In solitary confinement, a man serving twenty-five years fell into a habit that would rewrite his life. An older inmate pushed a packet of basic algebra under his cell door. Within a few years, Christopher Havens had taught himself number theory and published original mathematics from prison. He had dropped out of high school. He held no memory of ever being good with numbers. The ability was there the whole time. It had simply never been switched on.
FROM THE VIDEO
Key moments from the Math Therapy podcast with host Vanessa Vicaria and Christopher Havens:
Common questions from parents
Is being a ‘math person’ something you are born with?
My child says they hate math. How do I respond without making it worse?
How do I know if it is a deeper math difficulty like dyscalculia?
Is it too late if my child is already in middle or high school?
A man serving 25 years discovered math in solitary, taught himself number theory, and published it. Your child's "I'm bad at math" was never a verdict either.
The Label Lands Long Before the Ability Is Settled
Your child is not broken, and they were not born without a number sense. Yet math is often the first subject where a child gets quietly sorted into a column: good at it, or not. The host of the conversation behind this story is now a math educator. She failed math twice in high school. For years she was told she was not the type of person who does math. She was wrong about herself, and so were the people who told her. The verdict arrived early and stuck, which is exactly how these labels work.
Here is the part that changes everything once you see it. “I am bad at math” is not a description of where your child stands. It is a prediction about where they are headed, and a developing brain acts on its own predictions. A child who has decided the door is closed stops pushing on it. The lack of practice then looks like proof. This is the quiet engine behind the idea of a math person. A child absorbs that story as young as six and carries it for decades, unless someone interrupts it.
“I am bad at math” is not a description of where your child stands. It is a prediction they are making about where they are headed.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
What Brain Science Says About ‘Math People’
The science is not on the side of the label. Jo Boaler, a mathematics-education researcher at Stanford, puts it plainly: there is no math gene and no math brain. Brain-imaging research shows that experience grows the brain and that effort over time reshapes its pathways. Difficulty and mistakes are not signs that something is wrong. The struggle a parent instinctively wants to rescue a child from is part of how that wiring strengthens.
This is not motivational-poster talk. It is what the imaging shows about how a brain rewires itself with the right kind of input. Christopher Havens is the living version of it. He watched his own thinking and behavior change as he studied. He went from a person with no goals to a working researcher whose papers passed peer review. The foundation under all of it was number sense, the feel for how quantities relate. Every later math skill rests on it, and it builds through practice rather than arriving as a gift at birth.
Key takeaways
- The label is a prediction: "I'm bad at math" describes where a child expects to go, not a fixed ceiling.
- There is no math gene: Brain-imaging shows practice and struggle physically grow the pathways math runs on.
- Connection switches it on: A person who answers and believes mattered more than raw talent for one prison mathematician.
The Thing That Actually Switched It On
So what flipped the switch for a high-school dropout in a cell? Not raw talent that had been hiding. Studying alone with no one to ask, Havens wrote to a mathematics journal for help. The request was passed along, and a mentor in Italy began answering his letters. That single connection, he says, changed the game. He went on to build the Prison Mathematics Project. The goal was simple: give other people the same thing without the years-long wait. Someone who answers, and who believes the work is worth doing.
Your child needs the version of that you already are. You do not need a math degree to be the person who interrupts the label. Try a few specific moves this week:
- Name the effort, not the trait. “You kept going on that one” builds a learner. “You’re so smart” builds something fragile.
- Find a different way in. When one explanation stalls, a second route to the same idea often lands. The problem was rarely your child’s brain.
- Treat a wrong answer as information, not a referendum. A page of work that ends in a mistake is the brain doing the exact thing that grows it.
- Protect the story your child tells about themselves. Every session that ends in “I did it” is rewriting the prediction underneath.
Asked what he would say to someone certain they are not a math person, Havens had an answer. You were taught by the wrong person. There are beauties in mathematics you have not been shown yet. Give another person a chance. A fixed verdict turns back into a fixable mismatch.
A page of work that ends in a wrong answer is the brain doing the exact thing that grows it.
Laura Lurns · Learning Success expert
You want your child to walk into a math class without flinching, to believe the door is open to them, and to carry a sense of their own capability into everything that comes after. The thing standing in the way is rarely your child’s brain. It is a system that sorts children into ‘math people’ and the rest of us, often by the age of six, and hands some of them a story about themselves that quietly closes doors for decades. You are the one positioned to interrupt that story before it hardens.
If your child has started to believe the door is closed, Brain Bloom builds the underlying cognitive foundations, including the number sense and working memory that math leans on, so the skill grows alongside the confidence.
And math struggle rarely travels alone. Children who find numbers hard often also wrestle with working memory, attention, or processing speed, and the self-doubt spreads from one subject into the whole day. Nobody will ever advocate for your child the way you will, and that involvement is not optional. All Access gives you the full set of tools to meet the whole child, not one label.
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Your school district must evaluate your child free of charge if you ask in writing, whatever your income and whatever the outcome (US, 34 CFR 300.111 and 300.301(b)). That route takes time and answers a different question than you do. This one starts today, from what you already know.
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