NYT Opinion: Make your daughter practice math

[Paratus]

And your son too.

This opinion piece makes a lot sense to me and I see some of the same issues with our schools trying to teach my daughters who excel at math.

TLDR

• Research shows girls are as intrinsically good as boys at math on average but are better at reading and language arts which shunts then away from math
• Current curriculums push conceptual knowledge of math instead of practice (just because you understand chords doesn’t mean you can play the guitar)
• Rote practice builds the neural networks required to be proficient at math for boys and especially girls.
• Making learning “fun” can backfire.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/07/opinion/stem-girls-math-practice.html

The way we teach math in America hurts all students, but it may be hurting girls the most.

...A large body of research has revealed that boys and girls have, on average, similar abilities in math. But girls have a consistent advantage in reading and writing and are often relatively better at these than they are at math, even though their math skills are as good as the boys’. The consequence? A typical little boy can think he’s better at math than language arts. But a typical little girl can think she’s better at language arts than math. As a result, when she sits down to do math, she might be more likely to say, “I’m not that good at this!” She actually isjust as good (on average) as a boy at the math — it’s just that she’s even better at language arts...

...Unfortunately, thinking you’re not very good at something can be a quick path to disliking and avoiding it, even if you do have natural ability. You can begin to avoid practicing it, because to your mind, that practice is more painful than learning what comes more easily. Not practicing, in turn, transforms what started out as a mere aversion into a genuine lack of competence. Unfortunately, the way math is generally taught in the United States — which often downplays practice in favor of emphasizing conceptual understanding — can make this vicious circle even worse for girls...

...
It’s important to realize that math is, to some extent, like playing a musical instrument. But the instrument you play is your own internal neural apparatus.

When we learn to play an instrument — say, the guitar — it’s obvious that simply understanding how a chord is constructed isn’t the equivalent of being able to play the chord. Guitar teachers know intuitively that the path to success and creativity at the guitar is to practice until the foundational patterns are deeply ingrained. The word “rote” has a bad rap in modern-day learning. But the reality is that rote practice, by which I mean routine practice that keeps the focus on what comes harder for you, plays an important role. The foundational patterns must be ingrained before you can begin to be creative.


Math is like that, too. As the researcher K. Anders Ericsson has shown, becoming an expert at anything requires the development of neural patterns that are acquired through much practice and repetition. Understanding is part of acquiring expertise, but it certainly isn’t all. But today’s “understanding-centered” approach to learning math, combined with efforts to make the subject more “fun” by avoiding drill and practice, shortchanges children of the essential process of instilling the neural patterns they need to be successful. And it may be girls that suffer most...

...All learning isn’t — and shouldn’t be — “fun.” Mastering the fundamentals is why we have children practice scales and chords when they’re learning to play a musical instrument, instead of just playing air guitar. It’s why we have them practice moves in dance and soccer, memorize vocabulary while learning a new language and internalize the multiplication tables. In fact, the more we try to make all learning fun, the more we do a disservice to children’s abilities to grapple with and learn difficult topics. As Robert Bjork, a leading psychologist, has shown, deep learning involves “desirable difficulties.” Some learning just plain requires effortful practice, especially in the initial stages. Practice and, yes, even some memorization are what allow the neural patterns of learning to take form.

 

[Sunburn74]

I think this has been well known. Some theorize that the reason why so few women go into math and science isn't entirely an under-representation of women but also in part an over-representation of men. Whilst females and males as populations have about the same intrinsic math ability, females tend to do better in most other areas and so there are options to do other things, in combination with the background of all the negative social pressure against math. Boys however tend to cluster in math ability and perform worse in other areas, limiting their options in part and leading to an over-representation of men in the math and scientific fields.

I think the more important question in this day and age is how important is math anyway? Many college grads take it to high levels in college but in the workforce use no more than 9th or 10th grade algebra.

 

[UglyCasanova]

In fact, the more we try to make all learning fun, the more we do a disservice to children’s abilities to grapple with and learn difficult topics.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. Teachers try to turn it into a game so it’s fun but all it does is waste time and resources. A concept that would take 5 min suddenly takes an hour to learn and the concept gets lost in the game so less learning is even being done. I feel the same way about the push to have classrooms flooded with tech gizmos. All they do is distract.

 

[interchange]

Regardless of any new findings throwing shade on the old adage that boys are better at math or an alternate spin now that girls are better at other subjects, the differential in preference for field of study and career is driven much more by societal norms than biology. There is far more variation within 1 standard deviation of math ability among a group of boys and girls than there is between the average girl and average boy. Biological cognitive aptitude differences between boys and girls are real findings, but they aren't meaningful ones.

As far as this conclusion goes, I am a little skeptical in parts. I think it's incomplete as far as correcting the disparity. What needs to happen is for us to culturally challenge stereotypes and provide girls more exposure to women in the math and sciences they can see as role models. Simply building actual skill is not enough to rewrite someone's identity of being good or bad at something, but certainly it is a necessary component. I also agree that rote practice is necessary to establish those neural pathways, but I don't see this as analogous to memorization of facts. Memorization/repetition is piss-poor learning. Practicing math is not about memorizing the answers. It's about learning the procedure which maps onto a concept. Practicing an instrument is a better analogy here.

I also think that if something is not going to be fun, it's better not to try and make it fun or to convince people why it's important. That just cues people to use their actual experience to develop the sense of whether something is fun or important. Unless their experience actually is fun or the appreciate the importance of doing it, you've just taught them the opposite. Better to make them do because you said so. That way, their lack of enjoyment or appreciation of usefulness doesn't get burnt into their expectations of approaching something. They'll remember that it wasn't fun to practice a problem set of fractions, but that attribution remains with the specific task that they were performing and doesn't globalize to their idea of doing math overall.

All that said, we do need to appreciate why what we are learning is meaningful. Personally, instead of trying to make a subject fun or teaching people what future relevance it may have, I find it better to make people aware of how math (for example) already applies to their everyday lives. We utilize at least math concepts constantly without appreciating them.