John Mighton is a fellow at the Fields Institute For Research In Mathematical Sciences at the University of Toronto, and the founder of JUMP Math, a non-profit organization that teaches math to kids. JUMP stands for Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies. Mighton’s key message is that anyone can do math, that there are no inborn math geniuses. By resisting the school system’s tendency to judge children according to a hierarchy of abilities, Mighton works with children to help develop their latent potential. Mighton uses research on neuroplasticity—the study of how the brain physically reorganizes itself in response to new experiences—to inform his philosophy of “emergent intelligence,” in which rigorous, guided practice can unlock a child’s untapped talent in math.

In addition to being an accomplished mathematician, Mighton is also an accomplished author and playwright. In 1992 he won the Governor General’s Award for Drama for two plays: Possible Worlds and A Short History of Night. He won again in 2005 for his play Half Life. The jury called it “a theatrical masterpiece that is an important addition to the Canadian canon.” He was also awarded the Siminovitch Prize in Theatre for his body of work. His two nonfiction books, The Myth of Ability and The End of Ignorance: Multiplying Our Human Potential, discuss the development of his ideas about math and how mathematical ability can be fostered in every child.

Mighton sat down to chat with The Varsity about JUMP, chaos theory, Sylvia Plath, and how he ended up with a cameo in Good Will Hunting.

Alex Ross: The story of how you came to love mathematics is really inspiring. What started your love of math, and how did you come back to it after nearly failing calculus in first year university?

John Mighton: I had always been interested in math as a kid and I also read a lot of science fiction. I read about time travel and all of these interesting ideas that were coming out of physics at the same time. So I thought math and physics were very magical subjects, and I wanted to study them, but wasn’t that confident. I’d often compare myself to kids who would write in competitions and do well at math effortlessly, so I had some doubts I could be a mathematician. I really got back into it when I started tutoring kids to make some money when I started out as a playwright. Going back to the high school material at my own pace and having to explain things that were mysterious to me in high school became easier and easier, more obvious, and I finally thought I had the confidence to go back and do something, so that’s why I didn’t [get my PhD in mathematics] until my 30s.

AR: Tell us about JUMP Math, its origin and purpose.

JM: It’s a charity and a not-for-profit organization. It started as a tutoring club in my apartment, I just wanted to help some local kids, and I asked the local principal to send some kids who were struggling. I didn’t really anticipate what would happen with JUMP. I felt I had a pretty privileged life and I just wanted to give something back to kids who were struggling in school and couldn’t hire a tutor. We got such amazing results in the first year. I saw changes in kids that I never would have believed or expected and I started investing more and more time into JUMP. And gradually we began working in classrooms. The program has changed now, we don’t provide tutors – we work directly with teachers to provide them with workbooks for their curriculum in Grades 1 to 8.

AR: In your books, you discuss how you train your tutors, some of whom haven’t done math in a while or are afraid of it. How do you make sure somebody who may not be as adept at math can become involved?

JM: First, assume that everyone has the ability to learn math, but people are easily overwhelmed by too much information. There’s a lot of research in psychology now that says our brains can only handle one or two things at a time, new facts or new techniques. We have to learn very slowly, and we require lots of practice. We take the exact same approach with tutors as we do with kids. We just break the math down and help them build their confidence. We give them lots of practice and support. […] We find that when you give people that support they can become better tutors or teachers of math.

AR: What inspired you about Sylvia Plath and the way she taught herself poetry?

JM: The idea that you could imitate other people and that you could practice your craft, and that you didn’t necessarily have to create original stuff—you just had to learn a craft. It’s really been the basis of everything that I have done since. There’s this new book I read, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which looks at very successful people, and found that there is usually 10,000 hours of practice that lies behind their success that’s hidden, that nobody really knows about, because they just seem to develop these abilities out of nowhere. But that’s not the case for most people, even highly successful people. Occasionally, people just seem to develop genius or talent or originality out of nowhere, but usually you can trace it back to an enormous amount of commitment. […]

I call the JUMP method “guided discovery.” It’s very important that kids learn to work independently, that they take risks, that they be creative, that they try to discover things, that they understand things deeply. On the other hand, we have to recognize the weakness of the brain, [laughs] those things often require an enormous amount of rigorous instruction or guidance and so you need a balance, always letting kids discover things as much as possible, but guiding them when they need it. It’s very simple. It’s not rocket science; all good teachers do that. It’s not any kind of big revelation. You always let them balance being independent and making discoveries, and guiding them when they need it.

AR: How do you reconcile progressive and traditionalist perspectives on teaching?

JM: I don’t think we’ve communicated that enough in JUMP, because we’re a charity and I’m always struggling to even have the time to create the material. I believe in a balance always. The progressivist ideas are very positive and there is an enormous amount of value in them, because you don’t want to just teach kids in a rote way, or in a way that they don’t understand, or they have no commitment to. It’s very healthy, the progressivist movement. But what we try and balance this with at JUMP is a recognition of how much support students sometimes need. I think it’s an easy balance.

You can structure your lessons so that you assess what your students need to know. You let them discover things throughout the lesson, but you make sure you’re constantly assessing. It’s not a hard balance. You always have enough work for the faster kids to keep them occupied, but that doesn’t go too far. We’re meeting more and more teachers who can do that balance. We have one teacher who is an absolute inspiration to me, who within two years took a classroom that was very mixed ability, according to standardized tests, and in two years she got them all writing in the Pythagoras Competition. 14 of 17 students got awards of distinction, and three came within a few marks. There are teachers who know how to strike that balance on top of everything else.

AR: How do you overcome the tendency to separate students as superior or inferior?

JM: I don’t know the answer to that completely. One of the problems is when you teach kids in a way that doesn’t take into account the weakness of the brain, or the fact that we need so much practice. If you neglect that, you’ll get a pretty random distribution of results, it’ll be a pretty wide bell curve. So that’s the number-one problem, that in university we produce these very wide bell curves and results, and I believe I know why. Math is like a ladder. You miss a step, you can’t go on. You lose your confidence and your brain stops working efficiently. You need to look at why we are producing those differences and those hierarchies. It’s very hard to do that since all of the evidence seems to suggest that there are natural differences between kids, so it’s a circular situation. The only way you can really combat that is by gathering data and showing those very wide bell curves aren’t necessary. That’s why we have been trying to publicize the results of this teacher: it shows very clearly that you don’t have to have those differences.

AR: You played the character Tom in Good Will Hunting. How did you become involved with the film and how did you deal with its subject of a born math genius, an idea that you’re firmly against?

JM: Well, I expressed that problem the minute they asked me if I wanted me to be a math consultant. I expressed the problem I had with the movie, and they were willing to work with me, or at least to think about that. But through a series of miscommunications, I actually ended up in the movie and not being the math consultant. But they were very, very generous, and they let me add that little monologue in the middle of the movie that kind of expressed my view. So that’s how I reconciled it. I say in the middle of the movie that most people never find the teachers that believe in them and then they get convinced they’re stupid and that they can’t do something. They were extremely generous and it was fun.

AR: In addition to writing two books on mathematics, you’re also an award-winning playwright. How did you develop as a writer?

JM: My development in every field—in math, in writing—has been very, very slow. After I discovered that Sylvia Plath imitated other poets, I started imitating her work, and other poets. In theatre, it took me years before I wrote anything that I felt had my own voice. It’s just been relentless practice and study of other writers and so on. It’s hard to say what worth your work has. You can’t really know, especially in the arts. It’s easier in math to know, because if you prove something, it’s true unless you made a massive mistake. In the arts it’s very hard to know the worth of your work. I certainly feel I have developed a craft, and I am more confident that if I have an experience, or hear about something, I can find a form for it on stage. […]

Some of my best ideas in theater come from philosophy, mathematics or science, and I made discoveries in math that I think came from literary training. There is a sense of analogy I have and also I ask very strange questions, because I did philosophy. People sometimes think it’s unusual that I am doing the arts and the sciences: if you’re using one half of your brain, the other has to be left empty for storage. It’s not the case. We should have integrated brains. That’s why I am so passionate about JUMP. Kids should be able to do the arts and the sciences. Everything I have done has been driven by a sense of wonder more than anything, when I read a really great author or see a great mathematical proof, I get this sense of absolute wonder about the beauty of the universe and I think that’s a kind of birthright of kids. That’s the most unfortunate thing for me: that so many kids are shut off from a sense of wonder.

AR: How do you maintain a sense of wonder?

JM: If you throw away insecurities around whether I am good or not, whether I am going to succeed or whatever—if you throw that away and just start loving the process, and loving what you’re learning, then you’re not going to have any problem manufacturing a sense of wonder. The world simply supplies it, the world is simply so elegant and beautiful and complex. Of course, there are terrible aspects of the world that come mainly from us. But if you keep trying to look beyond those things, it’s very easy to be inspired all the time. What stops us is our insecurities more than anything, because we feel “if I am not going to be the best, then why bother” or “this is beyond me.” I’ve seen classrooms where as soon as you take away the hierarchy and you let all the kids succeed in the class and stop competing against each other—but compete against the problem—you get to a different level. And when kids are given the support, it’s magical: the whole class ignites. You have kids who are not being mean to each other or are competing, they’re all excited about it.

AR: The TDSB produced a position paper that accused JUMP of being too procedural and having too much rote learning. What are they missing? Why is their opinion so misguided?

JM: I can take some blame because I haven’t had time to communicate with people too often, so when I’m quoted in the paper, people make my position out to be more extreme than it actually is. They do not communicate the subtleties of my argument.

I should say first of all the school system has really opened up to JUMP, our problems are starting to melt away. There are still some problems, but people have begun informing themselves about our data, about what the program really is. A lot of people didn’t know we had free teacher’s guides. I talked to many people who had problems with the program who didn’t know they exist and had never gone to read them, whereas if they did, they would see it’s a very balanced program.

The final thing is there is a lot of debate about the best ways to teach kids, and there’s a lot of new data and research coming out of psychology that says people have to take account of how much practice we need. That research will take a while coming out of the system, and until people look at that research they won’t understand why JUMP is the way it is, why it has been built in the way it has.