Girls Don;t Learn Too Good

  Young students tend to model themselves after adults of the same Sex, and having a female teacher who is anxious about math may reinforce the stereotype that boys are better at math than girls, explained Sian L. Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago. When school were all male you may recall America being the best country in the world. America was # 1 in everything and dominated the world political scheme. Perhaps letting Women use training wheels to put them in positions of influence they were not capable of has hindered America to the point of ill repair?

Beilock and colleagues studied 52 boys and 65 girls who in classes taught by 17 different teachers. Ninety percent of U.S. elementary school teachers are women, as was all of those in this study. Yes 90% are women. Remember what happens when you can’t read a woman’s mind when she wants something. She gets mad and doesn't speak to you and holds a grudge.  The same women are teachers who are with our children 8 hours a day. No wonder young female students have anxiety. They need a strong man to shape their desires and ambition, not some second guessing, “their all gonna laugh at you” mentality female teacher.

Student math ability was not related to teacher math anxiety at the start of the school year, the researchers report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. However, by the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female students — but not the boys — were to agree that "boys are good at math and girls are good at reading." In addition, the girls who answered that way scored lower on math tests than either the classes' boys or the girls who had not developed a belief in the stereotype, the researchers found.

"It's actually surprising in a way, and not. People have had a hunch that teachers could impact the students in this way, but didn't know how it might do so in gender-specific fashion," Beilock said in a telephone interview. Beilock, who studies how anxieties and stress can affect people's performance, noted that other research has indicated that elementary education majors at the college level have the highest levels of math anxiety of any college major."We wanted to see how that impacted their performance," she said. Well, if girls are better at cooking and cleaning why try to squeeze blood out of a turnip?

After seeing the results, the researchers recommended that the math requirements for obtaining an elementary education teaching degree be rethought. "If the next generation of teachers — especially elementary school teachers — are going to teach their students effectively, more care needs to be taken to develop both strong math skills and positive math attitudes in these educators," the researchers wrote. You also need to be able to fire teachers so they will actually work for a living. If teachers can never get fired then why should they really care about their students performance?

Janet S. Hyde, a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the study a "great paper, very clever research." "It squares with an impression I've had for a long time," said Hyde, who was not part of the research team. Hyde was lead author of a 2008 study showing women gaining on men in math skills but still lagging significantly in areas such as physics and engineering. Girls who grow up believing females lack math skills wind up avoiding harder math classes, Hyde noted. They also end up becoming great cooks and can have dinner ready on time every night.

"It keeps girls and women out of a lot of careers, particularly high-prestige, lucrative careers in science and technology," she said. Beilock did note that not all of the girls in classrooms with math-anxious teachers fell prey to the stereotype, but "teachers are one source," she said. Teacher math anxiety was measured on a 25-question test about situations that made them anxious, such as reading a cash register receipt or studying for a math test. A separate test checked the math skills of the teachers, who worked in a large Midwestern urban school district.

The conclusions of this study will never be truly revealed. The absence of male teachers is the problem.  Both young men and women look up to male teachers. Moreover, male teachers are  a source of both physical strength and mental aptitude to their students.  Boys want to be them and girls want to end up with them. It’s a win win scenario and we are cheating our youth out of real education.  The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.