Math: Friend or enemy?

After working with many students I notice that students often tell themselves they are either good at math or not good at math.  It is as if they have a relationship with math that is either "friendly" or "not-so-friendly."  What I would like to share with you here is that math is actually neutral towards you.  All of the math that students are studying at the middle school, high school, and even undergraduate levels has already been discovered, analyzed, predigested, and systematized between 300 years ago all the way back to thousands of years ago.  So its not like mathematics somehow plays tricks on you when you are taking a test and changes its mind how it is going to operate that day(although it may seem that way sometimes).  But rather, math is like a loyal friend that you can always count on in a consistent reliable way.  I tell students, "when you don't understand something it is difficult, but when you understand then - it's super easy right?" Furthermore, even though some students say that they are bad at math, the fact of the matter is that the math that they understand they are really good at it...it's the math that they don't understand that is perceived as the antagonist to their good grades.  So our work begins with building on the excellent math skills that students already have and adding to them...and well, it couldn't hurt to think of math as that good friend.