Michelle Obama at WWDC: Bad Math Teachers Drove My Daughters Out of STEM
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Nobody I grew up with was taught to code in school. Most teachers were pretty bad - Math and Science particularly; they weren't just bad at the subjects, they were often cruel. Middle school was an awful experience for everyone, I think.
That's not a reason not to improve things - I'd love for things to get better for everyone.
Then, at university, the focus in math shifted to pure theory. I was lost. Totally lost. And then I discovered engineering math, and was happy again.
So anyway, I wonder if I'd have been better off without so much practical math.
I decided to become a computer programmer at age 10, I'm old enough that none of the careers literature available when I was at school even listed it as a possible job. I can't remember wondering what anyone else thought about my choice.
Controlling 35 - 40 students is hard. Coders are not naturally good at it. Someone who likes to sit at a PC and read HN and slashdot is not the sort of 'drill sergeant' who is needed to take control of them.
My coding skills are not used. The most complex things the students are asked to so are simple loops.
So this leads us to Michelles question. How do you get teachers to get girls interested in STEM? The role models are weeded out at the teacher training stage. I would estimate 90% of nerds and coders remove themselves from the teaching profession. Of the other 10%? They find the school system almost impossible to target a student.
Say I see the students for 60 minutes a week. Of those 60 minutes, 5min is registering them while they log into the computers. Then we are asked to do a 'starter' something to engage the students with the lesson, that's 10min. Then we teach and the students work. At the end of the lesson we do a plenary, 5 - 10 minutes. So I get about 30 minutes of teacher student time, so a minute per student.
How am I supposed to explain to a stroppy 13 year old girl why computing is a good career choice? Or why maths is interesting? In 60 seconds? In my last lesson a boy took a girls coat, so that girls rugby tackled the boy and punched him in the head. I had to drag them apart then wait for someone to come help. This is not uncommon. Imagine telling students how much fun a career in IT is, then tend to shout "This is fucking boring sir"
The school system has too many people asking things of it. English lessons. Science. Music. Sports. Tech. Religion. There isn't enough time. There isn't enough money.
The type of person that can survive a teaching qualification is not the sort of person who is sitting in an apple conference.
Having spent a great deal of time looking at the lack of women in STEM and what teachers can do about it, the most effective solution is to have great women role models come into schools and give talks or help teach. I can not tell you how many hoops I would have to jump through to make this happen. Even if I could find any women role models who would talk in front of a class of students. It would take months of paperwork. It's the sort of 'once a year' event that could take place. It would take the combined effort of my, my manager, the head of department, senior management and the head teacher to be involved.
I don't know what the answer is. I don't think anyone does.
It's crazy that you need a lot of paperwork for that, even if there are background checks necessary, that seems like the kind of thing that could be made more efficient... with computers ;)
I'm reminded of Paul Lockhart's work as an example of the claim that contemporary mathematics education is broken across-the-board. And then there are lots of reports that say that the U.S. is doing considerably worse than other countries at teaching mathematics and other technical subjects. This is a theme that dates back at least to Sputnik and the Cold War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_crisis
I think that forms of the Sputnik crisis have repeated themselves in subsequent generations, even if there isn't a single event that triggers this anxiety as dramatically as the Sputnik launch did.
It's hard to tell from this summary of the presentation how Michelle Obama felt that this interacted with gender (although maybe the recordings would make that clearer). One possible interpretation would be that girls' enthusiasm for mathematics is more fragile and easier to throw off-track through poor teaching. Another is that the bad teachers treated boys and girls differently in a way that discouraged the girls. A third is that boys and girls might be best interested or motivated by different teaching methods or projects.
"And there's something going on that is not just about the girls. There's something going on with how these subjects are taught."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2010/01/female-teachers-math...
http://www.npr.org/2015/09/01/436525758/how-teachers-unconsc...
(Both referenced articles talk about female teachers, who are the vast majority of teachers at that grade level, transmitting their anxiety about or dislike of math to female students)
Here's one change you may benefit from: exclude solutions that exclude a class of people. Otherwise, we'll need to wait for bad teachers to die out before a solution excluding them can really take hold & that's not a possible outcome because no system is perfect.
Edit: more specifically, we need to immediately start training teachers how to handle their anxiety,which means we probably need to qualitatively study their anxieties. Without shaming them or excluding them or threatening their livelihoods.
Physics is biased against women: https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201604/grading.cfm
Elementary school teachers are biased against boys who do not socialize well: http://ideas.time.com/2013/02/06/do-teachers-really-discrimi...
Indian teachers are biased against lower caste students: http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/remahanna/files/discriminat...
In fact the paper the NPR article talks about actually says "We show that there is large variation within schools in this measure, and that it has a significant effect on the academic achievements of both genders during middle school and high school in math, science and language and also on the choice of the level of math and science study programs in high school" it also has this line "Math teachers' assessment in primary school, on the other hand, is on average gender neutral (0.01). However, these means hide quite a large heterogeneity among teachers."
They also say "In terms of effect size, these estimates indicate that increasing the average stereotypical bias against girls from zero to its maximal value of one will reduce girls' outcomes by 0.317 of a standard deviation"; which doesn't sound huge (given that's with the most amount of bias), but I guess it all adds up.
The physics one is perhaps the most interesting since it says that male German teachers had no bias, and hypothesized that anti-bias training worked there, which if true is a positive sign.
I'm sort of rambling without a point, I guess I was just surprised how directly you could measure this effect. I had always assumed it was much more indirect.
In general, and on average, when asked questions, boys tend to just shout out answers, sometimes with no apparent care or concern as to whether they are right. They compete to be the loudest, most noticed, and to get the most reaction from the teacher.
In general, and on average, when asked questions, the girls will sit quietly and try not to be noticed. Those who are actively engaged with the subject will try to work out the right answer, and will still not react or respond when called on.
I keep repeating "in general, and on average" because some children behave according to the opposite characterisations, but these differences are over-whelmingly obvious to anyone who works with children and takes the time to notice. Proving it scientifically is hard, because society in general frowns on experimenting on children in ways that can potentially damage their progress. But the signs are there to be seen.
So yes, a bad teacher really can put children off doing STEM subjects, and this can happen depressingly quickly. What's more, it really does seem to affect girls more than boys. I don't know why that should be the case, but the same story is told over and over again. Your implied scepticism is most likely honest, but misplaced.
Edit: To whomever downvoted this: I just spent several minutes trying to share my experience after giving literally thousands of workshops in math with young people, and attending dozens of conferences on the question of how to increase and retain engagement in the STEM subjects. Given the submission, if you think such a response is inappropriate for HN then I'd really like to know why.
One has bs in math the other bs in another science field
Great comments
I could buy that I guess, but it's hard to believe that the schools that the Obamas sent their children too would have any bad teachers. Though I guess they were in primary school before he was president.
Still, if the most well off people can't find good teachers for their children, what hope does anyone have?
I'm also a little confused since she calls out the ages 8-11; I don't think I had any significant amount of math or STEM teaching at that age. I think all the math I knew at that point was how to multiply (and divide?) numbers.
Edit: according to Wikipedia her daughters are 19 and 16 years old - not too late to study a STEM related subjected, are they? Michelle, if you can't make your own daughters go into STEM, what message are you sending to young women of the world?
I feel sad when I hear anyone say they think forcing others into a career path is a wise or sustainable decision. Doubly so for their kids.
The message she's sending is she doesn't know what the solution is. And that's OK. The first step to resolving a problem is acknowledging you have one.
Denying the existence of gender bias both prevents the human mind from perceiving it and persists the problem, if there is one. Denying someone else's individuality and autonomy isn't a sustainable solution. In complex systems, it leads to pathological, extreme states/transitions.
See the US's political climate for perfect examples on both sides of the aisle.
If her children were turned off of STEM and didn't want to stick with it until they saw cultural change, I could see the Obamas as the type of parents who'd respect their childrens' chosen paths here.
Some things are even out of the Obamas' control, like what fields their children are drawn to or repelled from.
1. Teaching is hard.
2. Teaching abstract concepts (ie. math) is often harder because not everyone thinks the same way. (This is why rote learning in math was the standard for so long.)
3. Teaching abstract concepts in a gender-biased abstract composition of fields (STEM) in a gender-biased country (USA) is harder to teach equally to both genders.
4. Teaching in that context to kids is hardest.
There we go...now you can forget it was an Obama making the claim and come at me instead.
How do you figure? They just started college, the absolute most advanced level of mathematics we're talking about is probably Calculus I. I'm just not seeing the gender-biased way to talk about trigonometric functions or quadratic equations that would lead one teacher to do poorly with girls but not boys when they're being taught simultaneously.
Unless you're arguing that there's a "better" way to teach girls math versus boys, which would imply that boys and girls learn math differently. And as we all know, there's absolutely no difference in the intellectual capabilities of males and females so obviously that's not it.
How to bias responses to children expressing problems with grasping material: be human.
How to gender-bias responses to kids having difficulty: be human while teaching both genders.
More specifically, my teachers in the past weren't always able to clearly convey how equations directly related to their graphs. I developed a rote sense of functions, rather than a visual intuition. When I tutor kids, I pass on my intuition that since things real numbers raise to even powers gets you positive real numbers, your graph will be above or touching the x-axis. That's different enough from saying "Consider y=x^n. If n%2=0, then y>=0." to click for someone who isn't catching on to the symbolic reasoning.
Here's some evidence to support the systems-oriented reasoning behind what I'm saying.
http://www.npr.org/2015/09/01/436525758/how-teachers-unconsc...
Are you arguing for innate gender differences in abstract thought?
Or is it just that boys tend to intimidate and shut down girls?
Would gender segregation be better? My wife thinks so.
It's an efficient way to teach girls and boys differently.
But it also facilitates gender bias.
Especially with respect to STEM it seems easy to check how many girls from segregated schools go into STEM vs girls from coed schools.
That's how you can logic it out. If you want data, go find it. Failure to do so is work ignorance and that's OK because changing beliefs is scary and hard.
I'm arguing for humans to learn how to observe themselves and be open to seeing the impact they have on others. And for passing special attention where bias is present in order to properly apply whatever the appropriate anti-bias is.
You seem to really like problems with singular problems and solutions. Maybe looking into systems theory will help you recognize complex systems work a bit differently?
Personally, I think the ultimate solution is for humans to learn they can largely abandon judgment. I have some ideas on how to pull it off, so I'm gonna go back to writing about them.
> STEM is gender-biased because we live in a world where societies are gender-biased.
Really? STEM in practice is of course gender-biased. Because, as you say, "societies are gender-biased". But what about the subjects themselves? It seems unlikely that science, technology, engineering and mathematics are inherently incomprehensible to women.
I don't think the subjects themselves are gender-biased, no. I'm referring to STEM in practice.
It was the comment about not getting complex systems that offended me.
That was definitely condescending of me. Sorry about that. It's not how I want to roll.
Really? Do you really mean biased[1], or do you mean there are gender differences in STEM fields, particularly as to the representation of genders in those fields (as there are in other fields)?
Or are these two the same for you?
But even if that's the case, it's very likely that gender bias in the culture also drives them. That gender bias affects the behavior of everyone involved in the process (students, parents, teachers, peers, etc).
It may even be that gender bias pervades various STEM fields at a deep structural level. That's another perspective on potential innate gender-based differences in interest, aptitude, etc.
What does that even mean? Do you mean things like not counting medicine as STEM, because more women than men study it?
And why would we exclude a science from STEM? That's like...exactly the opposite of science. Is that a thing you've heard is happening?
A cynic might claim that that exclusion is because they do not fit the narrative.
Basic Math. People knew some of this shit 2000 years ago. Surely any modern teenager can learn this stuff if we give them the space of a year, good learning resources, and a detailed "spec" of what they must know at the end of each grade. Instead of the `stick` of failing this grade, you offer kids the `carrot` of skipping ahead multiple grades if they pass tests on the "spec"s for these grade levels.
Suppose students spend n years in high school and on average pass the entire math spec in m years, where m < n (maybe m ~ n/2). Math wiz kids won't be held back and can go on an all-you-can-math binge, while artistically inclined youth can choose to skip math for several grades and then "catch up" during later grades.
Edit: sort of a PS, the geometry teacher also expressed surprised that I wasn't a terrible math student. My next math teacher would see the grades from the prior year, and I think that had a lot to do with the next successive teacher not investing much time. I was a girl, I was clearly a shit student, so not much reason to bother.
gawd, been literally years since I've visited /. ...and tho it still is a bit of what it used to be, I don't think I like what it is anymore than when I quit it around ~2009.
I can't even remember now just what the tipping point was anymore but I do remember that the quality of conversation had gone south.
Does anyone else feel the same mix of sadness for what /. has become and a longing for what it once was? (...and for me personally, no, HN doesn't completely fill the gap, hence the longing)
From "Do They Stay or Do They Go? The Switching Decisions of Individuals Who Enter Gender Atypical College Majors"
PS - 100 years ago we spent an incredible amount on children's education and health as a society - we forced nearly all women of genius to either teach or become nurses. That represented a ridiculously large subsidy (on the backs of women) for both endeavors that we've never replaced. Certainly not by dollars. So of course there's a problem, now. Outside Finland where they pay teachers very well, of course.
Despite both parents being engineers, my 9 YO wants to be an ophthalmologist. The guy who runs the LASIK clinic down the street drives a "Lambo", despite the actual LASIK being performed by a machine built by those (Suckers)TEM.
I do not expect nursing programs to be affected.
It's an incredibly rational choice.
1. Establish nation-wide professional education colleges(the Normal Universities), students graduate to be teachers, government shall fund the colleges as much as possible, including lower tuition for students as long as they are into teachers profession.
2. boost pay for teachers, make teacher a proud profession socially and financially.
Both 1 and 2 are popular in Asia countries, it's nothing revolutionary. Our public education system here is so sub-par and good teachers are so hard to find, all the time.