Math anxiety – the teacher contribution?

Apparently a University of Chicago study is finding evidence that elementary school-aged girls pick up some math anxiety from their teachers. Specifically, their female teachers. (MSNBC video)

Here’s the full story, from the Chicago Tribune website.

An excerpt:

The ill effects go beyond stereotypes: girls who bought into the notion actually performed worse in math, chipping away at their self-assurance in related fields, such as science, the study found.

The effect was limited to girls — a finding that could have far-reaching implications in a country where more than 90 percent of elementary teachers are women. Researchers believe girls were affected by female teachers’ anxieties because children generally emulate the behavior and attitudes of same-gender adults.

Of course, the obvious question would be: why don’t male teachers pass on that anxiety to boys? And the obvious answer would seem to be: because the male teachers don’t typically have the same anxieties.

So, if this is true,

Random Thoughts, Vol I, issue 2

1. Catching up on Torchwood. Liked 2nd season a lot more than 1st. Last night watched parts 1 & 2 of “Children of Earth” – so far so great.
2. Still have the Christmas tree up. Probably should take care of that before progressing to “Children of Earth” part 3.
3. Bought Peebs a copy of Susan Boyle’s CD for Christmas, per her request. We both had the same reaction: eh. All the arrangements kinda sound the same. Boyle’s rendition of Madonna’s “You’ll See” is very good – but who suggested she perform “Daydream Believer” as a slow piece? YIKES. (Although the opening track is “Wild Horses” and it actually works.)
4. At work: too much to do, not enough time. As always. But the to-do list thing has helped some.
5. Actually had a disagreement with Peebs earlier. She called asking when the next full moon was. I looked it up and told her. “No, that can’t be right.” I guess she’s actually having a disagreement with my wall calendar. Which, by the way, she bought me.)
6. Except now I looked at the calendar again and the symbol I thought represented the full moon is actually the new moon symbol, and vice versa. So I was wrong.
7. Trivia: the date of Easter is often said to occur “on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.” However, the realities of what is meant by “full moon” and “vernal equinox” in that calculation are not the obvious things you think they are – in other words, it’s Way Too Complicated. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computus
8. Danged if there wasn’t something else I was going to include that has totally slipped my greasy little mind.

Poking my head out…

Quick update:

1. Yes, I’m actually cleaning my office. Or at least my desk, which is the most important thing. I went to Office Despot(TM) and bought some stacking inbox things and I’m *gasp* actually making myself to-do lists again.
2. Been playing the beta test version of Star Trek Online. I doubt I’ll have the time or money to invest in it once it goes gold and hits store shelves, so this may be the only chance I get.
3. The boy has finally started waving bye-bye. Mind you, he waves at himself rather than the person who’s leaving, but, you know, baby steps. Speaking of which, oh yeah, he’s officially toddling.
4. I hate my sinuses so much I’m considering stealing a milkshake spoon from Steak & Shake and sterilizing it.
5. I’m still proud of myself for changing my own car battery. (With helpful advice from a co-worker – thanks Brian!) Laugh if you like, but somehow I’ve never had to do that before. Changed plenty of tires, but never the battery.
6. The end of David Tennant’s reign on Doctor Who was everything we’ve come to expect from head writer Russell T Davies, whose approach to emotional content is somewhere between Titanic and Moulin Rouge – completely over the top, bang you over the head with it, figuring something’ll stick, but then, just when all the sturm und drang is over, there’s a little quiet moment that hits you hard. (Everyone who saw the episode will know what I’m referring to. Tap tap tap tap.) I’m going to miss Tennant & Davies. Might even pick up a copy of Davies’ book, The Writer’s Tale.

That’s all for now.

Questions for Pat Robertson

Mr. Robertson:

Your recent comments on Haiti have got me wondering about a few things. This week, on your television program The 700 Club, you said:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon the third, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you will get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other.

Based on that, I have some questions:

Perk up your ears!

OK, I’ve got a more relevant (or at least less facetious) blog entry in the works. But in the meanwhile, here’s some silly blather!

I was chatting online with Toby*, a friend who had recently seen Avatar and was bemoaning the fact that I would likely be the last person to see it, as Peebs has no interest. (Odd, since Titanic is possibly her favorite movie – Schindler’s List and It’s a Wonderful 24-Hour Christmas Eve Marathon being the prime competitors.) In fact, I think she might have a slight but specific desire not to see it. “Her interest,” I wrote, “is probably about -0.7.” This led to a discussion about exactly how interest should be measured – what units would one use?

When a dog is interested in something, it perks up its ears, so I decided that interest should be measured in perkons. Abbreviation: pkn. I considered making it a logarithmic scale, like the Richter scale for earthquakes, but Toby pushed for a linear scale, like temperature, and I quickly realized she was right.

A rating of 10 pkn would correspond to an obsessive level of interest. Neutral feelings are 0 pkn. -10 pkn, basically, is “I’d rather die than do X.”

Examples of use:

• “At 11:55pm the night before the release of the last Harry Potter novel, the ambient interest inside Borders was easily a full 10 pkn.”
• “When the movie was coming out, my interest in Serenity/Firefly was like 8 pkn, but it’s waned to about 3 now.”
• “Now that I’ve seen that interview with T R Reid, my interest in reading his book easily climbed another 3 pkn.”
• “If you’re engaged in the escapades of Lindsay Lohan at any higher than -9 pkn, you don’t deserve to have conversations with grown-ups.”

I think this could be the greatest faux measurement system since the invention of the microLenat! So now I challenge you all to start using perkons in your instant messages, emails, tweets, and FB posts.

If you’re interested, that is.

*Names have been changed to protect the Newtonian concept of Conservation of Pointless Name Changes.

Progeny Progress Report

At thirteen+ months, here’s his status:

• Will sometimes say “mama” and “dada” when prompted, but only then. Convinced he once tried to repeat me saying “stinky” while I was trying to change his diaper. Also once rode in the backseat repeating “Die, die, die, die, die, die, die…” so either he’s plotting our untimely demises à la Stewie Griffin, or he’s been watching Perfect Strangers reruns behind our back.
• Still not walking independently. Has occasionally attempted a step or two, but for the most part he will “cruise” with one or both hands on a piece of furniture, then plop down on his Royal Tochas if he has to cross an unfurnished area. We’re speculating he needs to be around kids his age who are figuring out the words to the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other song. Crawls like anything, though — in fact, it seems like he won’t stop moving unless he’s distracted by a toy he wants to play with or a TV screen (preferably showing a commercial, which bodes ill).
• We’re pretty sure Tooth #8 is coming through.
• Despite aforementioned age, still wearing many of his 6 – 9 month clothes.
• Not particularly fond of sippy cups.
• Showing a distinct reluctance to memorize his social security number.

I suppose it’s perfectly natural to wonder about whether we’re doing anything wrong. But, knowing that, I can’t allow it to stop me from fretting about it. I guess what I mean is, which is the worse sin? To worry unduly that we’re delaying his development in some way, or to resist worrying when, in fact, we’re missing something? If the answer isn’t “the latter,” someone tell me why not so I can relax already.

Anyway, merry Christmas to all my Christmas-celebrating readers.

Jesus is the Reason…

Folks react to these winter holidays in wildly divergent ways. Some despise them – we call such people “grinches,” after Dr. Seuss. Others can’t get enough of them – we call such people “mothers of toddlers with reindeer-footie pajamas.” The rest hold mixed feelings, and it’s not hard to see why:

Good	Bad
long strings of lights	long lines
gift-giving	bills (for some people, this includes Buffalo)
Christmas carols	Christmas carols starting roughly when people get bored with Punxsutawney Phil
snow	snow

I’m enjoying the holidays a little more than usual this year, probably because last year they were yanked out from under us: we’d just had a baby and were too much of a wreck to enjoy anything beyond the rare glimpse of the insides of our own eyelids. Don’t know what ya got – holidays, sleep, the ability to use the restroom without making arrangements – ‘til it’s gone.

Besides, is there every really a bad time for the Vince Guaraldi Trio?

But there is one thing that’s been nibbling my nerve endings in recent years, a sound that’s become far more irritating than “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

Here we are now – entertaineth us.

File this under Things I’m Trying Not To Let Piss Me Off.

So a couple weeks ago Peebs and I were at church, and one of the worship songs –

Okay, lemme stop right there. When, exactly, was it decided that “worship” and “music” were synonyms? I missed that memo, and I have to be honest, this is a trend that doesn’t sit well with me.

For those of you fortunate enough to have missed out on American evangelical culture for the past 20 years, let me tell you how a typical evangelical church service goes:

Math students: heed these words.

At community colleges across the country, students are dropping out of school because they can’t pass their core English and math requirements. I’ve spent seven years tutoring college math students, and even taught the occasional algebra course. So while I don’t have an education degree or teaching certification — yet — I feel I can make some educated (ha!) comments about the common problems students face. And many of the same problems crop up all the time.

I’ll also make a separate page on my blog keeping an archive of these things. But here’s the first one:

Stop relying on your calculator for everything.

I realize that many of our students are non-traditional. That’s a term that we in the field use to refer to people who didn’t go straight from high school to college, but waited a few years instead. For some of our students, it’s been four decades since they’ve seen a classroom. It’s therefore not surprising when a student says they forgot their multiplication tables a long time ago. But I see a lot of students directly out of high school who can’t work out things like 5+8 or 7×9 without using their fingers – or a calculator.

A modern calculator, the TI-30XS MultiView from Texas Instruments.

Ah, calculators. I love calculators. Ever try to work out the cube root of 42 by hand? Yeah, me neither. But where math students get into trouble is when they buy into bogus arguments like, “I don’t need to memorize my multiplication facts / know how to work with fractions / learn how to do long division. In the real world, I’ll have a calculator.”

Well, yes, you will. So given that you can always punch in “7 × 9 =” and read the answer on the display, why should you bother to memorize your basic math facts? Let me count the reasons:

1. Having the answer memorized is faster.
2. Calculators break down. Batteries die, sodas get spilled, gravity attacks.
3. Calculators round everything. 2 divided by 7 is not 0.285714286, no matter what your calculator says.
4. Everyone punches a number in wrong on occasion. Without the “number sense” that comes from mastery of basic arithmetic facts, there’s no way you’ll recognize a bad result when it happens. Imagine that you’re using your calculator to multiply 26.7 × 39.8, but you accidentally punch in 56.7 instead of 26.7 – an easy mistake to make. So the calculator pops up with 2256.66 as the product. A person with a developed number sense will say, “Waaaait a second: 26.7 × 39.8 is roughly 25 × 40, and if 25 × 4 is 100, then 25 × 40 is 1000. So I should be getting an answer around 1000, not over 2200.”
5. There’s an even more important reason to have a developed number sense: when you get to algebra, you’ve got to be comfortable enough with numbers to have a feel for how they work together. If your teacher puts the expression (5 + 8)² + 7 × 9 on the board, and she simplifies that to 13² + 63, she expects you to know that 5 + 8 = 13 and 7 × 9 = 63. If you don’t, you’re going to be staring at the board, asking yourself, “Where did the 13 and 63 come from?” For that matter, let’s say you’re being taught to solve simple equations, like x + 9 = 17. When you solve that, you get x = 8… but if you can’t look at the equation and say, “Oh, yeah, 8 + 9 does make 17,” without thinking about it, then you’re not really getting it; you’re just trusting the magic. And math classes aren’t about magic, they’re about clear, logical thinking. Your goal is to de-magic things.

Fifty years ago, before inexpensive electronic calculators, people had other tools: slide rules and books of math tables. (I had an old-fashioned math teacher in high school who, for one unit, made us learn to do multiplication with a logarithm table! Bob Szorc, if you’re out there, thank you.) But slide rules and table books were different from modern electronic calculators in one critical way: they assumed you could do the simple stuff on your own. With a log table book, you can work out the cube root of 42, but you have to be able to divide by 3 on your own. In fact, the original meaning of the word “calculator” was “someone who does calculations.”

Old-school: a slide rule.

Now, with a handy Sharp or Casio or ti or hp, the game’s changed… in same ways for the better, in some ways not.

So, my first piece of advice: memorize your basic math facts. Do whatever you need to do. Buy flash cards. Have a friend quiz you on them – in fact, work on improving your time. Rent the Schoolhouse Rock cartoons – they’re available on DVD. Most importantly, when you have to multiply 26.7 × 39.8, do it by hand first, and then check your answer on the calculator.

And the best thing about having a handle on the basics is that it’s a great confidence builder. Which leads into my next bit of advice for math students… next time.

Thanks, it’s great to be here.

Quick note – this is my new blog, replacing my old one.

Bye-bye, Xanga. It’s been It was initially fun!

But I will try to import my old Xanga entries.