My mom definitely played this role and I fell for it, until I had 2 really awesome female math teachers in 11 and 12 grade. Not great with numbers in my head, but geometry, algebra, pre-calc; all fun in its own way. The only thing I really suck at mathwise is probability. And ironically math plays a huge part in my job (finances). I always wonder what if I had been encouraged instead of sympathetic head pats.
Post by downtoearth on Aug 4, 2015 11:14:15 GMT -5
My dad is a high school math teacher, so we didn't have the option to be "bad at math." Even our high school dates were asked like three things, one of which was, "What math class are you taking right now and what is your grade?"
My mom never said she was bad at math, we just knew dad was better. I always knew I was going to be good at math and I was good at it in school, but I don't know if that was b/c of my parents. I'm sure most of it is because I didn't know girls were supposed to be "bad at math" or struggle with it.
ETA: And I'm pretty pissed at teachers that dismissed math or any subject based on gender... even in the 80's or 90's! I never once had teacher like this in my entire career?! I can't imagine someone saying that today to a kid's parents or a kid!!!
Post by londoncalling on Aug 4, 2015 11:16:12 GMT -5
I love math. It's beautiful. My mom was a math major and helped me when I ran into trouble with the more advanced stuff.
My high school has a girls only math class. Supposedly it was to be less intimidating and to have the girls participate more in class. I don't know if it's still in practice.
My grandma (dad's mom) had an 8th grade education and worked in the grocery store she and my granddad owned. She could easily do the multiplication for the deli items in her head and hated having to use the cash register to ring things up. She was killer to shop with: she did all the discounts quickly, and kept a running total of what you were planning on spending to the penny. Technically I guess that's arithmetic, but she was SO good at it.
:::shrug::: I'm bad at math. It is what it is. M is awesome at math, I tell her so, and tell her how proud it makes me. When I say I'm bad at math, I always follow it up with what I AM good at. I don't think I'm discouraging her or scarring her. Rather, I think I'm teaching her to acknowledge her strengths, and reminding her that everyone has things they are good at doing.
:::shrug::: I'm bad at math. It is what it is. M is awesome at math, I tell her so, and tell her how proud it makes me. When I say I'm bad at math, I always follow it up with what I AM good at. I don't think I'm discouraging her or scarring her. Rather, I think I'm teaching her to acknowledge her strengths, and reminding her that everyone has things they are good at doing.
Oh of course it depends on delivery! When I hear parents do it, it's in a dismissive way. Like, "of course you are bad at math, I was!" That is the problem.
I distinctly remember the middle school math teacher who first made me feel like I was bad at math. He was sarcastic and made you feel stupid for asking questions, so I just stopped asking. My parents were no help, and I leaned on my friends who did seem to understand for help. But I felt like I could never quite grasp why some things were right and others wrong even if I was getting the answers right most of the time.
I didn't feel confident about math until my freshman year of college, when I took calculus that was basically a repeat of my AP calculus class (I failed the AP exam so I had to take the course). My professor was really great and fun, and being able to go over the content a second time was actually really good for me. So good, in fact, that I took a second semester of college calculus -- which I never would've anticipated doing voluntarily, lol.
Really, though, I'm good at understanding the math I run into on a daily basis, whether it's personal finances or quarterly financial reports from companies, or technical tolerance-type stuff related to the industry I write about.
I think it's so interesting to see the difference in how my DD1 is learning math as part of Common Core, versus the straight memorization that I did at that age. She's learning math much more like it's a language that you can manipulate, play with, break down into basic parts and then build upon. The 1+1=2 stuff is built into that, of course, but it's much more about understanding concepts and relationships than memorizing. And OMG, it's so easy for her to jump from add/subtract to multiply/divide when it's based on thinking about how numbers are related rather than having to memorize a whole new set of this-times-this-equals-this. I think it would've been greatly to my benefit to learn math like that.
I have major bad at math baggage. I can pinpoint where it came from, and it's not from my mother or from a societal expectation that girls are bad at it. It came from "mad minutes" we did starting in 2nd or 3rd grade. I never got satisfactory scores on that and that left me convinced I couldn't do math.
My oldest started struggling with those (renamed "rocket math" but the same thing) this past year and I saw it impacting her math confidence. As it turns out her actual struggle is handwriting and it's a major struggle. In order to write the answer in rocket math and have it be legible it takes time for her. When her teacher quizzed her orally for rocket math instead of having it written she flew through the answers quickly. And she had great grades in math outside of the rocket math. I finally told her that rocket math doesn't matter in the least and isn't indicative of being good or not at anything. I really don't want her thinking that her inability to write numbers quickly means she's terrible at math because she has a head for math and if it were on a computer and just clicking she would likely be really good really quickly.
Timed tests are what killed me in 1st grade and I never recovered for the rest of my school career. I knew the facts but needed a little time to think so I always struggled to get them done on time. My school would only let you move on from one test to another once you had gotten a certain score and it sucked to always be three to four tests behind all my peers. Low math scores also meant that I was slotted into a lower reading group so I spent most of elementary school bored, frustrated, and embarrassed. I always felt so stupid in math that I never wanted to even attempt anything beyond the bare minimum in science because I felt like I would be too dumb go any farther. I enjoyed biology and chemistry in high school but never ventured beyond the required intro classes or took anything higher in college because I didn't want to set myself up to fail as a result of my poor math skills.
I'm actually quite good at arithmetic and geometry but algebra kicked my ass from 6th grade to my miraculous passing of the one math class I needed to graduate college. I went to three middle schools and two high schools in four states so my foundations in math and science are a little fractured because every system did it differently. One of my educational hills to die on is a standardized curriculum across state lines because my education from 6th grade to high school graduation was a hot mess of repeating material and giant glaring holes I had to fill in myself as I went along. Viva la common core!
I was always okay at math, but not great, and that felt the same as being 'bad' at it to me back then. Plus, it just didn't hold any interest for me. I wanted to be learning about literature and history and languages, and math was just boring to me. I took math through trig and never took calculus because it wasn't required in high school (I think my class was the last graduating class that only had to take 3 years of math instead of 4). I took AP music theory instead of calculus my senior year. Probably not any more useful than calculus, but it was a lot more interesting and fun for me.
I LURVE math & numbers...and turned out to be an engineer.
I remember at a very early age, my mom always had me counting. Everyday driving to daycare, we'd count, sometimes by 2's or 3's. She was always asking me to do simple math stuff in my head. Even now, she's already counting with my DD. She'll put cheerios or crackers on her plate & count them to her. My mom rocks!
I was good at elementary school math. Then I got to high school and ... nope.
I'm opposite. I get the basics, but it takes me FOREVER to get to the answer. I understand the mechanics but never memorized multiplication tables or anything like that.
Once I got to algebra & numbers were replaced by letters I was unstoppable. lol