nerad@closus.DEC (05/29/84)
{...libation...}
I grew up in north central Vermont, a culturally ambiguous place--both
conservative and progressive, in an entirely indescribable admixture.
However, one thing that prevailed in grade school was an attitude that was
communicated to most girls that women had to know the equivalent of Business
Math, and need not bother their pretty heads with most math. Arithmatic was
never presented with any justification to the girls in a class, whereas to the
boys it was associated with later math skills that would allow them to be
astronauts, scientists, and all those other manly technological niches.
Women, you see, have to know enough math to manage a checkbook--and if they
screw it up, they can always get their husband to dig them out. Girls who
were really good at math could actually go on to be bookkeepers.
Now this is a bit extreme and bitter, but I felt considerably put upon when I
got to high school. I was taking a really fine astronomy class in 9th grade
(and discovering computers) and fell in love with physics. Being the best
student that the astronomy teacher had ever had (the only person he had ever
given an A+ in the class) I went to him with great pride and told him that I
had decided to go into astrophysics as a career. He informed me that at 14,
my math skills were ill advanced, my arithmatic was questionable, and it was
much too late for me to catch up sufficiently to make any significant
contribution to the field.
Since I viewed this person as my mentor of that period of my life, I took his
advice to heart, and decided to abandon technical fields and find some field
in liberal arts to which I might devote myself.
By strange paths, I ended up in computer science via anthropology. I am
pleased that I ended up with a more rounded perspective than could have been,
had I gone into physics directly. I still resent the result of that teacher's
well meaning advice. I still find myself fully capable of implementing
complex algorithms in the context of, say, Pascal, but entirely incapable of
tackling similar problems as formal proofs. I can only consider this to be a
mental block--math anxiety.
Shava Nerad
Telematic Systems (@DEC Ed. Svcs.)
{decvax, allegra}!decwrl!rhea!closus!neradmartillo@ihuxt.UUCP (Yehoyaqim Martillo) (05/30/84)
Implementing complex algorithms and producing formal proofs are quite
different types of reasoning. The majority of men (and a larger
majority of women) have difficulty producing formal proofs. Math anxiety
is simply an excuse.
As for math training at 14 most Americans at 14 are well behind Europeans
and Japanese of same age in math.
--
Yehoyaqim Shemtob Martillo
(An Equal Opportunity Offender)