Comments about Girls and Math

<p>No, sorry, not visions of vapid girls at all. More visions of vapid boys who are turned on by any kind of game with a unique solution that they can solve and get awarded points for. While the girls want to communicate, build relationships, make things better, understand the world, save lives, etc. (Stereotyping again, forgive me.) I admire math intelligence, but if all you do with it is math (and maybe astrophysics and options trading strategies), I regard it as inferior to other kinds of intelligence, not superior. I don’t blame my stereotypical girls at all.</p>

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<p>I think the above may illustrate the problem, rather than contradict it. The people who tend to be “all curious about all kinds of things” are disproportionately female. The people who tend to limit themselves to one mastering one thing, and who prefer well-defined, pre-packaged problems with fixed rules are disproportionately not female.</p>

<p>Long ago, a math PhD relative had this to say: “When He was handing out gifts, God gave my sister beauty, charm, the knack of relating to people, expressiveness, a great singing voice, optimism, love, and a passion for justice. I got the ability to do theoretical mathematics.”</p>

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<p>The problem with this hypothesis is that, at least into middle school, the girls I saw were constantly receiving the message that they did math well, or at least better than the boys, because they DID do math well, and better than the boys, just like pretty much everything else. In addition to which everyone knew it was important to encourage girls to do math. Of course, that wasn’t the only message they received. At home, my daughter observed her mother’s math phobia (although her mother is the one who handles the family finances and controls a 10-figure budget at work), and knew that it was Dad who liked to talk about math. But Mom had a poetry phobia, too, and it was Dad who liked to talk about poetry, and ultimately that’s what my daughter wanted to talk about more. That, and Kashmir, and Palestine, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and educational policy, and what to do about her friend’s depression and drug abuse, etc.</p>

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<p>Why would being interested in all kinds of things negate high level math skills?</p>

<p>As far as >“all curious about all kinds of things” are disproportionately female<, my H is an engineer and still enjoys discussing art, literature and history. Again, anecdotal, I know.</p>

<p>How do you explain that girls are doing as well as, if not better than boys through junior high and then…high school happens? Why do so many girls drop math as soon as possible in high school? I don’t have the answer but I strongly suspect it is cultural. Why do girls in some other countries not suffer from the same phenomenon? What is different for these girls?</p>

<p>I’m sure some of this has changed but…</p>

<p>I think some of this is because most pre-school and elementary school teachers, who are usually female, aren’t all that great at math themselves and don’t really enjoy it. While again, there are variations, I think girls are more likely to pick up and absorb that attitude. If the girls involved really are talented across the board, they will start focusing on creative writing or some such thing if that’s what pays off in terms of teacher praise and classroom dynamics. Maybe because the boys aren’t trying to emulate their female teachers, they don’t seem to be affected in the same way. </p>

<p>I went for my first pre-school parent-teacher conference a couple of weeks after my D turned 3. We lived in a small apartment. My D played constantly with her plastic blocks. The nursery school had beautiful wooden blocks and I was convinced my D would spend a lot of time playing with them. I was astonished to learn she ignored them. </p>

<p>When I got home I asked her why she didn’t play with the blocks in school. She said she didn’t like blocks. I said that’s not true; you play with them all the time at home and school has much nicer ones. Well…she got all huffy–as only a 3 year old can when she’s been caught in a lie can–and said “Listen, Mommy, I want to play with the girls. If you want the other girls to play with you, you DON"T play with the blocks!” I was dumbfounded; she was 3!!!</p>

<p>Fast forward 2 years. She’s in a new school in kindergarten. She tried to play in the block corner one day and the boys harrassed her. She climbed out–she couldn’t take it. The next day, another little girl came to her and said she liked to play with blocks too. Would my D brave the boys together after lunch? My D agreed. After lunch, the two of them held hands and walked into the block corner. The boys started giving them a hard time. This time, the teacher took note and told the boys to play nice or leave the block corner. ALL of the boys climbed out! The girls played happily for about half an hour. The next day, the girls did the same. The boys walked out again. After they left, a third girl joined the other two. They stayed for an hour. Soon, it became the routine. At a certain time every day, the girs would walk into the block corner. After a few weeks, ALL the girls were spending a happy hour together playing with blocks. The boys would all leave. Now, what was interesting was that some of those girls really were not interested in blocks. It was just that when MOST of the girls in the class were playing with the blocks they didn’t want to be left out. </p>

<p>Then the boys started getting interested. The girls built these complicated mazes and then let the classroom pet guinea pig run through them, timing him. They made the mazes more and more complicated. They were all cheering when the guinea pig ran the right way, etc. The boys tried to come back into the block corner and take over the building of the mazes. The teacher said no. This had gone on for several months now and the teacher said you wouldn’t play with the girls before–so now they don’t have to play with you. </p>

<p>Weird, true story. That class of girls ended up being more interested in math later on. The girls who loved building the mazes loved the math Olympiad puzzles. This one group of girls was an aberation. They did much better in math later on in elementary school than the girls in other grades. </p>

<p>Maybe it’s coincidence, but I think that some of the stereotypying does begin in pre-school. The girls and boys USUALLY self-segregate by sex and then both groups play what the majority of their sex want to play. And that can be influenced by the direction in which a pre-school teacher steers them.</p>

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<p>I do not know your relative so I hesitate to comment on this remark but…to me, it reeks of self importance. It is intended to appear self-deprecating but is, in my opinion, a thinly veiled plea for praise of his mathematical prowess. And I’m guessing that his sister knew that, too.</p>

<p>Jonri</p>

<p>Great story! What a wonderful illustration of what can go wrong and what can go right. I guess we will never really know if those girls math proficiency was related to their earlier experiences but its possible that it is. It made me think about my own experiences in my art clssroom. When my students finish their work they are invited to choose an activity form the “art activity” center. This is a free choice area that has a selection of how-to books, art games, objects from nature and art materials. often there will be a group of children who will break off into a group, sit on the floor and start cutting up egg cartons, cardboard, etc. The tape comes out, the stapler gets involved and, before you know it, a crazy construction has taken shape. Now that I think about it, it is often the boys who participate in this. i will watch carefully to see what the girls make of this. Are they trying to participate and being rejected? I have never seen anything blatant but I will be more aware. </p>

<p>My younger daughter was a big lover of blocks and building. I remember her sitting on the floor with the boys in preschool and building complex walls. She has done well in math but went through a couple of years of struggling confidence and slipping grades. I found a math tutor (female) who got her back on track, feeling confident about her abilities. She recently stopped seeing the tutor and is doing very well in calculus.</p>

<p>What an interesting story about the blocks. Our elementary school was lucky to have a bunch of teachers who really liked math and taught it well. They used to do evening Family Math activities that were well attended. But most kids just went on to do pretty well at math. My son was precocious at math early on and always wanted to do more of it. I used to give him math puzzle books and games and eventually he discovered computer programming. But he got good at it because he spent an inordinate amount of time on it. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem - did he spend time because he was good at it? Or did he get good at it because he spent time? But he did seem to have a knack from early on (preschool at least). </p>

<p>Now my second son, is pretty good at math, but never was interested like his brother. As for what we discuss at dinner - pretty much everything. Last night the subject happened to be the fundamental theorem of calculus because it had been my yearbook quote, which my son thought was weird. :)</p>

<p>I’ve always thought it quite possible that my math interest goes back to the two years I was in a one room school house in 4th and 5th grade. The only kid close to me in age was a boy. My leanings were pretty tomboyish anyway, but there just weren’t that many girls around to play dolls with. My math books were very new math-y. My mother has always liked math (though she was an English and then later an elementary ed major.) I remember being shocked at how elementary math was when I joined a regular classroom in 6th grade.</p>

<p>I loved the blocks story! And I remember building block mazes with my little brother and trying to push one of those red-eared turtles through it, the ones that got banned for salmonella years later. I was good in math as a little kid, but so-so through high school, the A- kid (too pre-occupied with boys). Off to college at an all girls school, I ended up a double major in studio art and math, after realizing one could not make a living in art. Calculus was the first time I realized that math had a purpose (max-min problems that showed why all one quart cans are the same dimensions, loved that.) But like many math majors, I hit the wall at the the heavy duty theoretical classes in my Junior and Senior years. I ended up a tax lawyer. I still love sitting down with a big computational problem and my calculator. My S is now an applied math major, my D wants to go into engineering. It is probably a lot of genetics, but we always liked math stuff in the house.</p>

<p>The blocks story is great. </p>

<p>Also, the teacher with whom my daughter met her math Waterloo? A young, outgoing, charismatic, athletic woman. For whatever reason, her teaching style and my daughter’s learning style completely failed to mesh, and my daughter basically gave up on trying to understand anything for a while. She did much, much better with male math teachers in 7th and 10th grades than with female teachers in 8th and 9th.</p>

<p>Re my relative’s quote: Of course it was a double-edged sword, and understood by everyone as such. Although not quite as nastily as you might imagine if you didn’t know them. There was not much irony in what he said. The younger sister was/is dazzling in all sorts of ways, the brother (back then) an awkward, funny-looking nerd who had a lot of trouble with anything that involved communicating with someone he didn’t know really well. They mainly grew up in a small Midwestern town that was not exactly stuffed with smart, ambitious kids. They never had a lot of conflict or rivalry – they had their spheres of influence: his math, hers everything else. After college, he went straight to grad school, and she took a shot at establishing herself as a country singer in Nashville. She is now a political operative, he is a trader. So he makes a lot more money than she does (a very recent reversal for them), but she plays on a much bigger stage.</p>

<p>Just another anecdote to throw into the hopper. Our D1 has always been very quick with math concepts and was absolutely terrific at it through 8th grade but her interest and performance level dropped off somewhat at about 9th grade. Not to say she’s done poorly; her standardized test scores come in at about the 96th percentile in math, but she’d be even higher if she weren’t dogged by silly little computation errors that come mostly from being slightly disinterested and inattentive. So she’s a little “lopsided,” doing much better in humanities and social sciences courses and tests where she’s extremely good, often 99+ %. Now, though, in her senior year, she’s completely turned on by Statistics, and she’s perfectly clear about the reason for it: HS-level math was always presented as a purely abstract, self-referential system that she couldn’t relate to anything that meant anything to her in the real world she cares about so passionately. Statistics, on the other hand, has all sorts of obvious applications in the social sciences, and she sees how it could be useful in ferreting out non-obvious aspects of complex social problems that she does care about deeply. So she’s soaring. We debated whether to have her take Statistics or Calculus this year. Clearly for her Statistics was the right choice, not because it’s “easier” but because it gave her motivation that she’d never have had for Calculus.</p>

<p>D2 is a very different kid, always has been. From early childhood she’s enjoyed games and puzzles of all kinds. There are few things she enjoys more than curling up with a book of Sudoku puzzles; she’ll spend hours at it. D1 was never like that; from early childhood she never showed much interest in puzzles and would much rather be read to or later read herself. Not to say D2 is uninterested in the humanities or in the kinds of political, social, and public policy concerns that absorb her sister; she’s very engaged on that level, too. But she truly doesn’t mind and even enjoys the abstract and self-referential nature of math; it’s just another set of puzzles to her, maybe not always her very favorite kind of puzzles but she derives a lot of satisfaction from solving the math puzzles and getting the right answers. And not surprisingly, she’s excelling in her 9th grade IB Prep Geometry class, at just the age where her sister started to lose interest.</p>

<p>So nature or nurture? I don’t know. Same parents, largely the same socialization, essentially the same learning experiences in the lower grades. But I don’t think D2 is inherently “smarter” in math than D1; she’s just more interested, because she has not only a higher tolerance but an affirmative taste for self-referential puzzles that D1 lacks. But I think perhaps it says something about the way we teach HS-level math. As JHS suggests, a lot more boys are like my D2; the math doesn’t need to mean anything outside itself, it’s just another puzzle to solve and that’s just fine, a lot like a computer game. We set up math classes to teach to that view, and more boys than girls (but definitely some of each) excel in math under that approach. But that ignores the potential of girls like my D1 who are innately just as capable but who lose interest because math isn’t taught in a way that allows them to see its relevance to larger social, cultural, and human questions that are of much greater interest and concern to them.</p>

<p>JHS–</p>

<p>My D was the same. She did MUCH better in math when she had male teachers.</p>

<p>floridahopeful, when I was in college, I felt much the same as you. I wanted to study ‘pure’ math, but felt the only two careers were teaching (for which I wasn’t interested) and genius (for which I wasn’t qualified). I decided that rather than study something else, I would combine math with another major. Without ever having seen a computer (this was in the dark ages), I decided to major in computer science. This led to an interesting career, while enabling me to complete my studies in mathematics. </p>

<p>Today, there are lots more options such as applied mathematics degrees. While it is true, it may be more difficult to find careers with a ‘pure’ math degree, nothing says you can think better than a degree in mathematics.</p>

<p>good luck with finding your own path</p>

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<p>I think that this gets to the heart of the problem! Great post. We may never know if the “connection to the world” theory (if i may call it that) is the issue or not but I do think that the disconnect is in the way that it is taught. I also think that what JHS said about his daughter hitting a wall is key, as well. I remember hitting my wall in 3rd grade. My teacher called me up to her desk and told me that I was going to get an “F” in math and that I would go back to the second grade classroom for math for a while. That was the intervention that I received. After that, i just shut down as soon as the topic started to involve numbers. I did have one algebra teacher in high school who managed to make some progress with me and I even enjoyed the class. Anyway, enough of that. I’ll be getting a bill for a therapy session if I’m not careful.</p>

<p>We will probably never understand this problem completely but I started the thread because I was alarmed at some of the comments that were directed at female posts in regard to their math SAT scores. If nothing else, our debate may enlighten some of those respondents and cause them to consider more carefully the message that they are sending in the name of being helpful.</p>

<p>“If nothing else, our debate may enlighten some of those respondents and cause them to consider more carefully the message that they are sending in the name of being helpful.” sorry but i can’t see how this endless “debate” helps anybody, thanks just the same. lots of posts that girls are still underestimated/mislead/inappropriately taught/etc…re math. this from women who obviously feel they missed the boat in their own education. surely such women have been striving to avoid the same mistreatment of their own daughters? so how is it that this new presentation of math will supposedly be made more female friendly? i asked my own “expert”, 22 y/o daughter (d), june grad from a fine LAC with a degree in…eng/art. did d feel somehow discouraged from pursuing math, and if so when? never. throughout grade, middle and high school d had been in the group of kids who were “good at math” - more girls than boys, btw. great schools, lots of encouragement from d’s parents (chem eng, food scientist), computer math games, advanced math courses, summer seminars, projects and prizes at the state science fair, on and on. so why did d and all the other girls she knew drop math after high school. d: girls weren’t the only ones who dropped it - none of the guys stayed with it either. why? we all failed to see how math could lead to an interesting way to be self-expressive in work - it’s too black-and-white, too limiting. so i ask you what is the big deal about (hats off) MATH? not only is it not for everybody, it IS a bit limiting. for every brilliant tenured mit professor, there are hundreds of journeymen engineers cranking away on some project - highway bridge, oil refinery, computer gadget, insurance risk, airplane wing. good supportive careers, easily entered after 4 - 6 years of college study. but “interesting…self-expressive”? not. and who gets the call at 3am when something goes wrong during graveyard with the gadget, plane, plant? hint: it ain’t the director of marketing.</p>

<p>One of the biggest misconceptions about a major in Math is that it is “limiting” or “black and white” or can only lead to a teaching, engineering or actuarial position. While all of those careers can be wonderful and fulfilling, the truth is that a degree in Math can lead anywhere-law, business, government work, finanace, medicine-to name just a few. What Math teaches, besides the obvious various Math “skills”, is logical, rigorous and in-depth thought processes that are in-demand in many fields. It’s no accident that Math majors score the highest on the LSAT’s, followed closely by Physics and then Philosophy majors. Math can be the road to many exciting careers. I think it’s NOT having Math skills that can sometimes be a road block.</p>

<p>Interesting. My oldest daughter (math major) recently scored a 175 on the LSAT & then decided not to apply to law school. (Long story.) I didn’t even realize that such stats were available.</p>

<p>(Side note: Someone who scores 175 on the LSAT has a lot of paths she could take to a successful career. There’s no need to choose the law school path if it doesn’t really appeal to her.)</p>

<p>Side note response… She already has multiple great job offers and more interviews. She was talked into becoming interested in law school by a visting law school dean (who had attended her college) over pizza in Greenwich Village several years ago. Then she abruptly changed her mind this summer. I’m happy if she’s happy. And now I don’t have to pay for law school!!! </p>

<p>I just had no idea there was a correlation between major and LSAT success.</p>

<p>“What Math teaches, besides the obvious various Math “skills”, is logical, rigorous and in-depth thought processes that are in-demand in many fields.” i think i read that somewhere before, now where was it? oh yeah - it was the subject of a thread about whether kids should pursue liberal arts degrees…as in, “liberal arts teaches logical, rigorous and in-depth thought processes that are in-demand in many fields”. my take on this is that most kids can get all the math they’ll ever need, use or want by the time they take pre-calc in high school. we should encourage ALL kids to try for that, and then give it a rest. my degree required math through tensor calculus but - aside from reading textbooks - during 30 years’ of chem eng work i have found basic algebra to be the most useful. higher math isn’t god.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>Let’s not forget that math IS a “liberal art”. There’s nothing inconsistent between a liberal arts education and majoring in math.</p></li>
<li><p>toodleooo, you may enjoy this prior thread, which started with me saying pretty much exactly what you just said, and had a lot of different views represented: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/400329-whats-so-great-about-calculus.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/400329-whats-so-great-about-calculus.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
</ol>