I am the kind of parent who goes to parent/teacher conferences faithfully, even when I suspect the teacher may have little to say to me. That means that I went to 18 parent/teacher conferences for each of my two oldest children during their elementary school years. Both kids had the same teacher for almost every grade.
Whenever I went to a conference for my daughter, the teacher would almost always say, "Oh, she is such a reader. And wow, she is a good writer. I hope you encourage her to enter local writing contests, etc."
Whenever I went to a conference for my son, the teacher would almost always say, "Wow, he is really good at math. He is great at science. He really ought to think about a career in math/science."
Here's the strange part. If you look at the report cards and standardized test scores for my two oldest kids, the numbers are almost exactly the same. Academically, it's as if they have the same brain. (Not surprising, of course - similar genetic material and the same home environment.) I live in a state that really believes standardized tests so I have lots of data to work with. Both son and daughter consistently scored in the 99th percentile on standardized tests for math, yet it was rare for me to ever hear a teacher comment on my daughter's math prowess. Both kids are avid readers; both are terrific writers. Yet rarely did any teacher ever comment on my son's reading/writing skill even after he won several local writing contests.
More than one teacher has looked at my son's math scores and said, "Wow, he is really gifted in math. Is his father good at math?"
I always sigh and say, "No, his mother is."
10 comments:
Yep, it's the same thing here. My son always gets praised for his math skills, though to be fair, he has had a couple of teachers say he's a very creative writer. What I find more of is teachers willing to grant that boys may be good at typically "feminine" subjects, but girls are less likely to be good at math and science. We'll see the girl gets older. She does talk a lot about Buzz Bee, the science bee, but Kindergarten is not known for creating science geniuses. :)
The crazy thing is that I would predict this outcome almost every time. In most cases it's the result of the teacher not looking for what a kid is best at, but looking for what a boy or girl "should be" best at. The way that relatively rigid perceptions (and performances) of gender play out are very powerful. It's no surprise, then, to see how many college majors shake out along gender lines (feelings disciplines vs. thinking disciplines).
(weird biographical note): For a short while I taught at a Montessori school. The bulk of the students were 3 and 4 years old, yet they themselves already had these rigid perceptions. One little girl who wasn't yet 3 years old was stupefied that I have earrings since "boys don't wear earrings."
This doesn't surprise me in the least.
I graduated at the top of my high school class, a safe distance above the #2 person, highest grades in math/science and music (lowest in English, actually -- a class that I detested for the teachers' ability to suck the life out of good books), and my guidance counselor every year tried to steer me away from the science classes.
I won a math award in 8th grade. In 9th grade, my mother wanted me to skip algebra and go straight into geometry, but the (male) math teacher resisted it strongly. Mom won, but in part because of his resistance (and in part because of the social fear of being the only freshman in a sophomore honors class), I did very badly. The one test that I aced didn't help, because all the other students did poorly and were complaining that no one had done well, and the teacher singled me out as the ony student who had, which only made me more self-conscious.
In my junior year, I decided to repeat trig. I mostly slept through the class, but I was with all the other juniors, who were my friends. Then I took calculus and was one of the top students in the class.
In college, I actually planned to double-major in a humanities subject and a science subject. The rumors about how difficult organic chemistry was, however, scared me off--flashbacks of my high school math courses--so I opted for a minor in the science subject instead.
So yeah, who knows what would have happened if I hadn't, in my adolescence, been badly spooked by a teacher underestimating my math skills.
Does anyone know why random posts sometimes get removed by the blog administrator? This has happened a couple of times on my blog and it really annoys me. Anonymous had some good stuff to say but it got erased.
Hey, jo(e), you might be the one erasing the comments. When you read comments and you are logged in, be careful not to accidentally click on the little trash can icon.
Or maybe computers just hate you, the way cars and copy machines do.
Here's what's ironic. My mom is a programmer (and former college math major) and my dad is an electrical engineer. My sister is a physician, and my husband is also an electrical engineer. I'm surrounded by mathematically gifted people! Yet, I am totally idiotic when it comes to programming, statistics, equations, or using MATLAB. (Well, I'm better at stats than the others.) I don't enjoy it, and I'm not good at it, even though I ended up in a field that is increasingly turning toward mathematical methods. I don't remember if people actively encouraged me or not, but I certainly had plenty of role models!
More than anything in the world I wish that a talent for math would awaken in me. Or get implanted. However it needs to happen.
I don't remember anyone discouraging me from pursuing math/science, but I discouraged myself - I remember very consciously thinking that I was good at language-y things, but not math/science, whereas my best friend at the time (a girl) was the other way around. As we were two of the top students in elementary/middle/high school, I suspect it was a way for use to avoid direct competition (we were fiercely competitive people!). I sailed along in honors everything until freshman year in high school, where I had a terrible honors math teacher and decided to drop down a level. I'm not really sure that I couldn't do the material as much as I hated the teacher so much and couldn't learn anything from him. My take on it was always that I was good at math but didn't like it, whereas I liked some of the sciences but didn't feel any good at them (I was fine at bio but no good with physics).
Interestingly, the top science/math students in my high school were women - our 2 co-valedictorians went on to get a Ph.D. in some kind of biology from Stanford and a Ph.D. in compsci from umm, I forget where, but now she's a prof at Berkeley. :-)
At both schools I've taught, biology has been DOMINATED by women students. They all want to go to med school. :-) Physics, math, chemistry all seem another story (whenever I run into women students majoring in such things I try to tell them how great that is, but I can't imagine my meager encouragement means much by that point).
ack. This sort of thing drives me batty. I posted something on my blog about my own experiences growing up, but luckily for me I did have teachers that went out on a limb and said I should be taking all the highest math and science courses.
As a professor, when I teach the intro course in my field, I make a point of reaching out to students, male and female, who I think have potential and specifically inviting them to take more courses in this field. Every single female student that I've spoken to about this has expressed shock that I would think they would be "good enough" to move on to the upper-level courses. And this happens even when the female student is the top student in the class and is blowing everyone else out of the water. So these sorts of messages do get internalized.
Thanks for posting this, and I hope you continue to push your kids' teachers to consider their words carefully!
Interesting to read all your experiences. I was using the teacher atttitudes as an example, but parents and peers have even more influence. And where I'm from, the gender bias is blatant and ridiculous. Parents encourage their sons to go to college for some kind of math/science thing like engineering with the idea that "boys will need job with a decent salary because they will be supporting a family." You rarely hear a parent entertain the idea that a daughter might need to support herself. Most of the rigid gender role stuff comes from family and peers, but of course teachers have an influence too and I guess I would expect them to be a bit more educated about this kind of stuff. I do have to say a good word for my high school calculus teacher who tried very hard to get me to go into math, and 25 years later, will still see me in the community and say things like, "I can't believe you stopped with Calculus! You could have done anything in math you wanted!"
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