I've encountered plenty of adult men who seemed to say they hated math or were scared of it. Apart from gender issues, there seems to be a strong thread about young people having bad experiences with mathematics education.
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.
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.
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.