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Unread 17-05-2006, 09:36
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Re: CNN: Why do Girls Lose Interest in Math and Science?

We were just talking about this last night. We were theorizing it was more the pressures in school. One of our girls was saying how it was driving her nuts that all of the girls in her classes just seemed (or acted) "dumb". Many of them are spoiled and get everything they want from their parents, but as juniors or seniors, we see that its likely they are going to go off to college and not know how to hang a picture because they never had to.

It seems that in larger schools, those are the girls that are "cool" or "popular"... why?? They need everything done for them, and really have no common sense. These girls don't think science, math or technology are "cool" because they are harder subjects... so other girls that want to be "cool" and are desperate to fit in, follow in their footsteps.

Another thing that I've noticed in general (male or female) is that a lot of students these days are afraid to fail. They will take the easier route, or just not do anything at all so that there is no way to fail. We abolished this on our team. We try and push them outside their comfort zones, and show them that its ok to fail. I will give them more praise for trying and failing than I do for them not trying at all.

I even saw evidence of this in college... many of the girls that I knew in engineering majors had boys doing homework for them, and they would just go and whine or cry to teachers when they failed a test, often being allowed to make it up, or turn in extra work for it. It was disheartening to me, and to the girls that I knew that worked really hard to keep up our grades. I even had a friend tell me that in a summer class, he had a professor say he was relieved there were no girls in the class because they really didnt belong in the profession. This blew my mind because the professor was my advisor and I was easily in the top 25% of my class, having done all of my own work.

I really have to believe a beginning to the answer can be the lego league teams. I like the idea that we start with all girls teams, so they arent afraid of how they are going to appear to the boys, and then let them mix on FRC teams in high school. By then they've developed the confidence and they know that they are capable. We started two innercity FLL teams last year, one all boys and one all girls from the same school. The girls did an awesome job, and you could see how excited many of them were with it. They were learning that science & math are cool and they could do it.

Anyways, I think we need to keep studying this trend and keep finding ways to change it. FLL & FRC can be answers, but we need to work at it. Every team should pledge to change at least one girl's mind each year, and we just may change the numbers (I say as I sit here one of two female engineers in an 80 person department...)
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Kimberly O'Toole Eckhardt <3
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