One of my biggest pet peeves is when I have a female client who states some variation of “I suck at math” or “Math is not my strong suit”.
The reason that this bothers me is the impediment it serves to the student’s ability to progress, in and of itself, regardless of whether they had come to see me for tutoring or not. In other words, for reasons that I will lay out shortly, this statement means that the student will have a lower chance of success regardless of what I do as a tutor, or regardless of what their teacher or other tutor does, unless and until I – or someone else – forces them to stop reinforcing this corrosive and self destructive thought. Therefore, for my own clients who are girls who state some variation of “I suck at math”, I begin by telling them to delete this thought from their brain and to refrain from re-inforcing this thought by stating this thought out loud.
The first argument that I provide my clients is that by stating that they either do not have skill or talent in math, they will have less belief in their ability to improve, and this belief will corrode at their willingness to persist in their study, and hence will reduce their ability to improve; a downward spiral that ultimately inhibits the student’s ability to improve. Thus, by trying to convince the student to believe that their skill in mathematics is not inferior to anyone else’s, I hope to put the student on a path that will help them put effort into their mathematical studies.
The second argument that I provide to my students is that their statements that “I suck at math” serve as a sub-conscious permission to or protection mechanism if the student fails to improve as they expect not to improve. In other words, if the student believes that they “suck at math”, then they do not believe that they will be aided by tutoring, and if that expectation becomes reality, the belief that they “suck at math” serves as a permission to not improve in performance as well as a psychological self-protection mechanism.
When faced with this predicament, as mentioned above, I begin to try to make the student believe that they “do not suck at math”, I do not try to make them believe that they excel at math either, that is yet to be determined and potentially problematic, but definitely I want them to at least be open to the idea that they are on a level playing field as everyone else when it comes to math ability.
I also plant the idea, which is easy to accept, that mathematics is hard as a substitute for some inherent lack of ability. This permits me to set the right expectations that a client might have, by knowing that it is difficult, I will be more easily able to have them commit long enough to try a problem which they might originally have shied away from, and little by little, piece by piece, I am usually able to help them gain confidence in their mathematics ability and hence cause their performance to increase.
I also inform my clients the results of a study performed by Ellis, Fosdick, and Rasmussen (2016) which among a variety of interesting and important conclusions asserts the that girls rated their belief in their abilities in math after a Calculus 1 course less than comparably performing boys in the Calculus 1 class, this was even true for the top performing girls in the class, girls who showed no difference in skill from the top performing boys, and the authors linked this to their propensity to change majors away from STEM to their corrosive and false belief that they were somehow less skilled than the boys were. They specifically stated that
Our analyses show that, while controlling for academic preparedness, career intentions, and instruction, the odds of a woman being dissuaded from continuing in calculus is 1.5 times greater than that for a man.
I also recall, and have been able to find another study that was performed, that did the same type of analysis and found a similar kind of result.
Depending on the client, I often will also recommend the book "A Mind for Numbers" by Barbara Oakley. I recommend this book for two reasons, her inspiring story about her own journey into STEM as well as her explanation of effective study strategies for math and science topics.
On a broader scale, there are good signs in the world. Among these good signs, there is the huge reduction in the disparity between boys and girls in the top level of math performance(see Ramdani et. al. (2019)). At the same time, there is still a need to increase the visibility of female role models in STEM as related in an article by Kalender et. al. (2019)
Ultimately, I do have to state that it also bothers me when my male clients say things like "I suck at math" too, but I did not focus on this in this article because it is not the main topic of this article, and because it is unfortunately a refrain I hear most often from my female clients. Many of the same techniques of reinforcement hold. It is also true that I have not discussed the concept of math anxiety, a blanket term that is used to describe a spectrum of psychological impediments to math performance that also need to be acknowledged and dealt with. The handling of mathematical anxiety cannot be dealt with in general in the context of this blog post, as its severity, its nature, and its cause are all different from case to case, and the particular approach that can be taken in one case might be inadequate or inappropriate in another case.
References
Ellis J, Fosdick BK, Rasmussen C (2016) Women 1.5 Times More Likely to Leave STEM Pipeline after Calculus Compared to Men: Lack of Mathematical Confidence a Potential Culprit. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0157447. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0157447
Kalender, Z. Y., Marshman, E., Schunn, C. D., Nokes-Malach, T. J., & Singh, C. (2019, December 4). Why female science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors do not identify with physics: They do not think others see them that way. Physical Review Physics Education Research. Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://journals.aps.org/prper/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.15.020148
Ramdani, Y., Rohaeni, O., & Wachidah, L. (2019, November 1). IOPscience. Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Retrieved April 17, 2022, from https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1375/1/012066
