Stop what you're doing right now and dance a little gig.
This is a big moment in girl evolution, a big moment in feminism, a big moment for education and a big moment for the future of the United States of America.
Girls and boys are officially equal in their math scores, at all grades, according to a Science article published in July.
Parents and teachers persist in thinking boys are simply better at math, said Janet Hyde in an MSNBC article, Girls' math skills now measure up to boys', the University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher who led the study. And girls who grow up believing it wind up avoiding harder math classes.
So, really. Stand up and do a gig for all your hard work. All the hard work of math teachers and educators, all the hard work of feminists, and female mathematicians who did math anyway.
Read more on the study at Women in Science.
If you want a lot of different commentary on the study and its meaning, look at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker which has rounded up links (thanks to Women in Science for this link).
Next time your daughter tells you she's not good at math or doesn't want to take calculus, tell her you have statistical evidence that she can and will do just as well as her brother, and there's no reason to let her husband handle the money when she grows up.
5 comments:
I am not a math whiz. Far from it. My standardized test scores started out equally split between verbal and math, and ended up being 99th percentile verbal,30th math.
My daughter, on the other hand, is very good at math. She will freely tell people she is a "math wizard." She made her own t-shirt that says "Math is Cool."
No inferiority complex here. Keep it up, Girl!
Interesting indeed.
I WAS not a math whiz. I always felt I couldn't do it because it was too hard. I was lazy about it.
Then I realized it costs a lot of freaking money to be bad at math and I didn't want my daughter inheriting my math inferiority complex.
I confronted my "math retardation" - as I used to call it.
I also realized when Ainsley was around 3 that I had focused solely on letters and reading in our early education practice at home. I shifted and started teaching math and counting and now Ainsley is doing great at math.
More on that: http://traceesioux.blogspot.com/2007/10/math-retarded.html
I promised myself that I would raise my daughters to believe they were good at math. Period. I believe too many moms give the wrong message to their girls by saying "I'm lousy at math, too" or "It's okay if you don't understand - I never did and I survived." It's a big pet peeve of mine.
As mothers, we need to encourage them, and give the confidence they need to succeed in math. If you don't believe in them, no one will. Even if you have to pretend.
It works. Believe me.
Wonderful to hear Treece.
It's never too late to LEARN math - maybe Moms will like it more the second time around.
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