Girls and Physics. It's too hard for them. ?

I wonder what is 'nature' and what is 'nurture' for women. So much of our conditioning over centuries has about our being the nurturer, people centred etc and men having more logical brains and therefor more suited to maths, science etc. I don't think anyone is just one or the other ...we all have male and female aspects within us and I think women and men should be able to take any subject they have an interest in. It is still seen as a bit odd that a man stays at home and the women is a scientist. Society need to open up to examining our stereotyping.

Oh volver queuing theory is not complex, it is logical - and to be honest I was very well taught, albeit by, by chance, a male Professor, although he was never as good at teaching as my female Professor, the one who said I did not need to do the first year of the Cert. Ed. because after 14 years RN instructional practice, I already understood the underpinning theories of teaching at “an advanced level” so she APEL’d me onto the second year.

One of my granddaughters was left in my care for 12 days while Mum & Dad were away on business. She was about 6 and a bit nervous about being away from them for so long, but she was at school and they didn't want her to miss so much. Granddaughter and I agreed we would read a book, one chapter a night while parents were away. I chose the book 'The Number Devil' by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. She was hooked and has been ever since. She still talks about that stay, and has gone on to study Maths and Physics. Maths should be taught to children as an exciting subject with relevance to life around them. Another Granddaughter failed GCSE Maths twice and wanted to get into University. Maths was obligatory. This was pre Zoom etc. I decided to coach her over the phone. We had the same text book each. She had no problem with the maths, just the way she had been taught. She is now doing a PhD.
The approach to teaching maths MUST be changed.

Neilspurgeon0

Oh volver queuing theory is not complex, it is logical - and to be honest I was very well taught, albeit by, by chance, a male Professor, although he was never as good at teaching as my female Professor, the one who said I did not need to do the first year of the Cert. Ed. because after 14 years RN instructional practice, I already understood the underpinning theories of teaching at “an advanced level” so she APEL’d me onto the second year.

queue-it.com/blog/queuing-theory/

Oh yes. No maths at all.

Absolute rubbish - irrespective of any context - girls are no less inclined than boys to want to engage in Maths as they get older - my Physicist professor hubby continually sees true brilliance in teenage (female) physicists. The fault is down entirely to politics, to lack of funding for education, failure to recruit physics and chemistry teachers into secondary schools, a curriculum that can substitute General Science for Physics, Chemistry and Biology on the assumption that some children can't handle the concepts involved. It's all a huge social engineering project. The independent schools have no problem getting girls to continue with their maths and physics - and that's a question of resourcing. Who would have thought? ??

Oh for heavens sake. I would never have expected the mindless Twitter monstering of Katharine Birbalsingh to reach Gransnet.
She has never said that girls are not bright enough to do maths.
Her point is that they seem to gravitate towards subjects with a human/social/language element.
Pointing out that there are female astrophysicists etc does not disprove this because it’s an observation of general trends, not individuals.
Many teachers will tell you they have exactly the same problem in persuading girls that STEM subjects are for them.
Birbalsingh is a brilliant headteacher. She has created a school where children from extremely difficult backgrounds are getting the same results as kids from the poshest private schools. She is giving these students a REAL start in life instead of just talking about it.
She’s a tough nut and not always easy company - but takes the concept of levelling up deadly seriously, far more than any of the teachers’ union representatives (who hate her) ever have in my experience.
Her only mistake is to be on Twitter too much.

Lots of very valid comments here....I'd like to think girls are encouraged much more in school , but parents also play a part.
My mother used to say , what do you want to do that for ?seemingly encouraging my sisters to be happy with home economics CSE and not worry about sciences you'll "never use again".
I was at school from the 60s and loved maths (and art) .. in co-ed til age 12 and frustrated that girls were almost dismissed as not interested in Physics when I found it fascinating.
Lucky to win a scholarship to a girls private school where I started bottom in maths for my year group (was top at previous school) but worked my way back up and had educational supplements published with my very neat workings for exam questions and answers .... I flew through Physics and Maths at O' then A'Level then went on to uni and got 1st Class Hons in Maths - the first in my family to go to Uni. I have no doubt that this would not have happened if I'd stayed in mainstream.

Did you watch the whole interview sarahcyn?

Oddly enough I was having a conversation with my granddaughter earlier this week as she is currently taking her mock exams. On that particular day she had physics. I said I hadn’t really understood physics when I was at school, and she said that it was one of her favourite and strongest subjects!!!

Birbalsingh's mistakes are to think that she is somehow exceptional and to think it's OK to turn up as an alleged expert witness without any preparation. As the current Social Mobility Commissioner, it would be hoped that she could talk knowledgeably about something other than herself and her school.

Onde thing I agree with sarahcyn about. She has never said that girls are not bright enough to do maths.

However when asked why fewer girls do physics than boys, she said that it was a natural thing and the there was research to show that. That is incorrect. Are all those girls who do physics "unnatural"? The IOP, who know a thing or two about physics, have studied this for years and illustrated how she is wrong in this thinking.

She also doesn't appear to understand that there is no evidence at all that the reason girls gravitate to the "softer" subjects in innate; on the contrary, the evidence show that it is nurture not nature.

I have no idea if she's a good head teacher or not. But I know for damn sure that she knows nothing about women in STEM, and using her Twitter to say that everyone is bullying her is not the way a mature person behaves.

I also really object to being referred to as mindless by someone who doesn't understand what's going on and has missed the point of the discussion entirely.

Is that the kind of thing she allows in her school?

Doing teaching practice in late 60's I went into a small country school . The head teacher took out the oldest pupils due to go up to secondary school. He taught them some "A" level maths. He was a brilliant teacher, the children enjoyed their lessons and didn't\t think it was anything special. They were all "average " not academically gifted.
It is not just the subject that is important but the quality of the teaching which is important to how pupils interact with a subject

volver I didn’t say there wasn’t ANY maths, I did say there wasn’t any complex maths, which I really do not think there is, in queuing theory. It all seems highly logical and obvious, but that could well be because I was taught this as a discrete theory rather than as an application of pure maths, which I could never see the point of and which, aged 11-16, was dreadfully badly thrown at rather than taught to us.

For example I spent half a term working out, to no possible value to anyone, the first 2,000 decimal places of pi which, when you only have a vague understanding of how log tables work, and no real interest in the idiot teaching it, is a real bog.

Where is the poetry or the beauty in 3.14159 ?

What she said was part of a wider discussion and the comment has been taken completely out of context. She had spent 20 minutes discussing how they were overcoming this in her school to ensure that this was not the case, the achievements they were having etc, but despite this, there was still an anomaly when it came to wanting to study physics. She has also stated that when it came to statistics that girls who chose maths at A level did so much better than the boys but the take up was less but much better than it used to be. She spoke about the lack of confidence with girls compared to the boys. She has a wealth of experience to be able to state her opinion. None of this has been spoken about by those who want to pick upon something that might sound controversial.

My daughter went to Uni to study Computer Science. At the time, there were 3 girls and the rest were men. One of the girls left after a couple of weeks, those remaining felt overwhelmed by the testosterone and went home at Christmas vowing not to return. I was disappointed but knew that there was no point in trying to talk my daughter into staying. The sad thing was the girls were streets ahead in understanding the subject compared to the boys but the boys seemed to have a confidence the girls didn't possess. As a teacher, I saw this quite often and tried hard to dispel that.

There is a wealth of research about girls and empathy so it doesn't appear to be an outrageous statement to say that. If Birbalsingh had said it was ok for girls not to do Physics because they found the maths hard (she has also said that boys find it hard too but she was specifically being asked to talk about girls) and nothing could be done about it, but as she has been actively working against stereotyping in her school, she obviously doesn't think that.

I think a lot depends on how it is taught. Perhaps girls are better with a certain type of teaching rather than rote learning. Girls want to know why and the rationale behind the maths. Maybe the males find rote learning easier? If girls are not choosing maths and science perhaps they should look at the teachers ?

NeilSpurgeon I think most people would find the maths in volver's link complex. I don't know when you were at school, but I never remember having to work out the first 2,000 decimal places of pi. I suggest that you are quite capable of understanding quite complex maths, but that it wasn't well taught when you were at school and the content has changed quite considerably since you were at school.

PS. I don't see that an understanding of maths and music and/or poetry are mutually exclusive.

No icanhandthemback, it hasn't been taken out of context. It's what she said in the context of a meeting about girls and STEM subjects, which she didn't even address other than to say it's "natural" that girls don't opt for maths and physics and to say it didn't bother her. She's the Social Mobility Commissioner, for goodness' sake, and should be basing what she says on eveidence, not waffly anecdotes.

What's she done about stereotyping at Michaela?

And then there’s the issue of far fewer boys and girls wanting to learn languages other than English……….

Neilspurgeon0 Queuing theory didn’t spring fully formed into being in a form that could be taught to people who don't like maths. Queuing theory had to be "invented", using complex maths. (We shouldn't use complex. That means something specific to a mathematician. Let's say complicated. Or even hard.)

I have no idea why some bad teacher though getting you to work out pi to 2000 decimal places was in any way useful. Its seems to have left you with an idea of maths is mechanical number crunching, which is unfortunate.

The poetry or beauty in 3.14159? Here you go.

www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/pi-day-why-pi-matters#:~:text=Hardly.-

She said it was natural that girls found maths harder than boys did.

You can dress it up with her success as a teacher, and anything else you like, but she said something that is just not true and on which she bases her view of the world. And on which she will not listen to people who know better than her.

NO sorry volver infinity is just far too metaphysical a concept for my little brain. If maths really isn’t mechanical number crunching, and to be honest every single real world application of maths that I have ever needed in a long working life WAS worked out using a mechanical device; slide rule, calculator, spreadsheet, after that fruitless and soul destroying six weeks of dividing 22 by seven back in 1962, then I am afraid the concept of hard mathematics as anything greater than dull drudgery passed me by a lifetime ago, and it is much too late to wean me to your dark side of the moon now.

That's arithmetic.

Maths is something else entirely.

Heigh ho.

The Head sounds sexist to me! Oh, and Head teacher these days, not 'headmistress'/'headmaster'?