The school year of 1977-1978 was the beginning of my work for a master’s degree in mathematics. I was fortunate enough to be a “graduate assistant” at the university, meaning they hired me to teach “pre-calculus” courses there. It was basically the same stuff that you’d get in high school algebra. Before the year started, the professor who was in charge of the graduate students teaching pre-calc, not my faculty advisor but another, called us all into a meeting for a pep-talk. He said something like, “I know that for most of you, this is your first time teaching math at the college or university level so I don’t want you to feel too bad when your students, especially the female ones, can’t understand math; just do the best you can .” I didn’t say anything, but silently thought, “Why wouldn’t the girls do as good as the boys? I bet that they’ll do the same, give or take a percent or two.” Of course, he was wrong. Surprisingly, I was wrong also. I saw a big difference between the genders in math, averaging 9 or 10% (about a letter grade), and it was in favor or the girls; but only if they slay the dragon called Math-Phobia.
Both semesters were about the same. The text I was using had 11 chapters so I told everybody I’d give them a quiz after each, but throw out each student’s worst quiz and use only everyone’s top ten for the quiz part of their final grade since everyone has a “bad day” and I didn’t want a bad day ruining their average. In the first quiz most of the girls did pretty badly so made appointments with me to drop the course. For each student when I asked her the problem in the quiz, she’d only say that she’d never understood math. I’d ask if we could go over one of the problems that she missed and she said ok. She said that she saw that step would follow from each previous step, like multiplying both sides of the equation by the same amount or whatever. She’d say she saw it was true, but didn’t know which step to do first. I’d say, “That problem we just finished; do it yourself, but you do it in the ‘wrong order’ of the steps, just keep track of all the terms.” In the middle of the problem, it looks different. But at the end, she was writing the same solution as I did few minutes earlier. Each and every girl said the exactly same thing, word for word: “This is SO easy! I can’t believe I thought it was hard.”
I told them that when I’m taking a math test, if I finished early, I’d go over the test and do the problems in a different order of steps, just so I can be pretty certain that I got it right. The rest of the semester, those girls were getting B+’s and A’s. When I’d finished a chapter, I’d give the class an example and told them whet the homework was; then, let them ask questions. The girls rarely asked questions because they got the concepts and were racing through their homework, while the boys usually needed more examples to really understand what’s going on in the chapter. Girls are so smart, if most of them weren’t so nice, it would be a little scary.
At the end of the school year, I had a stroke, with the aphasia and paralysis so bad that I gave up my goal to be a math professor, but I did complete my master’s degree. After that I worked for the Air Force as a computer programmer in various squadrons . When I was in Civil Engineering, the clerk for my section asked me if it was true that I used to teach math and I said it was. Her daughters were failing in math so I agreed to tutor them. They went from bottom of their class to near the top. It was especially great when they did the best in the class on a math test. I’ve never had a daughter, but it was a thrill to think that ‘my girls’ can do anything.
