Warning: Total Geek-out ahead re: mathematical reminiscence.

I totally agree. When actually given resources and support, girls are fully capable of amazing feats in math. I have fond memories of my middle school math team. The coach (and teacher of the highest available math classes) was a woman who was encouraging and supportive and probably the best math teacher I ever had. Our "A" team was made up entirely of girls. And yes, I do count myself in that, even though only the random stranger would see me as a girl at the time. We were in the state competition and all four of us made it into the top 11 math students in the state (I got the bad end of a 4-way tie for 8th).

High school was another story. I had two years of agonizingly boring and passionless math which nearly beat the love of math out of me. (I spent class writing tortured teenage poetry about having my wings nailed to the ground). I hadn't put it into gendered context before, but now that I think about it, those two years were both from male teachers who I pretty clearly felt uncared for by -- and my junior year which brought a slight math reawakening gave me a female calculus teacher who made me feel like I was a part of a math family again.

When I first heard the suggestion that girls are inherently bad at math I was just confused. Everyone I knew who was good at math -- all the best math students and teachers -- seemed to be girls and women. Even removing myself as the transgender oddball that confuses statisticians, that was clearly the case. I know my experience is a bit of an anomaly -- What people saw as the almost all girl allstar math team actually turned out to be all girls -- but it's a clear example of what can happen when the support and resources are there.

After graduating college I spent two years as a tutor specializing in algebra. And since it was advanced algebra I was doing in middle school, I had really positive associations with it. Sharing the little methods I've learned for understanding and thinking about math was great fun.

I think the big fun for me, though, is writing and balancing budgets, personally or professionally (the checkbook is a bit boring because I usually know the answer -- it's like reading a mystery novel when someone told you the ending). And I will automatically start calculating the price per ounce to compare different products at the grocery store. It's a bit easier now that some stores put that on the price tag, but I'll do it in my head if it's not there.

You wrote, "He told me (and I'm not lying about this), 'You don't need to worry about that. It's not going to help you bake cakes'." And yet, you,re now going to culinary school? (giggle) Good article.

I have always found it odd how life has a way of becoming a strange wheel where we revisit our past to create our future. Lots of male teachers were/are chauvinist in regards to the manner in which they view capabilities of women.

Could this be that teaching (back in the day) was the highest pay occupation for college educated women and the lowest paying occupation for college educated men?

When I entered Purdue University the two largest schools for women students were education and home economics. Their daddies were sending their daughters to school to snag an engineer, join a sorority and become a homemaker. So much waste of potential and many of them completely bought in to it. For myself, I have always thought women were smarter than men.

Monica - I thought the same thing. *holds sides laughing*

This post made me think of this.

(And, yes, I read every xkcd just so I can reference them when necessary.)