Gender Differences
Why are there differences in boys and girls performances in math? According to Peggy Orenstein, author of Schoolgirls, the differences arise from the hidden agenda in middle schools. At one middle school she observed the ways math teachers taught and attended to the different students in the class. Boys who were out going and shouted out the answers got more attention, good and bad, than girls. Even if girls were attempting to gain attention at the beginning of the school year, by the end they would stop trying and would not want to give answers or be noticed in their math classes. Some teachers would try to call equally on boys and girls, to give them equal amount of attention, but boys "will be boys" in that they will try to gain attention no matter what. Boys will call out answers even if not called on, they will distract the teacher from the girls, and make fun of the girls if they get the answer wrong. As the girls get picked on, they become more self conscious, and will only give answers to questions that they positively know the answers to, and sometimes not even then.
I will post more on this book later in the week.
posted by Tiffani-Marie @ 7:43 PM
3 Comments:
Well, to begin with I think I have to disagree with an inherent assumption that there is an agenda behind the poor performance of girls in math. Let's look at her argument for a moment. If this type of action was actually responsible why wouldn't it be true for all classes. If this were true boys would out perform girls in every subject because "boys will be boys" and this behavior would carry over to other classes. People fail to realize several key aspects of what is going on here. Firstly, as a society (boys included) we are totally math illiterate. It is fine for a grown man to admit he doesn't know how to do simple algebra but he is embarrassed to say he can't read. These are equivalent skills and need to be considered as such. Therefore there is an expectation of failure (I admit that this is probably a place where different views of boys and girls play a role. For instance, if people don't expect you to do well in math then you generally won't. Therefore any assumption that you will underperform will most likely be fulfilled.) This is all also tied into how we value what men and women learn and need to know. Men are viewed as needing logical skills in mathematics far more in women (while women tend to be seen to need to develop social intelligence). These are trends that have deep rooted social trends. Whether these trends have deep rooted real evolutionary ties that only reinforce them is a possibility but not the point.
Let's face another facet of this issue. We constantly hear about how women underperform men in math but how about how men tend to underperform in other subjects such as English. It is almost as if there is an expectation that boys should be doing poorly in schools (this is only perpetuated by social pressure on students to not perform and become outcasts as nerds). Our society is constantly flooded with images of the stupid male whose only savior is his intelligent wife (Ray Romano, Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, Joey (from Friends)) not to mention constant commercials that portray men as stupid. 50 years ago these images were reversed and eventually we became appalled. Instead all we now see is stupid men that if the roles were reversed there would be protests from feminists all across the nation. Many women view men as lazy and incompetent, but let us not forget that men are fully capable. While much of men's success can perhaps be attributed to access to opportunities, there have been 2 generations of women that have had more or less equal opportunities that while making excellent achievements have not completely blown away their male competition.
We need to face that facts: due to evolution or societal pressures (most likely both) men are different from women with different abilities and intelligences. No one group is smarter than the other and variation within each group is much larger than any variation between the groups. However men do well in mathematics and it has nothing to do with and "hidden agenda", but rather what has been valued for men to do.
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I think you are both missing the key point here: girls are stupid. They simply arenot smart enough to learn complex things like math or...uh...football and stuff.
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