Despite the fact that girls are every bit as capable as boys in the realm of mathematics, girls’ math skills continue to suffer disproportionately. A story in today’s NY Times says U.S. kids aren’t getting the math education they could, girls especially.
Since math is a fundamental economic building block for science, medicine, and yes… finance and economics, this begs to ask the question: Can we afford to cheat our children out of something so basic and expect to our country to have a strong future?
I’d say the big problem is that the way math is taught it takes too long before any of it is really meaningful. The subject of math should be dropped and then incoporated into other teaching that has meaningful outcomes. It’s the old building block curriculum that leaves both boys and girls out.