Is your daughter not doing well in Math?
Moms, you suffered in Math class yourself?
Why is this suffering going in a full circle?
It may be because of a lot of factors but you may be shocked at what some researchers are saying – female math teachers are to blame. Why? Because they pass on their fear of math to their students, especially the girls.
According to LA Times, researchers from the University of Chicago looked into the math attitudes of some teachers in the US and discovered that many female elementary teachers were scared of math. This math anxiety made them believe that boys are hard-wired to do better in math while girls are just good at language learning. This kind of thinking was unconsciously passed on to girls causing them to do poorly in math.
I have to stress that we’re talking about primary level maths here – addition, subtraction, fractions, etc. So it’s very surprising that these professional teachers were actually scared of math. How did they become teachers if they couldn’t do their maths well? Well, I just hope that the primary teachers in Singapore aren’t scared of math like those in the US.
How do you think our female math primary teachers here are doing?
