Nonlinear Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and Mathematics

sylvan8798
Sun, 01 Jan 2012 15:56:01 +0000

Cardinal Fang:

I hope you don’t think this is prying, Sylvan, but I keep thinking about your inspirational story. Why do you think you were a mathphobe in high school? Do you think there could have been circumstances in which you took a more direct route to your academic success?

I’m concerned that we in North America have institutional and cultural barriers keeping talented girls from success in STEM fields. Do you have any ideas about what should be changed, to allow girls like you were to get to their bachelors degrees in STEM fields without the hardships you faced?

CF, my elementary/secondary school experience was messed up by massive dysfunction at home. We were extremely poor, moved around a lot, attended 6 schools in my first 6 years, my abusive alcoholic father died when I was 8, I was sent to live with my grandmother after my mother remarried and the stepfather was even worse. Once she escaped from him and we reunited, we moved across the country for a year and then back to my grandmother’s. This caused me to miss 8th grade geometry due to different practices in the different states.

On top of this, the various new-math fads of the '70’s made it impossible for my mother or grandmother to help with any math problem I might have had, not that anyone cared anyways. 9th grade algebra put me under altogether. All I remember was that we spent a lot of time doing square roots of numbers with some algorithm and she talked alot about infinity. I decided I just wasn’t good at that stuff.

In my high school, I think the teachers just accepted it when I said I “wasn’t good at math” rather than making any attempt to fix anything. Also I think that it often seems to be kind of accepted that poor or severely disadvantaged kids probably aren’t going to college, so no one took me under their wing to advance any such cause. It was accepted that I was on the typing/filing/secretary track even though the humanities teachers at least knew I was pretty smart. No one in my mother’s family had EVER gone past high school, so it wasn’t like anyone expected me to either.

Sorry for rambling.