Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Copyright 1991. This was probably making the rounds of homeschooling circles I hung out in.

We tend to do a sucky job of teaching math to kids. A lot of elementary school teachers are women who were encouraged to go into early education because they weren't doing so well in math and this is very much gender bias.

My ex husband wasn't good at math. No one told him he should spend his days teaching little kids because of it. He was a career soldier and he just got tutored in college (by me) for his math classes. He was just expected to work at it if it didn't come naturally and he did.

So we just culturally pass around this idea that math is scary and little kids can't learn it rather than going "Well, adults just need to up their game and, by god, explain it better."

My oldest was math phobic by the time I pulled him out of school to homeschool. My one and only goal for math was to get him over his phobia.

He loves physics. I hate calculus. Calculus makes sense to him and he has read calculus books for fun.

I was good at explaining the math to him and he learned lots of solid math concepts even though he likely has dyscalculia and isn't good at crunching the numbers. But I got the concepts through to him and that's more important.

He's what gets called "calculator dependent" in some circles.

> he likely has dyscalculia

Ironically enough, "someone who likes math but hates arithmetic" isn't a self-contradictory thing. It's actually a perfect description of a pure (that is, professional) mathematician!

Evidence: look no further than the infamous "Grothendieck prime" 51....

When i was in university i did a math minor. I definitely remember the people who were math majors tended to be fairly bad at simple arithmatic (or at least just very average)

Which may be because you simply can't do everything good without practice and in pure math, well, there are things you don't do as much. When I go back to the 3rd and 4th degree polynoms we solved back in school, it's a hassle. Back then I was quite good at solving them but nowadays it just takes time to get accustomed to these kind of problems.

It's not really important, but the "Grothendieck prime" is 57 according to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_(number)#In_mathematics

True, 51 is "exmadscientist prime".

<boldly updates wikipedia>

...I'll take it.

But, hey, I probably won't make that mistake again. Probably.

Erdós is described in Hoffman's biography ('The Man who Loved only Numbers') - I can't recall, nor immediately find by whom - as only being able to count up three numbers: '1, 2, n'.

Reminds me of the "zero one infinity rule"[0] rule for programming. Roughly stated it says that software should be designed around 3 cases: 0/no instance of a situation, 1/single instance, or an infinite/limitless instances.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_one_infinity_rule

I have a degree in maths and I suck at arithmetic. Understanding abstract mathematical concepts has little to do with speed and accuracy of thought and more to do with visualisation. But then again you are much better off with both, I often struggled because I could see how to get to the solution but struggled moving the symbols around accurately and fast enough to get to the correct soln in the required time limit.

I would say visualisation is great to understand those mathematical concepts that can be visualised well. There are many mathematical concepts for which this is not true. Logic comes to mind.

That would explain a lot. I am the opposite. Do well at the math that requires number crunching but terrible at things like geometry where I have to visualize stuff. Probably because of aphantasia.

> Ironically enough, "someone who likes math but hates arithmetic" isn't a self-contradictory thing.

I didn't even realise anyone would expect there to be a relationship between "liking" arithmetic and actual mathematics. I worked with mathematicians and was called one myself (it was a stretch, I think) but I have no idea who in the lab was or was not proficient in doing numeric calculations by hand. It was just not relevant. There was one guy though who liked to show off doing things like multiplying long numbers in his head, which was amusing.

It would suck to lack the ability to manipulate algebraic expressions efficiently, but you could go quite far without it in many branches. My most interesting results were identifying certain topological features of certain discrete structures of relevance to biology. There was no arithmetic or algebra involved at all except to write down the results formally.

I was in a bit of a weird half-rate math competion team/club where some people who were there to get out of history class and some people who were very much the opposite and were some of the smartest people I've ever talked to. One thing I noticed is that all the power competitors had good calculation ability, but whereas some people were just really fast calculators and, like your lab friend, could calculate huge multiples in their head, others were actually subpar at that type of mental math and instead were just familiar with, for instance, all the perfect squares/cubes/powers of 5 up to 20 and beyond because they've just encountered them a lot.

"A number less than 100 is prime if it sounds prime, and isn't 51 or 91."

(To me, 57 is too obviously 3 less than the obviously-divisible-by-3 60.)

I remember the moment in high school physics where I had an epiphany that the velocity equations the class was memorizing looked a lot like derivatives. We just happened to be covering derivatives in calculus at the time and my personal discovery meant I no longer had to memorize the velocity equations (I hated memorizing stuff)!

I brought up my discovery with my calculus prof later and he was so pleased for me (of course it was obvious to him). It's these small victories / "click moments" that grew my love of math and I hope to pass them on to my kids through their own discovery.

Maybe it's just me. But when I get the feeling like I just beat the system, even in a really small way, it's a rush.

Women has long been the "secret sacrifice zone" of domestic economics. Or, as Connelly put it, "woman is the slave of the slave."

> we just culturally pass around this idea that math is scary

There are thriving zones of anti-intellectualism in countries that have just one simple excuse for cultivating primitive thinking: it's lucrative to exploit.

Math, reasoning, debate, science, and democracy itself constitute educated civilisation. Everything else is a collection of stale bread and mournful circuses.

Wow that's a really big claim. Is there any research or reason you claim elementary teachers, specifically women, were pushed into the job (or to teach lower grade) because they aren't as good at math?!

That's a big statement.

Without research it's pretty absurd and comes off to me as sexist.

Though I think I get maybe the intention that sexist ideas and gendering subjects has created an education gap.

The teachers i know do it because it's their passion and many have post grad degrees and advanced training despite not being paid enough to cover the loans without income based repayment..

were pushed into the job (or to teach lower grade) because they aren't as good at math?!

That's not at all what I said. No one pushes them into teaching. It gets framed as "Well, if you can't hack the math, you have an easy out. You can just go teach children. That doesn't require a strong math background."

Men get discouraged from teaching small children and get stigmatized as "possibly a child molester." Women get the message, implicitly or explicitly, that caring for and teaching young kids is what we are best suited for.

It is generally true that women fairly often get told, explicitly or implicitly, that they don't need to really have career ambition because it's really a man's responsibility to provide for the family. The teaching profession is known to be family friendly and is often considered an ideal choice for a young woman who wants a career and a family.

Women are given an "easier" answer for their life than making it on their own. They can marry well (and never mind that this leaves a lot of women out in the cold these days). In contrast, men are generally told they need to be good earners to have any hope of marriage.

I don't have any sources at my fingertips and a lot of this is common knowledge, so I don't think I need to back it up. I became aware of this as a trend at universities when I was involved with The TAG Project* years ago and regularly spoke with people in the education field or who had gone to college and women got very different messaging from counselors and staff if they were struggling with certain subjects than men typically got.

We still have a huge gender disparity in who teaches what grade levels and in how comfortable most women are with STEM subjects, so I don't have any reason to believe any of this has fundamentally changed. Judging by the stats for how many men you find in early childhood education versus women, it's clear that society as a whole still shuttles women in that direction by some mechanism and men in another direction.

* http://www.tagfam.org/

Anecdotally and from my personal experience, this is unfortunately accurate. I would add two points to this depiction of scholastic life:

Teaching is not a highly regarded position in US society in general (I.e. those who cannot do, teach).

There is a trend within the US and UK to view STEM subjects negatively. The derogatory “nerd” stereotype is not so prevalent among other cultures. Growing up in the US, it was very clear that you could be either attractive/well-liked or good at math. For those that happened to possess both features, discussions would come from the angle that the person is attractive/well-liked in spite of being good at STEM. The underlying premise seemed to be that you had to extra good-looking to be labeled as attractive if you were also to do well in math.

I'm not sure I'd call it a "trend" (since there seems to be a concerted, if not obviously successful effort now to get more kids interested in STEM in the US at least), but more of a long-running thread of anti-intellectualism in general.

> Judging by the stats for how many men you find in early childhood education versus women, it's clear that society as a whole still shuttles women in that direction by some mechanism and men in another direction.

Or perhaps, women, in average, have a higher natural predisposition to take care of young children than men.

That would not be a surprise, since women get pregnant and, as far as I know, generally took care of children while men went out to hunt and fight.

Of course, nobody should be pressured to choose a profession based on a stereotype.

Or perhaps, women, in average, have a higher natural predisposition to take care of young children than men.

A few quotes from the below article:

From colonial times and into the early decades of the 19th century, most teachers were men.

1840s: Feminization Begins

The reformers argued that women were by nature nurturing and maternal, as well as of high moral character.

https://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/timeline.html

In contrast, early programmers were mostly women and it is now a male dominated field. There is a lot of research and we are quite confident that trends of this sort in various fields are driven by societal factors, and never mind how much people of a particular era try to come up with various justifications for how one gender is supposedly innately more predisposed to X for some reason.

I wonder if maternal instincts might factor in here too. There was a hacker news article not too long ago about "Despite social pressure, boys and girls still prefer gender-typical toys"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27240988

Please remember to assume good faith by taking a charitable interpretation of people's words.

For example, we can see reference to the broader issue of gender bias rather than so narrowly focus on a specific claim about elementary teachers. To that point, there is substantive and substantial evidence of gender bias in STEM:

Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED509653

Thanks for the reminder. Yeah I definitely called that out in my comment. But my point still stands a lot of this comment thread has a, charitably put it, strongly male point of view.

> We tend to do a sucky job of teaching math to kids. A lot of elementary school teachers are women who were encouraged to go into early education because they weren't doing so well in math and this is very much gender bias.

While this may be true and in general is in line with my experience, it might be better for you to reframe it in a more indirect way because sooner or later you'll find someone offended.

I appear to be the highest ranked openly female member on HN. I can suck up a few downvotes from people who don't like me or don't like what I am saying and that, in fact, seems to be par for the course here.

Thank you for otherwise validating my position, but I'm not going to soften it. If the truth about our world bothers people, they are free to make something else true instead of asking me to cater to their feelings at the expense of stating the truth.

Edit:

I will add I am unwilling to back down on this point because we are actively giving young women a math phobia and crushing their dreams with it instead of telling them to get a tutor and work for what they want and we are doing so in a manner that causes them to pass their math phobia onto future generations.

This isn't just a case of "sexism sucks." We are poisoning our entire society with this garbage and it negatively impacts huge numbers of people.

Or we could not pre-emptively self-censor on the basis of imagined offense that doesn't even exist yet.

Besides, if something really is offensive, saying the same thing just indirectly is rather cowardly. Being offensive in an indirect manner is still being offensive, just less people might notice. Any opinion worth having is worth having openly.

I'm not commenting on the original quote because I'm not sure I agree with it, but worrying about offending people is destroying the fabric of our society.

By not talking openly and freely, we're keeping our thoughts and feelings inside, which brings emotions to boil. There's no release valve. We can't vent, and because we have less honest discourse with others whose opinions differ, we become internally polarized against different opinions.

By preemptively taking offense on the behalf of others, we're imagining potential victims and dulling our discourse. Over time it erodes critical thinking skills, because everything is encoded in layers of indirection. The meaning is dropped in favor of a soft tone. We begin speaking in hardcoded memes.

Taking offense to words flies in the face of our free speech liberties, individualism, and freedom. We're putting up barriers that don't exist. If we keep it up, we'll soon find ourselves living under the oppression of self-imposed thoughtcrime.

There's something to be said about having a thick skin and being open to those you disagree with.

(I'm liberal, btw.)

I completely agree with you (and with other replies to my comment). It's just saw people's lives ruined for much less than that. Heck, storms happened over not what they actually said, but what people thought they said. Even being female and holding progressive views doesn't offer much protection - I saw feminists attacking other feminists using strange invented terms like TERF or SWERF.

For example, you may well have an opinion as to whether people identifying as females but but being biologically male should compete in sports with other females, use women's restrooms and changing rooms etc., but you better be careful when you decide to express this opinion outside a circle of close friends - especially if you have a family to feed.

I was homeless for nearly six years, along with my two adult sons for whom I was financially responsible. I am absolutely not a stranger to the fact that the world is perfectly happy to watch me starve while going "La la la not listening" to my observations that my gender is a factor in my intractable poverty.

This is precisely why I am unwilling to back down on some things.

If it is any comfort, I took your initial comment as well-meaning and intended to be helpful. It's just not a position I can embrace.

There comes a point past which politely going along to get along is part of the problem, not part of some kind of solution.

I have a strong track record of leaving nuanced comments on HN asserting that "No, it is not as simple as sexism and intentional exclusion of women in X case. Here is the data and women make choices." etc.

But in this case, I am quite confident that women not only get actively encouraged to go into early childhood education, they get actively advised that this is what they should do if their initial desired major has a strong math component and they are having trouble with the math and this is not done to men.

My oldest son ended up math phobic because his teachers couldn't teach it and brought a lot of baggage to the table. So I have seen firsthand what it can do to a child and that child doesn't have to be a girl to be negatively impacted by the emotional baggage that so many elementary school teachers have over the subject of math.

It can be a boy whose relationship to math is being egregiously harmed long term because of so many elementary school teachers having had their own dreams crushed on the excuse that "math is too hard for you" rather than being told "You can audit the class. You can get a tutor. You have to pass it, but it's fine if you only get a C as long your overall GPA is high enough. etc."

It doesn't just break women to have this done to women. It is breaking our society.

So if men value math and STEM, this is a practice they should be concerned about as well. It isn't just a women's issue by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm not angry at you. I'm not offended at your attempt to look out for my welfare in a cold, cruel world.

It's just the wrong answer in this case and I've basically crawled naked across broken glass for nearly twelve years on HN to claim my right to speak my mind to some degree here and I am going to exercise that right on details of this sort.

Your account is only 4 years old ;-P

But seriously, +34k karma in four years is nuts

I guess the broken glass is dispersed over another account.

Doreen has been around on HN for a lot longer than this account. She's definitely one of the OGs. I would believe 12 years, that's about how long I've been here and I don't remember a time when she was not a member.

All terms are invented.

The irony of a tech person calling acronyms strange!

Not all of them, just these, created just to label someone whose views some people don't like. It is "strange" for me, because it's heavily loaded, it includes a false premise (that the victim is transphobic), and is used towards people who have nothing to not only with "radical" feminism (whatever this would mean), but any feminism at all.

Anything can offend someone. It's the nature of seeking truth. Conclusions have to be challenged in order to be verified and assumed true.

If I'd be in a conversation of 3 people, and one might be offended, that's 50% of people I have to be cautious with. If it would be an audience of 1000 people, 1 in 1000 could be offended... Should we stop speaking altogether?

I think the current (quite absurd) situation is a function of three factors: 1) how easily people get offended these days, 2) how easily accusations can spread thanks to network effects, e.g. on Twitter, 3) how much damage can be done by people fixed on causing you maximum damage legally, e.g. calling your employer etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com