29 Jan 01
I thought I'd post this little rant for posterity. I had fun with
academic competitions when I was in high school, but my interest
definitely faded over school. Truthfully, if I had not been given free
pizza every year when we took the Putnam, I don't think I would've done
it.
The questions were =boring= and had little to do with what I found
interesting in math.
In any case, a little background: in 1992, I was a senior in high school,
I took a silly little test and got picked for the U.S. Physics Olympiad
team, which is composed of 20 students from around the United States (not
all of them were citizens, actually). Five people were then to be picked
to go to the International competition in Finland after a training session
at UMCP for 10 days (I think). I was obviously in the bottom half of the
people there, and, like the other students who also figured they were in
the bottom half, simply decided to have a good time and enjoy our daily
speakers and to blow off doing the problems.
So now, years later, somebody at St. John's University is doing some kind
of study on former Olympiad participants. Enjoy my rant.
> > Dear Mary,
>
> Thanks for your participation in the Academic Olympiad project. We have now
> completed Olympiad studies in the United States, Finland, Germany, Korea and
> China.
>
> An interesting finding is the scarcity of female Olympians. This phenomenon
> occurred in all the participating countries. Why are there so few female
> Olympians? One US Math Olympian (male) suggested that there should be two
> categories in International Academic Olympiad: one for males and one for
> females. Just like the Athletic Olympiad Games, the competition should be held
> within the same gender.
>
> We are very interested in knowing your opinion on this issue. As a female
> academic Olympian, what is your position?
>
> We need to get some feedback from you for the following 5 questions:
>
> 1. The German team has concluded that maybe females just do not like being in
> competitions? Does this belief hold for Americans?
>
For crying out loud, don't even =think= of creating a female ghetto for the
Olympiad competitions. I notice that not many blacks were on the Olympiad
teams, shouldn't we create a separate competition for them? Do you realize
how bad that sounds? Do you realize the impact it would have on the people
in the "lesser" competitions?
Yes, there were fewer girls in the math team and computer team in high
school, but there were plenty of girls in the college bowl/knowledge master
quiz teams. I knew plenty of girls in the upper level math classes; but
there were many guys as well as girls in these classes who were totally
turned off by the competitions -- the attitudes of the people competing.
There were several boys who had the "I am a math genius" attitude (which
they weren't) or the equally obnoxious "If you can't get this, you're an
idiot" attitude which put off boys and girls alike who weren't going to be
in the top echelon of the team anytime soon. I didn't find the obligatory
ultimate frisbee games (which I always sat out) very fun, and certainly
didn't enjoy the rehashes of problems after the fact.
Even more so, as I got further along in math, I found the problems more and
more boring, because I found the =real= interesting stuff was in research
problems - I saw these competition puzzles as little mind-teasers, no more
consequential than crossword puzzle championships (and, admit, they are
little more than that.) The physics olympiad problems were, to me, boring
beyond belief. I had more fun listening to the speakers talking about, and
demonstrating, scanning tunnelling microscopes and other ideas and
equipment from modern physics. I had taken a course in astrophysics and a
course in modern physics (baby quantum, I suppose) my senior year in high
school, and their open questions were much more fascinating to me than
figuring out some mechanics problem involving cleverness in making
free-body diagrams or changes in variables. Past a certain point, the
point at which one has obtained mastery of the mathematical tools of
physics or math, these "cleverness exercises" are little more than
intellectual masturbation. They make one's self feel good, if one can do
them, but doesn't add to the knowledge of anybody else.
> 2. You may have known from our questionnaires that we are interested in how
> parents help to develop extraordinary talent. Are parents less willing to
> accelerate the development of math and science talent for their daughters?
> Could family socialization be somewhat responsible for these gender gaps?
>
I wouldn't know. I was the oldest child of three, and we were all
girls. My father gave me several of his own books to read, science fiction
and non-ficition (I remember him handing me _Godel,Escher,Bach_ to me when
I was 13 saying, "This is too theoretical for me - you'll love it.") He
would also give me programming problems to work on when I was in elementary
school ("get it to draw a circle without using the CIRCLE
command"). However, my parents mainly helped me by not getting in my way
(for example, not making me do activities I didn't want to do, like letting
me out of Girl Scouts in 6th grade) and paying for the special activities I
did want to do (like going to CTY). I did get some encouragement from my
family, but mainly I didn't get any discouragement.
> 3. Are math and/or science teachers somewhat to blame for not recognizing
> talented females? Were there talented females in your high school and college
> math/science classes?
In 7th & 8th grade, I was in a special class in Howard County, Maryland, in
which qualifying students would take Algebra I&II and Geometry in those two
years by attending a 2-hour class each week. Out of the class of about 20
or so students, 4 of us were girls. We all tended to do the best, and we
definitely were the best-behaved (Dr. Lynn Collins, our teacher, had not
allowed younger students for the reason they tended to be too immature, and
for many of the boys, they were =still= too immature.) When we took the
SAT in 7th grade, the only two people in our class to score higher than 700
on the math section were me and another girl.
However, as we went along in high school, I noticed that while the girls
tended to be better in getting the material in classes, they didn't
necessarily solve problems the fastest. I remember one of my close
friends, who had been in the middle school classes with me, made low
scores on the math section of the PSAT because she simply couldn't finish
in time. I knew she understood math just as well as I did (we were both in
Calculus I at the time), but I was just much faster at taking standardized
tests.
>
> 4. Should the US try to solve this problem? Do you have any suggestions?
>
I think the U.S. should think about what they're trying to do with these
competitions. I enjoyed the math team competitions to a certain extent,
the ARML was always fun, but the written tests like the AHSME and the AIME
were really boring to me. When it became extremely clear that I had no
chance for the 5-person team going to Finland, I ignored the
problem-solving tricks being coached to us and enjoyed the company of the
other students who had come to the same conclusion as well as enjoyed the
presentations we got to see. The competition was the least important part
of the training camp for the US Physics Olympiad, and it wasn't due to the
Olympiad that I got interested in physics in the first place.
The last thing you want to do is to equate doing well in these competitions
with some kind of necessary quality of being a mathematician, physicist,
chemist, or whatever. People come to these fields from other directions
than timed competitions over prescribed material. I don't think these
competitions necessarily make students more interested in a field that they
are already interested in; they might put some students off if they think
to do well in these fields, they've got to be good at competitions.
> 5. Any final thoughts?
I think the one competition that heightens interest in the sciences and
math in high school students is the Westinghouse/Intel Talent Search
(whatever it's called now). In this competition, more directly related to
the research in these academic fields, I have yet to hear of a call for a
separate competition for girls. One of my comrades in high school, Ashley
Reiter, won it with a math paper in 1991. Other girls have won the top
prize and come in the top 40. Perhaps the Olympiad movement should look to
this competition and realize that the reason fewer girls compete in the
Olympiads might be because they realize it is not terribly realistic and
has little to do with the real world, that the Olympiads have certain types
of problems that appeal to a small group of people with a very specific
type of ability.
If the Olympiads wish to make themselves more relevant, perhaps they will
have to rethink the bases of competition.
mp
--
Mary Pat Campbell I am woman; open the door.
campbelm@cims.nyu.edu
http://www.math.nyu.edu/phd_students/campbelm/index.html
CLAIMER: I speak for everyone, everywhere! mwa ha ha ha ha