October 17, 2025 | Everything Has Meaning
Growth Mindset & a Changeless God
Each school year offers its own set of new challenges. Students will have new teachers; teachers will have new students; students will learn new content, new skills, and even new responsibilities. It is tempting to shy away from new things. They are uncertain, unknown; they can be scary. But if you have been a teacher long enough, “new students” begin to sound like old students: “Is this going to be on the test?”—“I forgot my homework”—“I’m not really a Math person”.
Students may not often say the latter, but they certainly think it often enough. They say and think things like, “Reading just isn’t my thing” or “I think I’m just bad at this science stuff” or “When am I ever going to use Latin in real life?” This line of thinking reflects a “fixed mindset.” Instead, at PCS, we work to develop a “growth mindset.”
At the heart of this—and I do not think students necessarily mean this—is the absolute and definitive declaration of Self: a declaration of who the student is or who they think they are. They have decided that they are a certain kind of person with certain kinds of interests and that these certain things are certain and that they will never change; that they will always be the nine-year-old or fifteen-year-old version of themselves.
But the reality is only God is immutable; only God is unchanging; only God is I Am. Students are becoming; God is; students are is-ish—and this is good! I would hope that we as teachers and parents have very different tastes in music, books, food, clothes, movies, hobbies, jokes, and even conversation than we had when we were twelve years old. A senior—let alone a second-grader—is not yet in their final form.
So, when students say something like, “I give up”, we want to train them to say “ I can use a different strategy to figure this out”; rather than “This is too hard”, say, “This may take some time”; instead of “I’ll never be that smart”, say, “I’m going to learn how to do this.”
Beyond the mere language of the exercise, we want students to remember that they are still being formed and made. Perhaps it is not that students “aren’t Math people,” but that Math is hard, and it has been challenging for most people throughout history; perhaps it is not that students “aren’t writers,” it’s that learning to articulate your thoughts and put them into words is one of the greatest challenges in the world. Yet none of these things are impossible, and God wants us to engage His whole world—even Mathematics and Composition. And the goal is not to be Euclid or Hawthorne but to use the capacities that God has given us to the best of our ability. We want students to be faithful, and we want students to grow, so we ask them to try new things in the classroom.
When students conclude that they “aren’t a Math person” or a “writer” they sell themselves short, cut themselves off, and snub God’s grace and work in their lives. We should not allow students to define themselves but allow God to work in them through the tasks they have been given. There are times that students convince themselves that they are not a Math Person or a Reading Person because they may lack the humility to try, want to justify their laziness, or want to shirk off their responsibility of learning—but we should push them to higher and greater things!
On a personal note, I think that if you talked to any of my school teachers today, they would all be shocked that I am a Literature teacher. Nothing was more torturous to me than reading a book or writing a paper. I would have said with absolute certainty that I was not a Reading Person in school. But God did a work in me and did not allow me to decide who I was; He showed me what I could do and be by His grace.
Yes, each school year is new and uncertain, but the good news is that the only certain thing is that God’s mercy is new every morning and that we, as people, are not yet certain. God is ever-changing us and ever-growing us—if we will humble ourselves and let Him do the work.
