Let Them Grow

“We want to be known but not to be memorized as though we cannot change.” 
- Beth Moore in All My Knotted Up Life: A Memoir

Once, I was making a seating chart for my physics class at the beginning of the year. One of our maintenance staff came in and saw what I was doing.  

• "Oh, it's so awful you have Seth Morris (fictional name). He's the worst!" he said.  
• I tried to ignore him, but he wasn't the kind of person who read social cues, so he kept talking, going on and on about this young man.  
• "I like him a lot," I replied. "He's bouncy, and that takes some energy to manage, but I'll take that over kids who won't participate."  

It turned out that the one experience this man had with Seth was when he trashed a bathroom during an extracurricular event when he in the 7th grade.  This kid was in my physics class his junior year, which means it had been four years since the event that this man was still holding against him.  

I think about that conversation sometimes, wishing I had handled it differently.  

• I wish I had said, "Yeah, he was a twerp in the 7th grade. We all were.  I'm glad no one holds my 7th grade twerp behavior against me now."  
• I wish I had said, "This kid is just trying to grow the heck up, and it would help if you got out of his way."  
• I wish I had confronted him in some way that might have prevented him from doing this in the future with other kids.  
• Alas, I did not do any of those things. Hindsight is always sharper.

One of the best parts of teaching in the school I was in was that I got to watch kids change as they grew. Because of my role as yearbook advisor, I often got to see kids from kindergarten through graduation.  I taught all 8th graders for 21 years.  For 11 years, I got them all again in 10th grade chemistry.  I often had 20-40 of them again in physics during their junior or senior years.  Let me tell you, the kid you know as an 8th grader is not the same young adult who graduates five years later.  Sometimes, they aren't the same at the end of the year as they were at the beginning.  Sometimes, I got the amazing experience of wondering how a kid was so different this week than he was last week.  Growth is not linear, so there are spurts and plateaus, and occasional regressions, followed by more spurts. 

In one of my favorite works by C.S. Lewis, Perelandra, the character known as The Green Lady describes learning in terms of agin. Every time Ransom explains something to her from Earth culture, she thanks him for making her older than she was before. We presume as people get older, they have experiences that teach them new things; her description was simply an alteration of that idea.  Seth, from my earlier story, had grown a lot between his 7th grade year and his junior year, and he was no longer a bathroom trasher.  In fact, he was likely the one who would have helped you clean up after an event.  

The reason this is on my mind today is that I had an interaction earlier this week.  There is a young man who comes into the Y every day.  I'll call him Kadeen. He's a handful, and he certainly hasn't been taught respectful interactions with adults, but I have seen him exhibit moments of kindness (like giving someone an extra bag of chips that came out of the vending machine).  I was mentioning something about finding an item for him in lost and found the day before, and one of the women I work with starting talking about what a horrible kid he was and how he would likely end up behind bars someday.  "I know I shouldn't think this way, but I do," she said.  I said, "I've seen him have some sweet moments, so there's some good in there somewhere.  We'll see what happens as he gets older"  She wasn't having it. Setting aside how annoying I find it when people can't agree that I have seen something if they weren't around to see it, I said, "I've known a lot of kids who seemed that way when they were young but changed a lot as they aged."  Long after we had ended this conversation, she brought it back up, saying he was one of those people who would have to hit rock bottom before anything changed.  This kid is 13 years old! Are we really writing his future off already?

If you know me, you know I am not saying some such nonsense as "There are no bad kids, only bad circumstances."  We are all sinners in need of grace and mercy.  (Even if you aren't a person of religious faith, you know that we are all more likely to do the wrong thing than the right thing if it serves us better.)  What I am saying is that people change, and kids are not yet who they will one day become.  I had a shorthand with the teacher next door to me. We used to look at each other and say, "Half baked."  It was our reminder that the kids weren't done yet. They wouldn't even be done when they graduated.  Just like no one would take a cake out of the oven half way through the baking process and toss it out because it was a mess.  Of course it's a mess; it isn't finished yet.  Of course your students are a mess; they aren't finished yet.  (Oh, man I just had the weirdest memory of a song from 80s kids' church - "Kids Under Construction")

There's a sentence that frequently pops up on social media - "When someone shows you who they are, believe them."  And I don't disagree with that statement if we are talking about an adult who has exhibited a pattern and shows no signs of remorse.  It is likely that person is acting out of his well-established character, and this is unlikely to change without a fairly large intervention involving repentance.  But when people show genuine signs of change, we should allow that, even if we are cautious in doing so.  

And when we are talking about kids, it's important to recognize that they are not just small adults; their character is being molded by every experience they have. We should be honored and humbled that we are part of that; it's an awesome responsibility.  While we hold kids accountable for their actions through discipline, we recognize that those very actions might help them to change (the root of discipline is disciple, so it should be teaching them something).  If we see a change in pattern, celebrate that as a success. Don't hold the action they've already been disciplined for against them months and years.  

One of the things I will miss this year about being in the classroom is that I won't have the opportunity to write college recommendation letters.  Writing those for kids I had known since middle school (and sometimes seen since elementary school) was an annual reminder of how God uses the process of maturing, learning, discipline, and experience to make us older, not only in the chronological sense but in the Green Lady sense.  

May we all be older at the end of the day than we were at the beginning.  

And recognizing that in ourselves, let us allow it in others too.

Learning From Defeat

This week, my friend and I went to see an exhibit about the works of Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strips.  There were many quotes from Schultz himself to explain his vision behind each character or his method, and one right at the beginning stood out to me. He thought failure was funnier than success, so he made the characters lose at everything they did.  He said,

"The Peanuts is a chronicle of defeat.  All the loves in the strip are unrequited; all the baseball games are lost; all the test scores are D-minuses; the Great Pumpkin never comes; the football is always pulled away."

My first thoughts when I read this were that:

• We love the Peanuts characters and their stories because we can all identify with failure.  
• Current children's media is just the opposite. We try to make kids believe they will always be victorious with enough trying.

Then, I remembered an interview I once heard with Lemony Snicket, author of the Series of Unfortunate Events, a hilarious series of books in which orphaned children are sent from horrible relative to horrible relative while their evil uncle is out to kill them for their inheritance, and the one time they find a good caretaker, he is killed by the bite of a snake.  (I promise the books are funny and not at all scary for children in spite of this plot line - such is the genius of Lemony Snicket.). In the interview, he referenced that the popularity of his first few books rose in the months after September 11th.  Children were asked why they liked the stories, and they said, "Adults keep telling us everything is going to be fine, but we know that's not true.  We like that he tells the truth."

And here's the truth.

• Life is hard (but there are joyful times in it).
• Some people are more talented than you are at some things (which is okay because you are more talented than they are something else).
• You will have bad hair days (and sometimes they are on school picture day).
• You will fail a test (which is why your grade is an average and not based on only one thing).
• Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, the other team wins (or the other guy gets the job you want or the man you love loves someone else or you don't get into your first choice college).

Yesterday, I overheard a conversation between two coaches.  They were having trouble with the parents of two of their athletes (not the athletes themselves).  These parents were insistent that their sons must compete in a competition for which they had not qualified because, without it, they would not make the special elite team.  The coaches were also talking about their own past, when they didn't make the team they wanted and how much they learned from it.  They wished they could communicate that to the athletes, but their parents were preventing them from having that conversation.  As I overheard this, I was reminded of a student's parent I once dealt with who worked herself into all kinds of anxiety, the kind that makes you email a teacher at 3AM, because her daughter couldn't get into honors biology at her new school of her grade in my class dropped by one point.  Both sets of well meaning parents were hanging all of their hopes for their children on ONE event.  That's a lot of pressure for a fourteen year old, the belief that God's plan for them will be derailed by one sporting event or high school class.  

But here's another truth:

• You learn more from failure than you do from success.
• Character is built from learning to be gracious when you win AND when you lose.
• Your life will take a lot of turns that you cannot foresee in middle school.
• It is only in exceedingly rare cases that failure results in death.  (Most of the time, you just feel sad for a few days while you figure out where to go from here.)

Parents and teachers, I know it is hard to see kids hurting.  It's natural to want to fix it for them. But tears dry and hearts heal with time and perspective.  The lessons they learn are far more lasting.  How many times have you looked back and been grateful that you didn't get what you thought you wanted?  How many times have you looked back on a lost job and been glad you have a different job?  

I know this seems counterintuitive, but kids will actually have less anxiety if we let them fail sometimes.  It will teach them resilience - that they don't have to be afraid of failure because they lived through it last time.  It will teach them to show class - another way to be successful.  It will teach them not to find winning mundane - and savor the times they do win.

This leads me to a quote from another artist whose work I've recently seen exhibited, the great Bob Ross.

"You can't see the light without the dark."

Novice Learners - It Takes Courage

When was the last time you learned something new?  I don't mean a small change to what you already know.  I mean something totally new.  It was exhausting, right?  And you likely failed at it quite a few times before you started getting comfortable with it.  That's no big deal if the thing you tried was knitting or baking banana bread.  It might have been a little bigger deal if the thing you were learning was car repair.  But, what if there were actual stakes?  When being a novice learner also means something to your future, it is much more frightening and requires more courage to try.  For your students, this is a daily occurrence.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have recently started a new job at the YMCA.  Among other things, I enroll new members, sell guest passes, accept payments for personal training, activate scan cards, and try to solve membership related issues.  Personify, the computer software system used by the Y, is a complex array of fields that seems to have a language of its own.  If someone's child is not showing up related to their membership, they can't admit them to the drop in day care center.  Now that I know how to do that, it's a pretty easy fix, but the first time I tried it, I didn't realize I had to go to the finance screen to add it to their "order" because that's not an intuitive connection.  When someone comes in with a United Healthcare AARP card, there are about seven additional steps to making them a member, and it is important to do it correctly because it is the difference between a free membership and one that costs sixty dollars per month.  

The first few weeks, I did everything wrong.  Of course I did.  It was the first time I was doing it, and it was a little like trying to take a drink of water from a fire hydrant.  My coworkers were very kind and helpful, and my supervisor reminded me that there was no mistake I could make that couldn't be fixed.  Members were very patient when I told them it was my first week (I'd like to keep using that excuse for a couple of years).  But, I was struggling.  It's been a long time since I spent all day without any confidence in the next step of my work.

During that time, I happened to be reading the book Uprise, written by my friend, Kevin Washburn.  This book is about resilience, overcoming challenges, and growth.  The chapter on practice spoke to me during that week.  It's not like I didn't know that things get easier with practice.  After all, I have taught that concept to students for over two decades.  But there was something about seeing it in black and white that was especially encouraging.  So, I emailed Kevin to thank him for that part of his book.  In his reply, Kevin said he was involved in another writing project, and there was a line it it, "Have the courage to be a beginner."  Below you will see how much that statement meant to me.  I printed it, laminated it, and hung it on my refrigerator.

Last week, I reminded teachers that the students in front of them were novices and to plan for that.  Today, I want us to remember how hard learning new things is.  I want us to remember how difficult it would be to experience failure over and over as they work to become competent.  I want us to admire the courage of our students as they tackle all of this on a daily basis for years.

• Hold high standards - sure
• Include rigor in your lessons - yep
• Include problems that achieve the level of "desirable difficulty" - absolutely

But also

• Care enough to give them the base knowledge they need.
• Scaffold learning to help students achieve.
• Empathize with them as they persevere.

Have a great school year, everyone!

Learning Should Be Joyful

I have been teaching for 25 years, long enough to see pendulum swings in a thousand ways.  From a focus on science to a resurgence of the arts back to STEM obsession.  From all phonics to whole language and back to phonics.  

Right now, we are in an upsetting trend of people who only value education as career training.  I am not against the idea that we can use what we learn in school for our jobs, but I am against the notion that everything learned in school should be focused on how you plan to use it after school, leading to people who complain that we don't teach kids to file their taxes or sew on buttons (yes, there is a weird contingent of internet people who won't let this go) or that students should only learn those things that they will use in a job 

This notion is disturbingly utilitarian.  If something is only valuable if it is useful, we will stop being learners and become consumers, judges, and grouches.  Education will become a commodity, so we will learn less as we cull the curriculum.  Content will be prejudged for usefulness, leading us to look at everything through a utilitarian lens.  All of this is bad, but the worst part is that there will no longer be joy in learning anything we don't immediately judge to be useful.  If we allow curiosity to be a defining feature of our lives, we will find joy in learning new things without insisting that it be something we will use later.

I have written on this blog before about my chemistry teacher insisting that I take honors physics.  Had I possessed the view that I should only learn those things that would be part of my future job, I would not have taken honors physics, would not have had Mr. Barbara, and would not have found that I adored physics.  I mean, I loved it so much that I came home every day and did my homework immediately just so I could do more physics.  While I ultimately did make my love of physics into a career, it was because I found so much joy in it that I wanted to give that to others.  When my students leave me, I don't try to turn them all into engineers, but I do try to make it so they see physics in their everyday lives and feel joy in knowing how things work.

I want students to be lifelong learners because there is joy in learning.  That won't happen if we view it merely as job training.  It has been 11 months since I joined the YMCA, and I have spent the last year learning new things.  I've learned about weights and kickboxing and Zumba.  I've learned about indoor cycling, and yesterday I took a certification course to learn how to teach indoor cycling.  At the age of 47, I have found new sources of joy in my life because I was open to learning new things.  My granny had a sister named Grace, who took Greek at her local university when she was in her late 70s.  Her career was long behind her.  She took it because she wanted to.  She took it because learning gave her joy.  I want to be like Grace when I grow up.  I'm not talking about making things easy to make them joyful; Grace was learning Greek, for heaven's sake.  In fact, it is sometimes more joyful to learn something hard because it is more of an accomplishment.

Keep learning.  Teach your kids to keep learning.  Model a love of learning for your students.  Show them that there is joy in learning, no matter how old you are.  

Reflections from Learning and the Brain Conference - Part 2 - Meaning and Purpose

Each year, when I attend the Learning and the Brain conference, I return with a very full brain, and much of what is in it is disconnected.  So, in order to process all of it, I look for themes and write about them.  This year, there will be three.  Last week's was on thinking and learning.  This second one is about meaning and purpose, and the third will be about well-being and happiness.  

If you ask teachers or school leaders to think about what they want for their students, the word purpose is likely to arise.  The GRACE vision statement talks about God's plan for our students' lives.  Look at the surveys of empty nesters or the recently retired, and you will find that they initially struggle because, unless they are intentional about redirecting, they have lost their sense of purpose (having defined it wrongly in the first place).  Professional athletes like Tiger Woods won't retire because they don't know who they are without their sport.  It's the only purpose they feel they have.  This is not true and represents job idolatry, but that's a rant for a different post.

It turns out that research into how we learn also involves a sense of purpose and meaning.  According to the work of Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, the way kids make meaning out of the things they witness enables processes of adaptive change in their brains. It influences the white matter of their cerebral cortex and makes more connections between neurons.  So the psychology of learning has a biological effect, and biology has psychological effects.  Even between people, there is feedback between the emotions of one person and the biology of another.  We've all had the experience of a friend's tears or a supervisor's anger making us feel sick.  When a baby focuses its gaze on us and smiles, there are physical changes in our heart rate.  Petting a dog or cat is thought to lower a person's blood pressure.  Since we aren't carved up pieces, we cannot separate physical neurology from psychological change.

What does this mean for my classroom?  Quite a few things, actually.  It shows us that a teacher's emotional state influences the class' physical atmosphere.  If I remain calm, students are less likely to spiral into a hormonal spin.  If I let them work me up, we create a dangerous cycle.  In past posts, I've called this "feeding the crazy."

It also means that I should carefully approach how to help my students make meaning of their learning.  This doesn't mean I am going to ask them how they feel about Newton's Second Law, but it might mean I should put them in the problem.  If they can get a physical sense of applying a force (even just in their minds), they can make the meaning of it more real.  

In her keynote address, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang showed a poem that her daughter wrote to her baby brother, Teddy.  She told him that she loved him "more than the whole earth-size."  Having just learned they lived on a very large ball of dirt that floated through space and moved around the sun, this second-grader connected her love for her brother, which she couldn't quite wrap her head around to the size and movement of the planet, which she also couldn't quite wrap her head around.  Making these connections is a natural process, but we can leverage it to make better use of it for our lessons.  We can connect the slope of a graph to a slowly or rapidly changing process that is common to students (or ask them to suggest a connection).

Daniel Willingham also discusses how having a student connect content to deeper meaning helps their memory.  He recommends a relatively slow process for using flashcards.  We typically fly through them pretty quickly if we are getting the answer right, but he suggests stopping after each card to ask yourself a why question.  So, you have answered the question "What is the relationship between volume and pressure?" with "Inverse."  Now, ask yourself why is that relationship inverse rather than direct?  Connecting to the meaning creates a more complex story that may involve emotion (e.g. The balloon will pop if the pressure is high enough, which will startle me) and will cause more change in the brain.  

Students have long wanted to understand the purpose of what they are learning.  This is one of the reasons we get asked the question "When am I ever going to use this in real life?"  There are a lot of ways to handle that question, but you don't actually have to convince them that they will use it as an individual.  It can be enough that they know this information is used by someone.  As John Almarode says, "They just need to know that it means something more than the grade in the grade book."  If engineers use it, tell them.  If poets, artists, doctors, CPAs, factory workers, or receptionists use it, your students will benefit from knowing that.  It will help them see purpose and meaning in what they are learning.  

By the way, it is unlikely they will admit it in that moment, so don't get your hopes up for them to say, "Oh, great.  Now, I'm cool with doing the hard thing you have asked me to do."  Just know that your explanation did have a deeper long-term effect on their brain than what you are seeing.

Fun and Easy are Not Synonyms

There are two classes that I take at the YMCA with the same instructor, Matt.  (I have a lot of great fitness instructors that I like very much; but Matt is the best, and everyone should take his classes.)  One is called Group Power.  It is a weightlifting class.  I love it, but it is a challenging class for someone with little strength and zero balance. The other is Cardio Kickboxing, an energetic class with fun music and dance-y moves where I grin from ear to ear and never once look up at the clock.  For reasons that are beyond me, the difficult class is highly attended every week, and the fun class often only draws eight or nine people.  This week, I expressed my confusion about that to Matt.  Halfway through Kickboxing, he said, "Twenty-five minutes ago, you said this was the fun class.  Do you still feel that way?"  Well, yes, I had been jabbing and uppercutting and kicking and laughing at Matt and having a great time while dripping sweat.  Then, he said, "Let's show her it's not the fun class."  But it still was.  Sorry, Matt, it is fun, and there is nothing you can do about it.

I think what Matt heard was "Group power is hard, and Kickboxing is easy," but that is not what I said.  I said that Kickboxing is fun, so I don't know why its attendance is lower.  It is fun, but it is definitely not easy.

Here's the thing. Fun and easy are not the same.  I googled synonyms for fun, and the word easy is not on the list.

While I have never heard or read the word "clubbable" and have never used the word "convivial," I would definitely use the rest of those words to describe the Kickboxing class.  It is lively, amusing, and enjoyable; it is the highlight of my week.  I would never describe it with any of these synonyms for the word easy.

Being a cognitive science nerd, I can't help but see it everywhere now, even in a conversation like this.  The difference between easy and fun is an important thing when it comes to student motivation.  On Thursday, I read a summary of the Robert and Elizabeth Bjork study, from which they coined the term "desirable difficulty."  They found that there is a sweet spot when it comes to learning and motivation.  If a task is too difficult, students give up.  But if it is too easy, they get bored and stop paying attention.  

Wordle didn't take over the internet last year because it was easy, but people loved it because it was at a doable level of challenge, making it fun.  The same can be said for Sudoku, crossword puzzles, and challenging video game levels.  Enjoyment comes from challenge, and so does learning.  Our memories chuck out things that are too easy to learn.  If you don't put effort into thinking about it, you won't remember it (which is good - this is what prevents our brains from being overloaded with too many memories, like what every person you know wore yesterday and what you ate four days ago).  Teachers, recognizing this should help us construct learning activities that lie in the desirable range.  Students should have to think about concepts or dig into their memory for answers.  They should be getting some things wrong, or we haven't calibrated the level correctly.  There is nothing satisfying about accomplishing something that was too simple and easy, and learning will not result.

Yesterday, I gave Matt a heads-up that he would be making an appearance on this blog.  During that conversation, he suggested that the reason challenging things are fun is because of the endorphin release.  While I had connected that to physical training, that conversation was the first it had occurred to me to apply it to academic work as well.  Perhaps solving a difficult math problem or writing a high-quality essay releases endorphins as well.  I'll need to dig into Google Scholar to see if there is any research on this, but shout out to Matt for getting me to think about its academic implications.

It is important that we explicitly relate this to students so they will be more willing to take on challenges.  In spite of the motivation of challenge, we still have to overcome inertia to get started, so it can be helpful to have examples of the joy of meeting a challenge.  I do this in "pep talks," of course, but I like it better when it comes up naturally in the curriculum.  When I teach 8th graders about the Apollo era, one of the things I show them is JFK's "We choose to go to the moon" speech, part of a 1961 address at Rice University.  This is at the heart of that speech:

"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? 

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

I love talking to students about this speech because they don't hear talk like this.  For sure, we aren't hearing it from politicians these days; they want to sell us on the idea that their solution to problems is easy, and no one ever has to sacrifice anything.  Students have access to a million technologies whose purpose is to make things easier.  Some of their parents email coaches and teachers to complain if they are being challenged.  Athletic coaches may be the only people truly encouraging them to do hard things on a consistent basis, but even then, I don't know if they are telling their players that the difficulty is, in fact, the point.  Yet, athletes know they feel more satisfaction when they beat a difficult team than they do when they win against the weakest team in the conference.

Nothing worth doing is easy, and it is important that our students know that.  Teachers, we are the people best positioned for showing them that day in and day out.  It's important that we model it by taking on challenges in our own lives, but I don't think they will draw the conclusion for themselves, so we should also take every chance we can to make it explicit.

Group Power is hard.  Spin classes are hard.  Boot camp is hard.  Cardio Kickboxing is hard (but it is also fun).  But with all of them, the hard is the point.  It's why I joined the Y in the first place.  After all, I was not pushing myself at home for free.  I wanted to be challenged, and that is, thankfully, what is happening.  Thank you to Matt, Stacey, Jay, Greg, and Liz for never making it easy.  Learning to read is hard.  Long division is hard.  Analysis of literature is hard.  The syntax of a foreign language is hard.  But the hard is the point.  It's why we go to school.  We want to learn the things we couldn't have learned on our own at home.

I'll end with one more quote, this one from Penny Marshall's masterpiece A League of Their Own.  

Speaking of making this concept explicit, our chemistry teacher has this quote framed and hanging by her classroom door, so students who have just finished a hard class can read it on their way out and remember that was the point.

Open to Change

Last night, I was drinking from my Wikipedia water bottle.  (Yes, there is a Wikipedia store, and they sell a pretty great metal water bottle.). What I love about that bottle is that it reminds me how much I have changed my opinion about Wikipedia.

Like most teachers, when Wikipedia first started, I hated it.  Students would sit in the computer lab, writing nonsense on pages, and the nonsense would stay for weeks or months.  I warned students against using it and took points off if they did.  Now, I have links to Wikipedia in my textbook, send students to it for some of my lessons, and donate to it every year.  So, what changed?  Well, Wikipedia changed for one, but I did too.  As it became more used, the people at Wikipedia recognized their need for a better error detection system.  They tightened up on who could contribute to their pages and created a system for flagging errors that was more efficient than they had once had.  I also watched a TED talk by founder Jimmy Wales in which he describes their structure.  He says something along the lines of "If you don't think our people care about accuracy, just remember that they volunteer to edit an encyclopedia in their free time."  I thought that was a very good point, and it changed the way I viewed Wikipedia as well.  (Listen, I'm not saying I let students use it for everything.  It still isn't the place to do formal research for academic essays - although, depending on the topic, it can be a good place to find sources.  But if you want to learn more about something as personal enrichment, it is often the best place to start.)

As a science teacher, I frequently use the phrase "our current best understanding" because that is what science is.  For hundreds of years, our best understanding of gravity was Newtonian.  Then, Einstein proposed some new ideas, and we think of it differently.  Our understanding of the atom has experienced five major changes between Dalton and the Quantum model, but each time it changed, it was based on new evidence or a new observation of behavior.  Most things aren't discovered all at once, so we must be open to change when new evidence is available.  When I was a child, we were taught that the brain didn't change after you reached the age of ten (which I found confusing because we were at school), but we now know the brain is plastic and can be changed by learning and experience.  While science is a search for answers, it can also be a search for the next question.  It is all our current best understanding.

I would like to submit that we apply this to our understanding of people and situations as well.  One of the best things about teaching 8th grade is that I have more chances to watch students change than most people get.  A student that started unmotivated and misbehaved can become a great student by the end of the year.  A new kid who begins the year socially awkward sometimes ends the year a leader.  Since I also teach juniors and seniors, I have the privilege of writing college recommendation letters.  Often, the theme of a letter is how much that student has changed since I first met them.  

When we think of growth mindset, let's not just apply it to learning math or studying for tests.  Let's recognize that experiences cause change in humans, and humans are having new experiences all of the time.  Just like science and Wikipedia, be open to changing your opinion about people when you observe new evidence.