Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

There is a recent study, led by psychologist Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago, which has discovered that female math teachers who are anxious about math pass on that anxiety to their female students, but not their male students.  The study was published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and it followed 17 first and second-grade teachers and their classes from the beginning to the end of the school year.  The findings are rather startling considering the implications.  There was no correlation between achievement and gender stereotypes about math among the kids at the beginning of the year.  However, by the end of the year the girl students (but not the boys) of the less confident female math teachers did correlate gender with math ability – girls are naturally good readers while boys are naturally good at math.  And, the girls who believed that did significantly worse on the math achievement tests at the end of the year.  In blunt terms, it isn’t brain power that is holding kids (in this case girls) back from math achievement, it’s the anxiety of their teachers, and it affects girls but not boys.  That’s pretty serious stuff.

The solution:

It’s too easy to get licensed to teach math.  A second grade math teacher who is unsure about their ability to teach first graders has no place in the classroom.  They may very well be doing more harm than good.  If little girls, who will eventually make up 50% of the potential pool of scientists in our country, are being scared off of math in second grade, that is a national problem that needs addressing.  There should be special attention paid and resources diverted to retrain teachers who fall into the anxious category (as determined by these psychologists).  An even more troubling statistic is that 90% of elementary school teachers are women.  If their students are unaffected by a teachers’ anxieties then that’s good, as in the case of boys.  But apparently, as this study suggests, the girl students are being taught, inadvertently, negative gender stereotypes.  That is a huge problem that could endure through a whole lifetime.

Do I Transfer Fears to my Kids?

I was afraid of math when I was a kid.  I always did poorly at it even though everyone around me always kept saying I had a talent for it.  It was a paralyzing fear that kept me from coming out and just doing it.  I’m over that fear now and, at age 35, I have started anew in my math studies.  For me it’s a matter of confronting the fear and defeating it.  But, this research has gotten me thinking about other fears I might have that I’ve unwittingly been transferring to my kids.  When asked about fears by other people, I typically say the only thing I’m afraid of is confined spaces.  Maybe there’s more.

1. Confined Spaces and Being Immobilized: I would say my fear of being immobilized (shackled or paralyzed) is borderline clinical.  It really is number one on the list by a long shot.

2. Poverty: I’m scared of poverty in so much as it would affect my kids.  It doesn’t bother me to be poor.  It scares me that being poor will affect my kids.

3. Losing a Kid: The chances of this are remote and thus I’m rational about it.  Nevertheless, it’s always in the back of my mind.

Out of those three things, I don’t think my kids are aware of any of them.  My conclusion, in my own life, is that I do not pass fears to my kids.  They are well adjusted and fear free as far as I can tell.  What about you?  We all have fears.  Are any of yours seeping into your kids without you knowing it?  I’d never stopped to think about it before today.  It’s something I’m going to be on guard for from now on.  Perhaps there’s something I’ve missed.  I’ll have to keep thinking about it.

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