The Myth of 'I'm Bad at Math'
The two authors, Kimball and Smith put their heads together to get their idea across through this article; that math ability is not the product of good genes, but hard work. The two strongly believe that They state that having a term called "math people" is a self-destructive idea. The fact that people classify their intelligence does not make sense to them (this classification mostly takes place in highschool among peers--for example, some would be working on AP Calculus and some doing Pre calc). There are two types of people: those who believe in Incremental orientation and Entity orientation. Incremental believe ability or intelligence to be malleable and that it could increase with effort. However entity orientation says people have certain amount of intelligence for each person and there's nothing we can change about it. The authors try to prove entitiy orientation wrong by providing information from a professor's research paper, surveys, experiement results and such. The reason why people focus so much on math is because they get you good jobs, and Americans believe that math is America's "fallacy of inborn ability". Also people are moving away from hard work and relying more on genetic determination of their intelligence.The two authors claim that if people put personal perseverance and effort, there will be no such thing as "math person" because everyone will be able to do it.
The beginning of the article starts with a quote, "I'm just not a math person". It definitely catches people's attentions because they've probably heard many people around them say the same thing. By the third sentence, "we've had enough", directly set forths that the authors are opposing the idea. The thesis is presented in the last sentence of the 2nd paragraph. It is very clearly stated and straight-forward so that there will be no confusion among the readers. The authors support their idea in many ways: personal experience, researches, experiments and such. However no specific statistic datas nor numbers were shown which lessened the credibility. Also their first proof was based on their personal experience as teachers teaching "many" years where they do not tell how many years they have teached, and exactly how many percent of students have they seen being effected on whatever they were testing. Although, the thesis, body and conclusion were very clear and distinct so the article was easy to understand. I think it could've been better if they also included a bit of humor because this type of topic fits well being satired. I think there were no problems at all of the authors getting their point across to the audience, because every statement they made was stated distinctively and clearly, all provided with some backup information.
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