PB, you seem to have missed my whole argument and ignored the facts.
Did you read FredonEverything and the lack of success of women at maths in the world championship stakes?
A teacher at high school showing children how to solve quadratic equations and count angles in a triangle is very, very low level maths. Even if they are lecturing at university, that just means they've learned quite a lot more.
Maths is more than solving set problems. It's about understanding the overall context of a matter, such as whether women are good at maths or not, meaning how well the top 1% compare with the top 1% of males. That's what the discussion is about.
Your comment that you had some good female maths teachers as though that was some sort of argument against the case misses the point that your few maths teachers are statistically irrelevant. Even if they were mathematicians in the sense that we are talking about, they would be irrelevant.
I think what you are really saying is that there is a politically correct point of view which says women can do anything, that they are as good as males and it's sexist and poor form to suggest otherwise.
I say they are different. The big difference in the particular area we are discussing is the age at which their brains are fully grown. You seem to totally ignore that central and only point that I'm making as though it's irrelevant. Developmental years for children are crucial to their mental abilities as adults and once they've gone through childhood, there's no second chance. Their developmental years are not a rehearsal. It's the real thing, real-time, succeed or fail deal.
Females miss out on 3 years of developmental experiences because they mature that much younger. If they are going to be good at something, they need to start three years before boys. Note that that is an average and some boys will need to start 3 years earlier than other boys and 2 years earlier than some girls if they are not to miss their big developmental years.
I doubt that female brains are unsuitable for learning maths because linguistically, women are as good as men [I think that's true though I don't know how it's measured] and maths is another language for understanding and describing how things are.
The understanding of an issue is the essential ingredient of maths and that's where most people fail in being any use at all in maths. Once understanding is achieved, setting the understanding out in a mathematical form is another arduous problem and that is difficult enough too. I suspect that the quicker developmental time for females makes it difficult to squeeze in enough knowledge.
Then there's the other issue of competitiveness. Males, being polluted with testosterone, tend to be competitive and aggressive not to mention sexually frustrated, all of which helps drive them into various things at high levels, including maths, starting at a young age.
I'm sure you must see the light now.
If you are unconvinced, would you care to explain what effect the earlier development of females might have on them? Nature has been a long time working on the matter and has clearly decided that females might as well be grown up young, randy young and bearing children young and to heck with the reasons that males go on for another 3 years with their child brains.
Why do you think that might be and does it have any consequences or mean there are compromises?
I say there is a great need to revamp education practises and stop just dumping all children into an age cohort and boring them with the same material which is largely irrelevant to their lives.
I'll ask Google what age chimps have babies. That might throw some light on this mathematical problem too. Sure enough, Google knows. Scroll to the bottom for the big apes, including us. primate.wisc.edu
We are the same as chimps for first birth. It's obvious that brains and late sexual maturity go together. Stupid little monkeys breed like rats. Note too that longevity goes with brainpower = it's too much of a waste for nature to enable all that mental horsepower over a couple of decades of development only to see it go down the end of life drain a decade or two later. People outlast chimps with double the lifespan.
Mqurice |
