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To: Joe NYC who wrote (176677)	1/28/2004 5:14:09 AM
From: Amy J	Respond to of 186894

OT Hi Joe, RE: " Could it be that at that point, abstract thinking starts to take over from mechanics? I hope not" Don't even think it. Hold them to the same expectations you had on yourself. But to answer your question, girls do better in grades on math courses up thru 17 then fall off. Girls start to fall off on the standardized tests around 4th grade. But don't tell them that. I never heard about this when I grew up. But society's other subliminal messages were always commented about very early maybe 5-8 yrs old way before teenage years took over parental influence ("so foolish" my Mom's favorite expression about strange things in society) and challenged head-on (she made you like the "so intelligent" option much better) - this probably gave me the awareness not to become a victim to the subliminal messages. Girls that aren't aware of them, don't know how to challenge them. Better to swim upstream then get sucked downstream. Games were key for me. Every strength I have, ties directly to a game played when 4 to 6 years old. My love for communications - received a see-through phone around 5 or 6, so could see all the motion inside. My love for network flow - would create roads using wooden blocks and think about motion and best paths. (My Dad is like a tour guide for children - he would always point things out in an interesting way and every so often something would stick and later I'd turn it into a game.) My love for math - came from the witty games my super fun older brother would come up with (we both would come up with fun games on long road trips) and also played games by myself in a room full of big adults (nine numbers making up a square where you try to get them back in order was my favorite around 4, later on was mastermind, puzzles, he would make a game out of solving a fun proof at age 12 in an applied way too, etc. etc.) Games weren't isolating the way our family did them - we didn't go to our rooms and play games, our living room was where I could set up my games and projects for days on end so I wasn't isolated (girls generally don't like isolating games) - education was more important than a perfectly clean living room. Enjoyment of money probably came from being the banker in monopoly which helped my counting (think my Mom may have said something encouraging, that's great you want to play the banker- helps your math.) My Mom set an extremely enthusiasic tone for math when I was young (3 to 8, after age 8 it was sink or swim) by always enthusiastically believing life holds a lot of promise for people who are good with math. Always very upbeat and positive about math. Math is fun, important. Never punitive as some parents I hear were. College was already ingrained and always assumed by grade 3. She also set the tone that people work to get where they are - growth at every stage at any age. RE: "because I have 2 daughters, and I am certainly hope they will excel in math. ...but I notice that she likes to resort to mechanical "tricks" instead of thinking. Joe " American schools use a lot of tricks, compared to Russia and India. One time my Dad emphasized the importance of concepts in his story telling way - his punchline being if you understand the concepts you can do anything with it - tricks can be good, he said, but sometimes they will only get you so far - and he had sort of an entertaining style when he said it. And a positive real-life example about the reward for those who work on concepts. He always would turn a real life application into math --- that's extremely critical for girls. An introduction to trig occurred when we were walking out back and viewing the trees - either I asked how tall a tree was or he asked me how tall I thought a tree was, then he explained what trig was and he showed how it could help you calculate the length in this real-life case. Too many engineering profs don't tie examples to ones that are interesting to women -- they use too many military oriented examples. One of my favorite applications was killing an epidemic thru computer programming, where I had developed various heuristic and was the first to kill it off days ahead of others - this project was not something the IIT students could do well because they were solving the perfect solution for every case, rather than using heuristics, I seem to recall. Regards, Amy J