Last week, I had the privilege of interviewing a number of poor students at a community college in the southwest.  By “poor students,” I do not mean that these individuals have faulty study habits; I mean that they are broke.  These are individuals who are living below our Nation’s poverty line, and who have come to the realization that an education may be the key to a better life for them and their families.

One single mother of a middle school child confessed to me that her math classes have been the single biggest academic obstacle she has faced since returning to school.

She said, “You see, I don’t do math.”

I laughed politely, assuming that she was making reference to a popular phrase (earlier that day, one of the staff at the college had said to me, “I don’t do Starbucks.”).

“No,” she continued, “I don’t do math.  I stopped doing math when I was 13.”

It caught me off-guard.  She was serious, and, for a moment, my mind raced as it attempted to comprehend exactly what that meant.  I could not imagine going through life without doing any arithmetic.

She went on to describe an incident from her middle school years.  It seems that her seventh grade math teacher had belittled her in front of the whole class.  She had been singled out, derided and made to sit alone at a desk apart from the other students.

What she did or said to deserve such treatment is irrelevant to this point:  school was not a safe place for her.  It singled her out for scrutiny at period in her life, a period in all of our lives, when the opinions of others are incredibly important.  As a result, she started associating math with shame and failure, so she stopped doing it.

She stopped doing math, and I am starting this blog.  I am starting this blog because my research, education and experience are bursting with examples like this, as are those of my colleagues.  More importantly, we know how children and adolescents excel or fail, why they flourish or flounder, and how to nudge them down one path or another.

The picture of our children and adolescents painted by a hundred years of research is clear.  Unfortunately, the pictures held by too many people in authority over them, including parents and teachers, is fuzzy or all-together wrong.  It creates a distance between adults and youth that hinders real communication and growth.

I hope this blog, in a very small way, can help change that.