Fuzzy Math
Submitted by Boys and Schools Blog
I am not super-great at math. I’m certainly not bad at math either. I took calculus in high school and college, and I understood it. Mostly. (It was about curving graphs and stuff, right?) And I got decent, if not spectacular grades in it. And my standardized tests for math were always very respectable, if not exactly genius level. It has been known for quite some time that when math assessments are done of American students, there is little in the way of a math gender gap, and the recent data confirming this has received a lot of play in the press lately.
This is all good news, but it does leave a supposed contradiction in some of the things that I’ve said about boys’ development–specifically, the common claim that boys’ brain development gives them slightly more facility with spatial relationships and certain abstract mathematical problems. Like all generalizations, this has a million exceptions and qualifications–except when it doesn’t. Certainly it doesn’t mean that there are no brilliant female mathematicians (there are), that girls aren’t capable of doing as well as boys in math (obviously, they are), or that all boys are innately good at math (they’re not). It’s just a tendency; an explanation as to why some things seem to come easier to most boys than others. (Like math versus language skills.)
What I didn’t expect to hear was to have my mom asking me why, if this study was true, she always struggled with math. My mom’s study habits aside (based on dimly remembered childhood lectures, I believe she always had her homework done ahead of time and never ever sassed her mother), she seemed a little disappointed to lose the myth that helped explain for her why advanced math was so tough. Not to let my mom completely off the hook, but there is a little more to the story than you can get in a 15-second news brief. Check out this story in the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, while there is little overall difference between boys and girls in math scores, boys’ scores are a lot more variable than girls, with more boys scoring extremely poorly or extremely well (as in the top 1% of scores). Interesting stuff.
It’s incredibly tempting to take that one detail and turn it into some big, sweeping theory about gender and education and so on. But I think we all know that giving into that temptation is a good way of looking spectacularly wrong and more than a little foolish at a later point. So I’ll just say that it’s some interesting stuff. I don’t know what future studies on this subject might turn up, but I am curious. (I also really wish they’d start looking a little more closely at the big gap that has opened up between boys and girls in literacy scores. It seems like there’s a lot less interest in the question of why boys have fallen behind.)
