&gt; opens by saying that learning avoiding mistakes before any bigger concepts is a major root of this but then again, people do make mistakes in math (even math professors) and it&#x27;s a field where any mistake can completely invalidate the work.<p>The problem is that an emphasis on avoiding mistakes leads to paralysis. Though he phrases it differently. Students don&#x27;t want to be <i>wrong</i> so they just don&#x27;t instead.<p>As he points out later in the piece, learning from our mistakes is key. If I never learned to walk because I fell the first time and failed walking class, I&#x27;d be crawling even today. An overly negative assessment of the students&#x27; works, an overemphasis on right and wrong, rather than correction and expansion to different methods when some method has failed a student, ends up producing many students who can&#x27;t do math.