#172 Building Math Confidence for Better Career Options with Ben Orlin Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker Robbins  01:00

is your teen avoiding math like it’s a pothole in the road? What career paths might they be writing off without even realizing it? Math Anxiety affects countless students, limiting their college and career options before they’ve even had a chance to explore them. But what if math could become your teen’s unexpected strength instead of their biggest obstacle? Today, I’m thrilled to welcome Ben Orland to the show. He’s the author of the wildly popular math with bad drawings, books that have sold over 100,000 copies worldwide. Ben brings a refreshing perspective to mathematics, one that focuses on curiosity, persistence and real world application, rather than getting the quickest answer in our conversation, we’ll explore how math skills have become increasingly valuable across nearly every field, not just STEM careers. We’ll discuss practical strategies to help your team build math confidence, and why the ability to ask questions and acknowledge when they don’t know what the answer is, might be important than any natural talent that they have. Ben’s unique approach helps students see math as a form of purified thought that can complement their other interests and open doors rather than close them. Whether your teen is math phobic or simply hasn’t discovered their mathematical potential, yet this episode will give you actionable insights to help them approach this crucial subject with a new mindset. I’m Lisa Marco Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity a flourish coaching production. Let’s dive right in to a great conversation. You Ben Orland, welcome to the show. I am excited you’re not my typical guest. Yeah,

 

Ben Orlin  02:50

thanks, Lisa, no, yeah, I appreciate that. I feel like I get that everywhere I go, that I’m not that typical guest. So I appreciate people letting in this atypical personality.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  02:57

Well, I’m excited for the atypical personality because I think that you your belief that math can become a strength is I approach everything I’ve built, my businesses. I work with the students that I work with on college major and career coaching, saying, like everything’s figure out, able. And I feel like that math can become a strength goes right along with this. Everything is figureoutable. And I’m like, Oh, he’s my kind of guy on the mindset piece, for sure. Yeah,

 

Ben Orlin  03:29

definitely, yeah, yeah. I think math, I don’t know, we encountered in school, and it’s such a strange and spooky thing when you’re running into in school, we can talk about that. But there’s so many kind of artificial aspects to the way we encountered in school and then. But if you give people a little more time, a little more space, they can, yeah, they can. They can turn something that they didn’t think of as a strength into into a real part of what they do. Yeah, that’s,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  03:48

you know, that’s interesting, that you just said, like you turning something that they look as its deficit into a strength. I had recently, a podcast guest came on, and we were talking about neuro diversity and career coaching, and we talked a lot about, like, what is a deficit in one area can be turned into a strength. Again, that’s about your mindset around that piece there. Yeah. So you really say that people treat math like a pothole in the road, and I like that metaphor. I now understand what you mean by that, but I think our listeners need to understand what you mean by that. Yeah,

 

Ben Orlin  04:29

so maybe right to give a little bit of background on my own, how I navigated those potholes and what led me to a career in math education. I was a kid, thinking back to when I was 1718, I kind of loved school, and I loved every subject. I loved Literature and Creative Writing, and I liked science a lot. I liked just learning about how the world functions. And I liked, I sort of liked everything, and math was one of those things. It wasn’t a special subject to me. I enjoyed it like I enjoyed everything. But I could look around at my friends and at adults too, and they did not feel. That way, you know, there were people who were really fascinated by history, and there were people who were fascinated by English, and everyone had their their different interests and things that appealed to them. But for so many people, math just turned them off. You bring up math, and you can see the light go out behind their eyes. And the way, you know, over the years, sort of seeing how people respond to math, yeah, it came to seem to me like kind of a pothole in the road, like something, not that it’s a huge problem for most adults, not that it’s something that it like causes them panic attacks, although some it does. But for most people, it’s just sort of like, math comes up. I’m gonna swerve around that like, you know, I’m just gonna tune that out. We’ll wait 45 seconds, the math will go away, and then I’ll get back on the path. So just

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  05:42

like we’re avoiding those potholes that right now it’s April, while we’re recording this, and I see all the road crews out trying to repair those potholes from the winter, right? That’s right, yeah, they’re up there in Minneapolis. You’re like, we got a lot of those, yeah? That’s right.

 

Ben Orlin  05:56

No, yeah, we had a bad winter a few minutes ago, and it was just the street was more pothole than street, you know, and a pothole is not the end of the world. You don’t hit a pothole and think, oh my gosh, my life is ruined. But you also really don’t want to hit them. You do what you can to avoid them. And you might even avoid a street if you know, there’s a street that’s got 10 potholes on it, maybe you go a few blocks out of your way to avoid it. And that’s what I see people doing with math. There are paths that you think would go down, or maybe they should consider going down, but they know there’s a lot of potholes down that way, and so they’ll go around it. And so this thing that starts out as just like that’s a little inconvenience to avoid, it can start steering you away from from paths through the world that you might benefit from taking, or things that might fascinate you, or things that might enrich your life or become a cool career. But just because there’s that pothole down that way, people will will do what they can to avoid it.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  06:44

You know, you tell that story, and it makes me think of one of my students that we worked with in our launch Career Clarity course. So Brady, when he was going in that I think he was like a sophomore in high school, and we were working with him on just the career development career advising piece. And when he started high school, his eighth grade teacher, I’m sure you probably see this a lot, directed him to take honors English and to downgrade into a regular like college prep math, right? And he accepted that, and he started to his narrative that that was the real that was running in his head was, well, I’m not good at math, I’m I’m good at English, and I’m gonna avoid the rigor, right? There’s a pothole now I’m gonna be thinking about potholes all the time on everything, and so he was avoiding the rigor of math, and he he down shifted. And you know, for some students, that wouldn’t necessarily be a wrong choice, but when we took his Berkman personality assessment, that’s the personality assessment we use as the data piece of career advising. We we assess 10 areas of motivation. One of them happens to be math. Now math could be math, solving math problems, or it could be just like data and analytics, things like that. And so as he thought, started to look at his Berkman, the math category was high on his motivations. And so instead of avoiding what was kind of like an uncomfortable thought like that didn’t correlate with what he was thinking about himself, he dug into it. And you know, a lot of this was done in conversations that he was having at home with his family. I wasn’t a huge part of this, but his mom came back to me and said, after we really dug into that and explored it more. He’s actually and started looking at careers that had more of a math bent or a data bent to them. He actually up shifted for his junior year into honors math again, and down shifted the English and started it was doing well, and is very happy. But I don’t think all students take that approach to thinking about it?

 

Ben Orlin  09:02

No, no, I don’t think all students are, first of all, most students aren’t that strategic and thoughtful when they’re thinking about classes. That’s much more of this instinct of, I feel good at this, I feel bad at this without a sense of like, well, what are the paths out there, and then even the ones who are being strategic? Yeah, it can be hard to overcome the sense that math is, I don’t know. Is this thing that you see in school, which is these thick textbooks with lots of exercises and and a, really, this kind of bare bones abstraction, there’s a lot of x’s and y’s, and what students are always asking for, and sometimes I struggle to deliver it, but, but what they’re always asking for is like, What is this for? What am I going to use this for? What’s the what does this connect to? Where, in reality, am I going to see these x’s and y’s? How

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  09:43

do you answer that for them? Because I know that you have a belief that how we think about math is is more of a life skill than just a career skill, right?

 

Ben Orlin  09:51

Yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah. It depends on the specifics. So one of the things I love about teaching is that you kind of need to tailor it to every particular student. Every student has this wonderful snowflake of an individual, and they all have their own interests and needs. But one thing that’s very overarching right now is, you know, in the last few decades, we’ve gone from a world where data was kind of scarce, nobody had good numbers on stuff, to a world where data is spilling out of every corner of the world, every organization, every company, every government just has reams and reams of data, these tables, and tables, numbers upon numbers. And what can we learn from that? Right? What’s missing from those numbers? What can those numbers tell us? Yeah, what inferences can we draw, or what predictions can we make, and what insights, you know, what sort of what can we glean from this? We’ve taken this whole complicated world and collapsed down into spreadsheets. How do we read those spreadsheets? And how do we, how would we get sense from them? And that that involves math, and importantly, more than math, you know, math goes really well with other subjects. If you’re somebody working in government, you know, say you’re looking at transportation data, you kind of know a lot about transportation. Just show it to me. I don’t know much about transportation. I could, I could tell you some stuff about the numbers, but I would need to really have a lot of conversations with subject matter experts, and that’s why I think for a lot of paths those mathematical skills, they don’t have to be the only thing you’re doing all day, but to have those skills really opens up new ways of thinking, and especially when you start braiding it together with other kinds of knowledge, math becomes really Powerful. It

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  11:20

makes me think of for a student who applies to Purdue University. And this was, I haven’t checked this recently, so this could be incorrect, but at one point, if you were applying to the Honors College at Purdue, you actually had to write an essay on the intersection, a multidisciplinary intersection of majors right in and so that they were thinking more broadly about like taking the humanities and coupling it with the math or the data side of things. So I know that to be true of like the deep thinkers and the people that are really making big impact. One of the things that we think a lot about, I get a lot of questions about, what classes should I take next year from you’ve taught at the community college level, and I work with 15 to 25 year olds. So what classes do I take next year as far as a high school student? Right? What’s going to position me? Well, there’s always a lot of questions around math, like, do I have to take calculus, or is that the pothole I’m trying to avoid from college students? How do I fill in the blank spaces on my electives? Like, what’s gonna benefit me when we’re talking about I’m just curious for you, when you’re talking about math, do you think of that as just math, traditional math classes like, you know, Algebra Two, then on to pre Calc and then Calc and multi variable and differential equations. Or do you also include a broader lens on math, to include more like statistics and computer science? Like, how do you look at math? Are you defining it just as pure math classes?

 

Ben Orlin  13:03

Yeah, no, I’d probably take the broader view. You know, statistics, to me, is a wonderful kind of math. I mean, it’s almost, I almost want to call statistics its own discipline, because it has its own set of questions it worries about in its own traditions. The one thing I will say is it depends how deep into statistical thinking you want to go as to how much of that more traditional math you need so to be, I think, a good citizen who’s data literate and can read lots of different data visualizations and can think a little bit about data and, you know, use a spreadsheet. You don’t need calculus for that. If you want to go a little deeper into statistics and start running some inferential statistics to a little bit of machine learning. And these are things that organizations really benefit from doing, you know, be able to take some data and do do some real prediction based on that data. Little bit of calculus really helps with that. And if you want to go even deeper and be designing your own models, well, yeah, even a little more math is going to be necessary for that. So when, when I think about careers and things like data science, or like, a real data analytics career, pretty deep level of math. You need to go really into undergraduate math, high school maths, not really enough for for doing those things professionally. And so that’s, you know, just yeah, those are, those are different paths that require different amounts of math background. So as you’re

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  14:16

as a community college professor, and you’re working with these kids, I think it’s hard for them to wrap their mind around like, what does that mean on the deeper level, math, right? And there’s a lot of when it comes to careers and college major paths, a lot of confusion on that. What are how do you talk to your students about this to help them make sense of this. And yes, we, I know you said you can make math a string, but don’t we all have an upper limit of that? Yeah,

 

Ben Orlin  14:48

it’s funny. Everyone feels that way about math. That’s something I’ve noticed early in my teaching career. When I started, I teach community college now, which I like, because it’s most of what I do actually, is I write books, and so the community college is very flexible for me. But. In the past, I taught middle school and high school, and in that teaching and in just, you know, talking to adults, talking to friends, and people I meet people talk about math, almost like the NCAA Tournament basketball, you know, where it’s like, like, you know, I took calculus, or, like, you know, I made it to the Sweet 16, you know, I won a couple of rounds. And that was, that was as far as I got. But hey, that was pretty good. And then some people go, I took multi variable calculus, I made it to the final four. And some people like, got through high school algebra. That was kind of, that was enough for me. It was more than enough. And that’s kind of, you know, whatever. I made it around a 64 made it the tournament. But, you know, and it’s just not, it’s not, it’s so funny. We don’t talk about other subjects that way. We don’t, we don’t think of it as, like, you hit that ceiling. And so I don’t want to dishonor the experience people have. I think that’s a very authentic experience. People get into a math class and feel like, Okay, last year I got it this year. I do not think things have just cut out for me. But it’s not like everything in education. It’s never one clean explanation, you know? Why do students have that experience? It’s not just that, though, yeah, they hit their cognitive limit or something. It’s like, well, you know, maybe there’s something from last year that they learned how to do a procedure so they could, sort of could get through it, but they didn’t quite learn why that procedure worked. And so now, the next year, when you need to apply it in a new way, they’re a little bit lost and they don’t quite have the conceptual understanding to draw on. That’s one I feel like I saw a lot early in my teaching career. And then it can also be the opposite way too. Maybe you sort of have a basic understanding of the ideas, but the new problems involve so many steps that actually the things that you were doing very effortfully last year, you know, I’m gonna solve this equation. You just need to get the procedures down. It needs to be much more automatic for you to be able to access this new content. I don’t know, I sound a little bit like a diagnostician or something, right, but it really varies from student

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  16:48

to student. No, I like that. I mean, I like that idea of like, push your cognitive load and think about like, what was last year. I mean, you know, you and I both have experience teaching high school, mine, many decades ago, but you know, we would see on a kid’s transcript, or even as an independent educational consultant. Now, I can look at a kid’s transcript and you can see like, gosh, if you had a family member have a health crisis, or a parent lost a job, or a late ADHD diagnosis that’s gonna impact what you just said about like, hey, like, I got through, but I didn’t really get it, but I had some other stuff going on that maybe is impacting that as well. You know, it reminds me of one of my career coaching students who I worked with her when she was in high school. She is like, well, out of college now, so I’ve been doing this work for 15 years. So this is a while ago, but she what you know, one thing about her career path was she had identified that she really wanted to go into marketing, and she did all the things that we suggest, like do the job shadows and have the informational interviews and do the college visits, and, you know, try to do some extracurriculars in that area. So she was doing real world experiences. It was very confident in her path, her Berkman looked like it fit, and she got to college. And I think what a lot of kids don’t realize is, if you’re going to major in business, we had previous podcast guest on, I think it was episode 119, Casey courses. She teaches, or she doesn’t teach. She works administratively at a college and university. And she said, you know, kids think, oh, I want to go into marketing, or I wouldn’t just go into sales. And there’s not a lot of math with that. You still have to take calculus if you’re going to make it through a business program. So this student that I was working with gets to college, and she’s hitting some econ and some calculus that was hard, and she’s like, to your point, well, how am I going to use this? Like, what does this matter? Right? And so she contacted me. She’s like, I got to change my major. I’m on the wrong path. And I’m like, why are you on the wrong path? And it was because it had gotten a little hard. And I said, Well, why don’t you dig in and just get a tutor to get through? I think it was an econ that was killing her, like, get an econ tutor and get through. You’re on the right path, but there’s some boxes we have to check along the way. So that totally fits. Yeah,

 

Ben Orlin  19:17

that’s something I find it you know, as I get a little bit older and move into my teaching career, I can see where, you know, this is a tough year for you, but just get through this tough year, and it’s going to open a door that you’re going to love what’s on the other side. And when you’re 20, that’s that’s much harder to see that way. A tough year, like a year, is an eternity when you’re 20, so and you don’t know what’s on the other side of that door. So I can see that being really tough, and it’s something about education that is strange, maybe necessary, that we front load a lot of these challenges. You know, if you want to understand economics, a lot of economics, the way economists think, is about what happens if you make a tiny little change, you know, okay, if you raise the price just a little bit, how will consumers respond? Will they stop buying it? Will they not really care? And so. It’s all about these tiny changes, and that’s what calculus is. Calculus is the study of tiny changes. And so it might feel totally disconnected for the learner, like, oh my gosh, why am I doing this calculus homework? I just, I just want to know about business and marketing and companies. But I say, Well, you know, kind of churning in the background there underneath that helps to have some of these ideas and an idea that’s really tough to learn when you’re 20, it’s actually worth putting in that time, because then you got another 4050, years of your career where you get to use that idea. You fought hard to learn it when you were 20, and now that’s in your possession, and something that you’ve got going forward,

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  20:33

well, that linear time frame that you just gave like in the grand scheme of life, right? This is a stat I always give the students I’m working with, and their faces show that they feel every every one of these words, when I say it to them, you will go to school for 16,000 hours from kindergarten through 12th grade. And so it’s like, I say that, and they’re like, yeah, man, I feel that. It feels like a lot. And I said, you’re going to work 95,000 hours in your adult working life. So to your point, this is like, just a blip, and we got to get through it. But there also are meaningful connections to the work that we’re doing. It’s not just like, Oh, you shouldn’t have to take calculus if you’re going to go into sales.

 

Ben Orlin  21:22

Yeah, there’s no, that’s right. Yeah, go ahead. No, I was gonna say, I wouldn’t want to be necessarily, the defender of the calculus curriculum exactly as it’s done. And, you know, this calculus always, always strictly necessary, you know, as someone who helps, you know, build educational systems and play a part in them, I don’t want to argue that the way we do it is perfect. But for students navigating those systems, I think it helps to recognize systems aren’t perfect. There’s also a reason to it. The calculus requirement for business isn’t, you know, if I were drawing up a new college, is that the way I’d do it? I don’t know. But then again, maybe no one should trust me to drop a new college. And there are connections there. There’s authentic value, I think, to be gotten from calculus, if you look at it at the right, look at it the right way. Well, it’s just

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  22:04

like, I don’t have to understand why the plumber is doing X, Y and Z in my house to fix the problem. You know, I trust that he’s the expert, and he’s made a wise decision that this is going to be beneficial. So maybe putting not that it’s perfect, but putting a little bit of trust into those the degrees have been formulated in the way they have with reason, and you’re not going to be able to get it all. But there are people, I mean, when you’re investigating college and career paths I had on episode 27 of the podcast, which was a long time ago, because this episode is like in the 170s I had a professor actually was the Dean of Engineering at the University of Toledo, and we talked about the difference between engineering technology degrees, which are more hands on, and engineering degrees which are more theoretical, and the level of math that is needed and how they teach math differently so that there’s persistence through because, to your point, it can be very challenging because we front load those hard courses and because, you know, they’re just weeding people out. And, you know, I don’t necessarily believe that that’s the case. They want students to be successful, but there are universities out there who do treat some of these more challenging courses a little bit differently, and they can be hard to find, but they can be a difference major or difference maker in the persistence through a degree. For sure, we know that stem and math fields are the number one changed major. So can you give us some practical tips. So you math mindset guru on if thinking about math in this way has inspired people to whether it’s a parent that’s listening or it’s someone who supports teenagers and young adults and their development and their career development. How do we make math a strength. What are some practical tips?

 

Ben Orlin  24:03

Yeah. So yeah. As you bring up mindset with which I think is important, people like talk about growth mindset, right? And sort of not seeing an obstacle as a sign that I lack the skills. But as you know an obstacle, everybody faces obstacles. One thing I’ll say is that I think students and young people and maybe people in general need to take pride in something. They need to be able to point at something like and this is, this is the thing I’m doing. Well, this is my skill, something that’s very brittle and dangerous that a lot of people do in math is they take pride in how accurate or how fast, or how much quicker they are than the others in the class. And that’s very brittle, because you wind up in a different class, and suddenly everybody else is just as quick as you are, just as accurate as you are. And now, now that sort of sense of pride, and then self efficacy just collapses. So my advice of where to find that sense of self efficacy is that if you talk to mathematicians, mathematical researchers, and this is something I do a lot of so people who you know, they’re what they do for a living is they solve. Math problems that no one has ever solved, and they talk about being basically confused, like, 98% of the time. Wow. Because, because that’s what it looks like to solve math problems you’ve never solved, you know, like, like, not just you’ve never solved. No one has ever solved these math problems. These are, these are open questions that somebody a few years or decades ago said, I wonder what the answer is to that, and now it’s just sitting there, and no one’s figured it out yet. And so they spend a lot of their time kind of wandering around a little confused, trying things, it doesn’t work. And what they take pride in is this, their sort of meta cognitive skills there, their patience, their willingness to acknowledge what they don’t know. And I think if you think of the people around you, how willing are the people around you to acknowledge what they don’t know? Like if the people around you are human beings, which they probably are, but not very like most of us are, really we just have this blind spot for our own blind spots. We like, really, like to think that we know everything, and we start to turn away from the things we don’t know. So if you can become someone who’s able to acknowledge what you don’t know, and able to just be frank about it and say, Yeah, I don’t understand how to do this kind of problem. I don’t get how this works. Turn that from a point of shame, which it can be for a lot of people, to a point of pride. That’s something that is rare and hard to do. To be able to look at something that you’re struggling would say, I am struggling with this, and I know that, and I’m not going to stop until I get it. It can be a hard mindset, mindset switch to make, but it’s, it’s sort of an all powerful one. The most successful math students that I know. You know, do they have some kind of natural skill, some of them probably, but one thing they really share is persistence, and that sense of not knowing doesn’t scare them, not knowing maybe annoys them, but the way, the way an itch annoys you, and you keep scratching it until you Yeah, so that’s as if our mindset goes I think that’s the that’s the big one. And then if, for a much more sort of concrete, practical thing, ask lots of questions. It’s all about being willing to ask questions. Yeah, as a math student, I wasn’t always willing to do this. Part of the reason I recognized the importance is, you know, I was pretty good at figuring things out on my own, and then when I couldn’t, I was very reluctant, very shy about asking questions. And I don’t think I figured that out as a student, I don’t. I think it just meant that when I ran into classes that I couldn’t really follow, that was it,

 

Speaker 1  27:20

you know, when did you figure that out? Like, how old were you? I don’t know. I think I’m

 

Ben Orlin  27:25

getting a little better at it during adulthood. Still, you know, it’s still a, still a journey. And probably there’s some settings where I’m better at it than others. And if i can summon that mindset of, like, you know what, I should take pride in my ability to ask those questions, then I’m, then I’m better at it than if I, if I sort of unthinkingly fall into a sense of pride around Oh, well, I’m, you know, whatever. I’m a professional math educator. I write these books about math like I should. I should know everything already. So no, there’s tons of people who know lots of math I don’t know, and I’ve got to still learn from them.

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  27:53

I love this. My favorite part is what we’re ending on, which is what you just identified. You know, ask the question, so stay curious and be persistent. You know, be willing to know, to ask about what you don’t know. Don’t be prideful. Don’t look at as a weakness. Those are the soft skills that employers want. So as a career advisor that’s working with teens and young adults in career development, you know, I have, I have kids ask me all the time, oh, what would be a good second major or a minor? It’s not a second major or a minor. It’s like, go get your degree if you’re college bound. And there’s lots of careers where you’re using a lot of math in the trades, right? So whether you’re college bound or not, you’ve got to have those math life skills, but work on the skills that are more the human side, the softer side that employers are telling us that are lacking in this Gen Z as they’re entering the workforce, that’s a better use of your time, and that’s those same attitudes are going to benefit you with curriculum and cognitive thinking, as you just indicated, so that that’s a beautiful intersection. So Ben, this has been great if, if our listeners want to find you, because they’re inspired to not avoid the potholes and find a way to make math a strength. What’s the best way for them to connect with you?

 

Ben Orlin  29:18

Yeah, so probably my website is, is math with bad drawings.com. And I have had that as a blog for ages now and then, that’s also the series of books that I write. So the first one is sort of like a gentle introduction to lots of fun mathematical ideas. That’s called math with bad drawings. I did one about calculus, actually, for your your student, your business student who’s frustrated with with calculus, it’s called Change is the only constant, sort of a family friendly one I did called math games with the bad drawings. So it’s like pencil and paper games. And then my most recent book is math for English majors, which is sort of the, maybe the most pertinent, actually, our conversation to vary the sort of the essence of math, what, what makes the subject, what it is spelled out in very clear terms for for people of all majors, not just English majors. Yeah. And

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  30:00

that, I mean, that kind of shows that probably that underpinnings, like you said, like, we have to trust that something that we learned in calculus actually is beneficial to the marketing or the organizational psychology or industrial organization expert in major I love it. We’ll put all of that in the show notes. Ben, thanks for coming on today. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much, ladies and gentlemen. I really

 

30:21

appreciate the conversation. I really appreciate the

 

Lisa Marker Robbins  30:28

conversation. I hope today’s conversation with Ben has given you a fresh perspective on how math can become a strength for your teen, not an obstacle, as we’ve discussed, developing math confidence isn’t just about STEM careers, it’s about keeping doors open and building problem solving skills that will serve any path, the ability to persist through challenges, ask thoughtful questions and acknowledge what they don’t know are qualities that will benefit them, not only in school, but well beyond if you’d like to explore more of Ben’s approachable and often humorous take on mathematics. Visit math with baddrawings.com where you’ll find his blog and books, including math for English majors. I’ll link to it in the show notes if you’re interested in seeing how math fits into the bigger picture of your teen’s career development. I’d like to invite you to download our sample Berkman report we use in our launch Career Clarity program at flourish coaching, co.com forward slash Berkman, that’s B, i, r, k, m, a, n. This report demonstrates how we consider mathematical thinking in the context of personality, interest and career advising, helping your team make informed decisions about their future. You can find that link in our show notes as well. Remember, with the right mindset and approach, your team can transform their relationship with math from avoidance to advantage. Thanks for listening to College and Career Clarity. I’m Lisa Marco Robbins, and I’ll be back next week with more insights to help your family navigate the college bound journey where we turn overwhelmed and confused into motivated, clear and confident.