One of our subject leads for Mathematics, Nicki Cologne-Brookes, has always had a very positive relationship with maths, its study and its teaching. She explores why this is and questions why there is so much gender stereotyping when it comes to studying mathematics. In this year’s A Level results, maths was the only subject area that achieved better results for boys than girls, yet girls do better in STEM subjects in single sex schools. However, as she points out, our children need to be allowed to explore and get their hands dirty in their study of mathematics as much as in all other subjects.
My kitchen cupboard is full of mugs featuring Maths jokes. I particularly like the “√(−1) 2³ ∑ p” mug given by an appreciative Year 13 further mathematician. Another, totally black with the words “You can’t scare me, my wife has a Maths degree,” is doubly funny in our house because my husband finally achieved, aged nineteen, the O Level grade C he needed to get into university.
Drinking tea from that mug the other day, I reflected on its message. The assumption that a woman with a Maths degree is scary shouldn’t be a source of humour. The message wouldn’t be regarded as a joke if it read, “my husband has a Maths degree.” The fact that I bought the mug for my husband suddenly seemed even more bizarre. Perhaps it was a rare smug moment of mine, shamelessly indulgent.
The number of times I have been faced with a mother at a parents’ evening, apologising for her daughter’s ‘incompetence’ at Maths is astounding. Usually the apology is followed with a comment such as “she takes after me, I was hopeless at Maths.” In my former career, how many times did I encounter that look of astonishment when a stranger asked what my line of work was? That surprise usually turned into panic as I repeated, “Yes, I teach Maths and Further Maths—to girls.”
As a female and with working class roots I am, in terms of my love of maths, a statistical anomaly. I’ve often wondered what pulled me into the subject when it would have been simpler not to rise to its challenge.
I have always had a fascination with patterns and was never told how hard Maths was supposed to be. The closest I got to this message was in primary school in the 1970s, where Maths was used as a punishment. The sanction for not having the right PE kit was to be made to spend the hour doing Maths. A win-win situation for one as exercise-adverse as I once was. I had so much fun playing on my own, in a classroom empty of people, with unifix bricks, rolling dice, stretching elastic bands, and pushing myself to get to the next exercise, and the next, while having the wit to pretend it was a chore.
My parents must take most of the credit for my fearless approach to Maths. My mother was the eldest of six children. Her mother had no time to attend to each individual child, and her father worked all hours at numerous jobs to keep the family afloat. She went to a grammar school in Leicester and had ambitions to do A Levels. My grandfather forbade this because she had a duty to help with the family. Instead, he allowed her to study to be a nursery nurse, because this was a skill that was more obviously useful.
My father left school at fifteen. He was a butcher, baker, cobbler, coal miner, photographer and eventually, having a family to support, he trained to be a technical artist. Not having much cash to spare, he’d be forever fixing, mending and building. I’d follow him around and learn from him, spending my school years, when not in lessons or PE detention, fixing, mending, building, photographing, cooking, measuring, singing. Those ratios, fractions, decimals and percentages were thick in the air from a young age. Pre-decimalisation, manipulating numbers in different bases was second nature. Endless counting songs and rhymes filled the house, and numbers never seemed problematic. Neither my father nor my mother ever told me something was right or wrong—they just let me work things out for myself. I remember, when I was around nine, my mother singing a song from the Hans Christian Anderson musical, about Pythagoras’ Theorem. I was so excited by the lyrics that I drew and measured a hundred right-angled triangles to just check it was true.
So my message, to all parents and carers of young children, no matter which gender, is to let them get their hands dirty and play with mathematical ideas, songs, rhymes, stories. Anything that captures their imagination. Follow Jo Boaler, https://www.youcubed.org/ and allow creativity, with a growth mindset with respect to Mathematics at home. My mother certainly passed on her fear of spiders to me. Don’t let the spider be the Maths textbook!
Time for another cup of tea. How about the “Calculators…Weapons of Math Destruction’” mug? I’ll save that for another blog.
