I know that this makes me a terrible person in the ed biz, but there is just so much that I don’t understand about the growth mindset. The idea, from what I can tell, is that every person’s academic potential is unbounded and that one can do anything if one believes that it is possible to get limitlessly smarter through hard work. There has got to be something that I’m missing or some unstated assumptions that I don’t also unstatedly assume because there is so much that I just don’t get (and questions that I have not seen asked).

  1. First off, isn’t this super-offensive to people with disabilities? Especially those with intellectual, developmental, and learning disabilities (both those present since early childhood and those acquired later). Oh, student, the reason that you are not succeeding is because you have the wrong mindset. It is not because you have an extra chomosome or an uncommon balance of neurotransmitters or a bunch of brain cells that got injured in an accident; it is because you just don’t believe that you can be smarter and you are not trying hard enough. This can’t really be part of the growth mindset canon, can it?

  2. Or is there an asterisk saying that everyone can be smarter except for some people? How do we know which people are in which group?

  3. And isn’t this really a form of victim-blaming when students don’t succeed? My students failed calculus, so they must have fixed mindsets. Too bad so sad. They just need to get their attitude in order, and then they will succeed. I’ve seen way too much of this nonsense, especially when it came to blaming college algebra students for failing college algebra. There is plenty of blame to go around.

  4. But if all the mindset people are claiming is that a very large fraction of people have the intellectual capacity to learn the equivalent of what I think of as ninth-grade algebra, possibly with a lot of work and some remediation (cough fractions cough), then sure, I can buy into that. I totally believe that most people have the capacity to learn that sort of algebra. I also believe that adults who haven’t previously learned that material might have higher priorities in their life than getting their math skills to the point where they really understand algebra.

  5. Maybe I just feel personally threatened, and I want to make a #notallfixedmindset hashtag. Every time someone tries to explain mindset theory, they spin a tale about fixed mindset people that does not at all match with my lived experience as a fixed mindset person. Mindset canon says that I should give up—especially at STEM-type things—when something is hard. But that is not the case at all. I observe that lots of stupid people are successful at whatever the thing is, so it can’t really be that hard, and I should be able to figure it out.

  6. Likewise, the studies about how growth mindset students will continue to truck along when assigned a literally-impossible problem and fixed mindset students will give up after making no headway. Depending on the nature of the problem, I could realistically see myself proving to myself that there are no solutions, so I would stop looking for solutions.

  7. Also, since I am good at a lot of things, and I enjoy a lot of things (but not all things cough the French language cough), why shouldn’t I optimize and choose how to spend my time based on a utility function that depends both on how much I enjoy the thing and how much of my time spent doing it is productive?

  8. An aside, mostly about giving up at things, is that many times in my life I have been told that I should do something because I am good at it / it is prestigious and I could do it so I should do it. No one ever seemed to care about what I would enjoy doing. If I could support myself in the manner to which I have become acustomed by hacking vintage knitting machines to do new and fabulous things, I could really get into that. But my accumulated lifetime experiences have led me to value having a predictable way to make sure that the bills get paid.