of the population is more intelligent than me. This is nowhere near the “genius” range.

So how was I able to produce the outward appearance that I was “smart?” I’ve had lots of academic achievements I am proud of, but the big one to start it all was skipping kindergarten.

I didn’t skip kindergarten because I was “gifted.” Learning has always come relatively easy to me, but I did do a lot of hard work in my youngest years. And I think it came out of my curiosity for things. I wanted to know how to read books. So I taught myself at age 3. I wanted to do math problems. So I learned from my grandfather how to do multiplication and division at age 4.

While lots of other kids were out “picking their noses,” I was beginning my days of the path to nerdiness. And I’m proud of it.

My point of this is, we as America have a problem—in fact we have a “math problem.”

Here is the math problem we need to solve as a nation: Given that we are in a world where math skills are needed, how are we going to allocate our resources in a more efficient way?

And while college is the easy answer, since it is the place where career choices are made, I would argue that K-12 education is where efficiency needs to be better achieved.

Studies have shown that there is some sort of plasticity to our intelligence. Low-achieving students who were convinced that intelligence can be molded via hard work were found to improve much greater in school than did the control group.

The previous article also mentions how the fact that people say “they aren’t math people” is in fact a self-fulfilling prophecy, meaning people who say they are not good at math will not be good at math, because they will not put in as much effort as they would otherwise.

So my point is, we need, as public school advocates, to convince children that they can achieve in these math classes via hard work.

Because math is not about how intelligent you are. It’s about putting yourself in the correct frame of mind, and putting in some form of hard work (admittedly, it does come easier for some than others).

This is a great lesson for students, especially at a young age, to learn. It’s the lesson that with hard work comes success. If we can instill the value of hard work in many more Americans, the future workplace productivity would be so much higher than it is now.

On top of that, I don’t even need to cite statistics; there are a shortage of STEM majors. And if we change the attitude in public schools towards mathematics, than more people will become interested in the field.

STEM obviously isn’t for everyone, but it is for more people than we think. I have been lucky to see the perfection in mathematics, and it is a perfection that is greater than many other things that are found in other career fields.

As my economics teacher in high school said: “Attitude is everything.” I believe that could be a powerful philosophy if taken up in schools across the nation.