Girls inheriting math anxiety from female teachers?

January 27, 2010, 7:00 am

The LA Times reports on a study suggesting that female elementary school teachers who are anxious about math transmit that anxiety to the girls in their classes:

Girls have long embraced the stereotype that they’re not supposed to be good at math. It seems they may be getting the idea from a surprising source — their female elementary school teachers.

First- and second-graders whose teachers were anxious about mathematics were more likely to believe that boys are hard-wired for math and that girls are better at reading, a new study has found. What’s more, the girls who bought into that notion scored significantly lower on math tests than their peers who didn’t.

The gap in test scores was not apparent in the fall when the kids were first tested, but emerged after spending a school year in the classrooms of teachers with math anxiety. That detail convinced researchers that the teachers — all of them women — were the culprits.

It’s no surprise that teachers who are weak in or nervous about a subject do not inspire confidence, or performance, in that subject among their students. What’s different here is the gender connection — female teachers having a pronounced effect upon girl students — and the subject area. It would be interesting to see just how many elementary school teachers view themselves as “anxious” about teaching math, and then to see how that self-description breaks down by gender. Do a lot of female elementary teachers feel anxious about math? Is it more than male elementary school teachers? I don’t know, but that is certainly the stereotype.

At any rate, the opposite seems to be implied by this study too — female teachers who are strong with math and comfortable with teaching it to kids will have an enhanced positive effect on girls’ perceptions of math and their performance with it. And it seems like a no-brainer that elementary education curricula ought to stress a strong degree of math content mastery among all preservice teachers — of both genders — and demand a high level of fluency with doing and teaching math.Teaching math to little kids is hard, and you have to know a lot of math outside of what you are going to teach if you’re going to do it well. We need to have done with another stereotype: that you major in elementary education because “you just love kids” (you need more than sentimentality to be a good teacher) or because it’s supposedly an easy major (it isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be).

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Gary

No one is disputing that the sexes are distinct biologically, but sociologists have shown that many behavoirs and roles we associate with sex vary fromculture to culture, and they are therefore culturally determined. Furthermore, statements like, “Boys are better at math,” may be biologically true on a general basis, but it does not follow that every boy is automatically better than every girl at math. Gender also places value on the sex differences, which biology does not, obviously. To continue the math example, it may be true that biology has given the male brain an advantage in mathematical and spatial intelligence, but the value we place on male forms of thinking over female forms of thinking is societal, and caught up with gender. Everyone is encouraging girls to excel in math and science, but very few people seem to be concerned that boys aren’t so interested in foreign languages sciencer or literature. Instead the Media will feed us lies to oppress boys and better girls. If you you cant see that Gender bias’s Cannot exist anymore. WE PREACH EQUALITY… but we dont mean it as a Country we should be pushing for the better for every student no matter the gender in EVERY subject.
Will Farris

Oh, Gary, great words there! It is notable, as you say, that the intelligensia has for a long time taken up the issue of mathematics as gender thing precisely because it is a crystal clear parameter that distinguishes left-brain from right-brain. And as a general rule girls are more right-brained and boys are more left-brained. Logic vs intuition, it is just that simple. Remember all those experiments trying to get guys to play with dolls and girls to play with bulldozers? It just did not work – duh! And what is also forgotten in this silly debate is that most people, especially girls, just do not like math as a subject because it is so isolated from tangible reality in the classroom. In order to study pure logical process it strips away the real complexities of the world, as it must, in order to establish models or reality. Touchpoints with reality come later for those who survive theory. And another thing, those girls who do become brainiacs do not typically serve well as role models for their peers. “Oh, Susy is the math brain, but she is so weird.” And typically not too terribly good-looking in my experience, and can be very threatening to guys if they are. This social dynamic is more powerful than any government program can overcome. This is why it is much better to have segregated schooling in the earlier grades to get rid of those distractions and let the intellectual stratifications take care of themselves. The talented ones will be freer to rise to the top without stigma.

Alas, being good in literature does not get one a job nor is it a means to an educational end that will. Jobs are miserably scarce for math and physics majors, but at least one can move on into engineering or computer science with such a background and poof – as if by magic – suddenly attractive to a huge host of hiring managers. In my group we have electrical engineers and an odd physics major. The physics major is as knowledgeable as the EEs but earns half the salary. Go figure. But that is a topic for another day. So I read literature and philosophy on my own time, as engineers and physics majors are typically illiterate and I wish to avoid that image as far as possible, but it still hasn’t led to any promotion :-0
Carolyn

Interesting thoughts. You know I have always loved math, never felt anything but encouraged during my school years…and really thought about becoming a math teacher because I liked it so much.
I think what I always loved about math is that your answer was either right or wrong…no opinions mattered in the grading. (probably why I didn’t care so much for English or History…too much room for subjective grading)…anyway..I think alot of girls might feel that way, but I never did…maybe it was because our dad treated his daughters and you, his son, the same way when it came to academics and life in general…I think we always felt (all three of us) that we could pretty much do anything that we wanted to do in life…we just had to work hard. And I know in high school we had great math teachers….so, maybe the attitude of the parents toward academics has alot to do with the whole thing too…
anyway…I enjoy reading your posts!
http://www.travacor.org Kyle

Interesting indeed. I’m not a math person myself, but I think any teacher with any kind of anxiety about teaching any subject is going to cause the students to lose sleep over it down the road. I don’t necessarily believe that it’s as gender specific as this article would have you think. I guess I’m just an advocate of calming yourself and accomplishing what you set out to do.

Great post.
http://google mifta shemsu

why the fmail student deffer in mathematics subject
dw

You conclude on the basis of one example that the “whom” words are making a “creeping return”, but in the wrong places. Have you ever heard of the recency illusion? Hypercorrect use of “whom” goes back at least as far as the King James Bible’s “Whom do men say that I am?”.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=36813802 Melissa Fox

I can’t bring myself to say “this is she”, but still less can I bring myself to say “this is her”. I cut the knot with a simple “speaking”.

mbelvadi

Or repeat your name, “This is Lucy” or “I am Lucy”, which also serves as an extra confirmation as to what name they just asked for in case the line or their pronunciation isn’t clear.
3rdtyrant

How about a grandiose “It is I!” That’s my favorite. The stunned few moments of silence are worth the ridicule.

Guest

I am guilty of being snooty. To whomever I speak, I continue to use the accusative case of our beloved interrogatory pronoun “who.” I also take off points when I correct student papers when they fail to use whom. (My students in Intermediate Exposition, by the way, are mostly Latinos who speak English as a second language, many of whom are undocumented.) If you do it consistently enough, it becomes a signature piece, like wearing a strange orange hat or using suspenders.

As for Nick Kristoff, I suppose his grammatical mistake would be shocking, had I not concluded a very long time ago that the New York Times opinion editorialist is among the least intelligent creatures of the species Homo Sapiens. His co-workers are Maureen Dowd and David Brooks, for Heaven’s sake. What is more depressing is the 46% figure, since I am not one of these spineless Burkean conservatives who can live with Mitt Romney as our nominee. I will not vote for “whomever we nominate”; I will vote for ABR — anybody but Romney. If it’s Romney v. Obama I am joining Occupy Wall Street for it is time that “whoever” finds domination by an Ivy League cartel problematic go out and start a revolution.
mbelvadi

It is interesting that you started with an example of written prose, but much of the rest of your essay refers to speech and speakers. It’s entirely reasonable to accept one form in oral communication, where emphasis and other cues are adding their own kinds of grammatical inflection, and another in written prose where English’s minimal inflection is often needed for disambiguation. I try to avoid the, as you put it, “snooty” forms in speaking, but I’ll use them in writing, including email, and especially in professional contexts.
QuiHai

“It’s not that ‘Whom shall I say is calling?’ is wrong; it’s that it sounds snooty.” Wow — being “snooty” is now more of an issue than being wrong. Are we that afraid of snootiness? Why?

“Snooty” is just a pejorative way to say “formal.” God forbid that we relinquish our right to casual speech even when greeting a stranger.

The world needs a lot of things, but a rousing defense of casualness is not one of them. A little more formality would be a tonic, these days. On Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum recently pointed out that use of passive grammar doesn’t lead to “passive thinking” and “passive action.” But repudiation of formal speech does seem to buttress a saddening society that expects tube tops on receptionists, sweat pants at funerals, and snarky ridicule for dinosaurs who stupidly bothered to learn how to use “whom.”
nordicexpat

It’s really hard to tell sometimes if the appearance of “whomever” (or whom) is due to “overcorrection” or whether those speakers are simply following a different rule than the one you cite. In the Kristoff quotation, for example, the rule (maybe just in formal situations) might be “use the accusative for a pronoun in a pre-nuclear position” (pre-nuclear being here the position before the subject). This rule would predict “whomever it winds up being,” since “whomever” appears before the subject “it” but not “?whomever ends up being President” (the OP’s example), since “whomever” is in the subject position. It also predicts DW’s example above (“Whom do men say that I am?”). ”I’m inclined to say that “whomever ends up being President” is due to hypercorrection, but not “whomever it winds up being.”

Case in coordinated constructions is also pretty complicated, but the same problem about whether we have examples of overcorrection or simply different rules for coordinated vs. non-coordinated pronouns also apply. In each case, the rule that people cite as the “correct” one occurs in a different grammatical context than the one that they cite as being in need of correction. Maybe English (or some varieties of English) assigns different cases to pronouns depending upon whether the pronoun appears in the subject or pre-nuclear (i.e., before the subject) position, or whether the pronoun appears in a coordinated vs. non-coordinated construction, etc.

(And for those language peevers out there. Yes, I know what your seventh grade grammar teacher told you. I just think your seventh grade grammar teacher was wrong, or greatly simplified English grammar for you).
sicetnon

The pertinent issue is that students are no longer being taught grammar or, heaven forbid, sentence diagramming. The fact that most young (or mature) people are grammatically ignorant was made clear to me when I saw a book in the university bookstore entitled, “English Grammar for Students of Foreign Languages.” The fault is not sloppiness but ignorance.
11182967

Another overcorrection, common among athletes turned broadcasters (and especially NASCAR announcers, for some reason) is the use of “he” instead of “him” as a direct object: “Fines were levied against he and Kyle Busch.” Grammar usage in spoken language usually reflects the oral language context of the speaker (my wife “doesn’ts” around me and my university colleagues and “don’ts” around her relatives). I suspect that many of the athlete broadcasters have been corrected for using “him” as a subject (“Him and Tony Stewart got into a fight”) and have somehow internalized this correction as applying to all uses of “him,” probably operating on the principle that if something sounds wrong to them it’s probably correct–and if it sounds right it’s probably wrong.

jffoster

You might want to give a close read to Mr. Nordicexpat’s comment above, especially his middle pgf. about case and coordinating conjunctions in English. All the examples you give are instances where the pronoun is in a coordinate structure with another noun.

tariq1one

Also, the fear of being incorrect (which motivates some of the hypercorrection, at least at the high school level, has driven many to statements like: “You may send your responses to John or myself.”

crunchycon

Use of “myself” instead of “me” is one of my language peeves.

earshape

Churchill was, I think, right. Isn’t there a disjunctive pronoun in English, which allows us at the door, say, to answer “Who is it?” with “Just me”? Surely “Just I” borders on the impossible. Avoiding that “me” may also account for the incorrect “I” when combined with another pronoun. Very much like the French “C’est moi!”

3rdtyrant

I fear the French have it wrong. The construction ‘moi aussi’ is similarly flawed, but may be the root of our “me, too,” or it is just human grammatical penchant to disregard accuracy in case.

jffoster

Wait a minute — “the French have it wrong”? Mr.3rdtyrant, that’s the way French — including the Standard French, is spoken.   The disjunctive pronouns moi, toi, lui, eux are used for post predicate positions, as in C’est moi — never *C’est je .’ nor *C’est me.. The disjunctives are also used as objects of prepositions — avec moi ‘with me’ and whenever they are in a coordinate construction, as in

Lui et moi, nous allons au cinema., which exactly parallels nonstandard Southern Highland English

‘Me and him, we’re goin to the movies.

except that English has a different order for the two pronouns.

Perhaps I have misunderstood you, or perhaps you were writing pen in cheek. I read your comment as implying that French grammar is somehow wrong or defective because it doesn’t work the way you think it ought. If I misread you, I apologize and perhaps you could clarify what you meant. If I have read you correctly, are you prepared to devaluate Basque grammar too because in Basque, the direct object of a transitive sentence is in the nominative case like the subject of an intransitive while the subject of a transitive is in a case with a suffix, called the ergative case?   Or do you think that people who speak ergative languages “have it wrong”, like you apparently think that French speakers do?

crunchycon

As others have pointed out, there can be distinction between spoken and written English. On the other hand, #2 and #5 ARE correct grammatically, whether they sound ”snooty” to the author or not. By her standards, it would seem that I have a tendency toward snootiness.
mbelvadi

Just a note that while you are correct about “whoever” being correct in the original sentence, the verb is “ends up”, not “being”. “Being” is a participle. “Ends up” is also acting as a linking verb (takes a complement in the nominative case) so your analysis with regard to “whomever” is correct, but on the wrong verb.

nordicexpat

I wouldn’t agree with you on this. Think of the relationship between “whoever it is” and “whoever it turns out to be” (I’m modifying the example a bit, but the structure is comparable). There’s a clause enbedded within another clause, and whoever belings to the embedded clause, not the matrix clause (cf. “whoever it is” vs. *”whoever it winds up,” the * marking it as ungrammatical, in the sense we are discussing: transitive sense is fine) i would say that the structure is whoever it winds up [being __], with the __ linked to “whoever” that appears in prenuclear position (that is, before the subject of the matrix clause. It’s called an “unbounded dependency”

mjaneb

And just to stir the pot a bit, why doesn’t Kristof use ‘whichever’ instead of ‘whomever’?

jffoster

And to stir it even more, there is a region in the Ozark and Ouachita Mtns. of Missouri, Arkansas, and Eastern Oklahoma where in the mid 1900s, the objective case suffix on who-, i.e. ‘whom’ is, or was, not only alive but in fact got extended to the inanimate form also. So we could hear about The cabbages whichem you picked….’. In this dialect, the form ‘whose’ was also preserved as the possessive of ‘which’ as well as of ‘who’. It is notable that so far as I know, this extension never obtained with the general English complementizer that. So it was never *The cabbages thatem I picked….’

I have not been in that region much in the last two or three decades and do not know whether this is still alive, dead, or dying. My guess is the last. But there you’ld have heard something like “Whichemever cabbages you want…..” or, “Whichem cabbages you ever want….’ The latter parallels a common German construction Wo du immer bist / seist… ‘Whereever you are / may be’, i.e. ‘Where you ever may be’, and some of that region, though not all, had considerable German settlement soon after the Recent Unpleasantness, so it may have been partly a borrowing from German.

Guest

But you give the game away by using variant forms as data for analysis. You won’t catch many snipe that way.

jffoster

Sorry, …159x. You’ve lost me. What “game”? Citing variant forms was the whole point. I was simply showing how one regional, nonstandard, dialect of American English actually not only preserved the who/whom distinction but extended it to the inanimate, which as well.

But I have just noticed your warning below that “…n2n_0131 is setting up a snipe trap.” So there’s apparently some agenda going on here that you see but I don’t. Sorry if I inadvertantly naively or stupidly prematurely tripped a trap.
Guest

(The machine does not allow me to reply to jffoster’s response to me, so I am replying to my response to him that caused him to take offense.)

The game, dear sir, is “stirring the pot,” as in using “refudiation” as a blend of “repudiation” and “refutation” to cue those who understand that one’s prejudices do not count as data for proof of “correctness.” I do most humbly apologize if I assumed too quickly that your introductory phrase “And to stir it even more” was your cue to identify yourself as someone who understands repudiation of usage items does not constitute a professional or scholarly activity in the way that citing variant grammatical forms does. Mea maxima culpa, if that is what is required.

As I have said elsewhere in the last couple of days round about in Lingua Franca, I am unhappy to the point of deep sorrow that The Chronicle of Higher Education has become a forum for old-time discussions of “correctness” to repudiate speakers who wear their identity markers in plain sight (especially students struggling mightily against institutionalized racism and others bearing linguistic signs of lower class status).
jffoster

to …159x,
      1st, no offense was taken, and I’m sorry if my comment sounded like I might have been offended — I wasn’t and ain’t. No apology needed.

      2nd, thanks for the explanation. I see I stirred more than I realized at the time.

     I’ll take this opportunity to join you in at least a partial overlap of disappointment with this Blog Series, Lingua Franca.   It has indeed largely turned into a pet peevery with a lot of the commentors and even occasionally a few of the original posters asserting very strong opinions about things they don’t know much, if anything, about, who seem not to understand the notion of empirical evidence as applied to the study of how a language works, and some of whom seem sometimes either amazingly ignoramosious and stupid or else deliberately obtuse. .
beedhamm

replying to jffoster, “I’ll take this opportunity …”
I agree with you completely. In fact, I have found the comments of a few individuals, such as yourself, to be much more interesting and useful than many of the blog postings.
jffoster

reply to Mr. Beedham,
Thank you. Glad to have been interesting and useful to somebody.

Guest

Your implied conjecture that nominees are whiches rather than whos bears some refudiation or consternation or something.

A word to you who derive an ego boost from ruffling your grammatical plumage in the face of the less worthy, n2n_0131 is setting up a snipe trap.

Guest

The ghost of W. Nelson Francis has been knocking, knocking on my chamber door. He’s saying:

“A curious paradox exists in regard to grammar. On the one hand it is felt to be the dullest and driest of academic subjects, fit only for those in whose veins the red blood of life has long since turned to ink. On the other, it is a subject upon which people who would scorn to be professional grammarians hold very dogmatic opinions, which they will defend with considerable emotion. Much of the prejudice stems from the usual sources of prejudice–ignorance and confusion. Even highly educated people seldom have a clear idea of what grammarians do…………”

jffoster

…and even seldomer of what linguists do.

socwwp3

I felt the death of who and whom when, years ago, the dean of an ivy league School of Theology asserted “we should hire whomever is best qualified.” We were taught to recast a sentence with he or him would show us automatically which to use, and it did. That was before “between he and the hole” became standard in golf broadcasting. To avoid being wrong, many announcers now say “between himself and the hole.” Since we have been ignoring case for hundreds of years, only those of use who see some value in standards in their own right seem to care.

Guest

What you felt was a parade of the ghosts of dialect scholars from mid-20th century walking across your grave site. When grammarians became linguists after 1959, the traditional-prescriptivists joined the undead walkers. Dennis E. Baron used to shoo them off the Chronicle’s doorstep, but now we have Lingua Franca instead.

potratzg

We need a better term than ‘hypercorrection’; for ludicrous errors ironically caused by an attempt to write or speak properly. Is there such a term? ’Overcorrection’ is better, but still lacking in my view.

‘Hypercorrect’ to my mind would better fit stilted uses like ‘this is she’.

Guest

Not a single term. The paradigm is not “correct,” “incorrect,” or “hypercorrect.” The REASONS people run afoul of their own language are many and varied. There are dialect differences, of course, double speak (when pomposity is used to deceive or conceal), formal vs informal, sometimes characterized as speech vs writing. Some of these latter are simply conventions of edited English (“the book should HAVE (not OF) cited its sources” and the placement of apostrophes. There are socially significant usage items as well as early stages in the language acquisition process. There are violations of semantic restriction (“violence is a topic which is highly opinionated by society”), slips of the tongue (“you hissed all my mystery lectures”), and purely illogical statements–some of the most entertaining coming from reports of accidents as reported to insurance companies: “i thought my window was down, but found it was up when I put my hand through it” and “to avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front of me, i struck a pedestrian.”

Of course, I could talk less, walk less, wear less, and care less if I wanted to. On the other hand, some people say I couldn’t talk less if I tried, that I couldn’t walk less without becoming completely immobile, couldn’t wear less without getting arrested, and couldn’t care less if I reached within myself for untapped reservoirs of ennui. One of these alternative claims is commonly believed to be beyond the pale, but I can never remember which it is: “I could care less” or “I couldn’t care less.” Both seem to me to be fairly ordinary sentences of English.
Guest

Not a single term. The paradigm is not “correct,” “incorrect,” or “hypercorrect.” The REASONS people run afoul of their own language are many and varied. There are dialect differences, of course, double speak (when pomposity is used to deceive or conceal), formal vs informal, sometimes characterized as speech vs writing. Some of these latter are simply conventions of edited English (“the book should HAVE (not OF) cited its sources” and the placement of apostrophes. There are socially significant usage items as well as early stages in the language acquisition process. There are violations of semantic restriction (“violence is a topic which is highly opinionated by society”), slips of the tongue (“you hissed all my mystery lectures”), and purely illogical statements–some of the most entertaining coming from reports of accidents as reported to insurance companies: “i thought my window was down, but found it was up when I put my hand through it” and “to avoid hitting the bumper of the car in front of me, i struck a pedestrian.”

Of course, I could talk less, walk less, wear less, and care less if I wanted to. On the other hand, some people say I couldn’t talk less if I tried, that I couldn’t walk less without becoming completely immobile, couldn’t wear less without getting arrested, and couldn’t care less if I reached within myself for untapped reservoirs of ennui. One of these alternative claims is commonly believed to be beyond the pale, but I can never remember which it is: “I could care less” or “I couldn’t care less.” Both seem to me to be fairly ordinary sentences of English.

gavrik

“This is she” is stilted? Overcorrected? How else does one answer the telephone? ”Speaking?!!!”
“This is she” is correct. Period. Ask my 97 year old mother.
http://www.facebook.com/peteschult Pete Schult

It’s nice to see 22089159x, jffoster, nordicexpat, and others struggling (perhaps quixotically) against the forces of peeving about the alleged decline of grammatical standards. One of the results of my own linguistic education was the understanding that the correct grammar for a language was defined by the way that native speakers constructed words, phrases, and sentences in the course of fluent use of the language. So the fluent speech of Igbo by native speakers of Igbo yields the data that a linguist can use to try to make the correct, underlying grammar of Igbo explicit.

But I guess I drank too much of the Kool-Aid. 3rdtyrant informs us that all native speakers of French (and even the Academy) are speaking French wrong by using the prepositional object form of pronouns in any coordinate noun phrase, regardless of syntactic function. If a high-prestige language like French is subject to the same prescriptivist poppycock (thanks, Geoff Pullum) that comes from forcing one language into another’s Procrustean bed, what hope is there for those of us that want to help people overcome their classist and racist notions that are embodied in the designation of a certain variety of white, upper-class English as having “the” “correct” grammar for the language as a whole?
dheidenreich

I am reminded of two quotes (which I repeat, probably not quite accurately, from a faulty memory), one from a humorist of long ago, and one from a modern writer:

“‘Whom are you?’ he asked, for he had been to night school.” [George Ade?]

“Whom was invented by someone who wanted to make us all sound like butlers.” [Calvin Trillin?]
cdandrea1

Madonna, it seems, is the latest to climb on the ‘hypercorrection’ bandwagon. In her acceptance speech at the Golden Globe awards, speaking with her faux British accent, the pop songstress corrected herself at one point after paying homage to a particular person “who I adore” then quickly said “whom I adore.”

jffoster

How is that an example of “hypercorrection”? Here the relative pronoun is the direct object of the verb adore so, if you’re going to use who-m at all, that’s one of the places to use it. She corrected herself, but I can’t see how it was a “hyper”correction.