Maths A Level Popular

[FredPuli43]

Story here:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/education/article3844054.ece


Maths is within touching distance of English as the favourite A level. AS level maths is also popular , as is Advanced Maths. But the subject remains predominantly male (which will satisfy one UKIP member!)

Two questions: Why is it so popular? Why is it predominantly male students who take it?

[Peter Pedant]

Freddie - two Math undergraduates,

if they only use greek letter and no numbers
you might at least call them undergrads

oh and they 'read' Maths too

[Peter Pedant]

We had one in my class as skool
but that was erm 1968
.... and it was a boys' skool


and Carol V didnt have many girlie companions in her Engineering class

[mikey4444]

I would have thought the answer was obvious. Every job application that needs qualifications, needs maths ( and English ) Media studies doesn't seem to needed at all, but an awful lot of kids seem to be studying it.

[belrec]

Just throwing this out there as it is something i have been thinking about recently. Bear with me :-)

The "apparent" rise in boys with Aspergers and mild autism due to better screening and diagnosis could help. (i have no actual figures to back this up just a theory)

Often boys with Aspergers are extremely gifted at maths, perhaps instead of being labelled as troublemakers and diffcult children and dumped in remedial classes, as they would say 20 years ago they are being helped into mainstream classes and just doing good work?

So boosting the numbers of maths a level takers. As i said just a theory :-)

[FredPuli43]

Not just a lack of female role models, certainly until recently, but what society expects women to do. Women barristers were once expected to do divorce, family law, and generally that is what they did do. That one would do crime or patent law, for example, was unthinkable. Dame Elizabeth Butler Sloss started in family law, as expected years ago. She became the Director of Public Prosecutions, then a High Court Judge, then an Appeal Court judge, to her credit. She and others broke that barrier. Once they had, others were inspired to follow and the 'women's work' attitude changed with that; any chambers that said, as one used to, "We can't take any more women, we have our quota" meaning that they had three out of twenty, would be laughed at now.

As with the Bar, other professions are now more equal. So what we need is high profile, probably on TV, mathematicians; female de Sautoys; and physicists. Alice Roberts alone has probably done much to interest girls in science (and boys in her in shorts!).

[jim360]

I think in my first-year maths exams the only numbers I saw were the question numbers!

There are some incredibly bright and brilliant women maths/ physics/ general sciences students around. If they are outnumbered by the men, which is still the case, then this is slowly changing around. Don't think there's much more than universities and even A-level courses can or should do to increase the number of women who take up maths and Science. The "problem" is most likely to be one of perception again, and should be addressed yet further down the scale, when girls and boys are both young.

wolf: ""I can't give you a link but I read on t`internet that student entering university to study to become vets vastly outnumbered the males. Something like 80% women to 30% men."

80% to 30%? Sounds like you still need to work on percentages... :P

[wolf63]

Seriously Jim ~ when we did go to night classes to study maths there were people there who did not understand percentages or negative numbers (to me these are basic maths - the stuff we do each day without thinking abut it).

But that was all over 10 years ago so much of the 'stuff' that we studied has evaporated from our brains.

I used to calculate payments of benefit (DWP) and have to admit to using both my calculator and my fingers. It can't be a coincidence that we have 10 fingers (and toes) - decimalisation?

[FredPuli43]

A subsidiary question. We do find some quite young children who have great aptitude for maths. The latest is a 12 year-old, Andrew Ejami, who got A* at A level, having got A* in GCSE at 10. Why do some children show aptitude in maths when so young? Is the maths brain quick to develop?

[jim360]

Dunno. At 11 and without all that much practice I was finding it not difficult to do standard KS3 matsh SATs (now abolished), but never really bothered to go faster. As a result I basically spent five years of maths lessons learning not all that much and just being bored, walking out at the end of that with almost full marks in the GCSE. Maybe I could have sat that earlier and with similar results, but I think it was effectively decided that I not do so and not "rush" exams. But I think I could have sat the GCSE, and maybe even the A-level with a bit more work, some years earlier than I did.

Thing is, with all respect to those who have sat it, the Maths GCSE at least isn't all that hard. (As far as I'm concerned exams have got easier over time, though probably not year-on-year.) Anyone who has a "maths brain", whatever that means, should find it a breeze. Beyond GCSE, A-Level is definitely a step up, but what the "maths brain" means, presumably, is an ability to follow a logical path and spot patterns, which is essentially the entire subject of maths. It's not that there is only one right answer (sometimes there isn't an answer at all), but rather that you are "forced" logically to get to any answer there is, and by that same logic can identify all the wrong answers. GCSE and A-Level papers, which often split the problem up so that the logical route can be taken in small steps, therefore play into the hands of people whose minds work that way. Hence why particularly gifted young children can sit such papers at a young age. Unlike any other subject, maths tells you what the next stage is, and the only difficulty (although it is of course extremely difficult at times!) is in being able to read those signposts.

[Hypognosis]

@jim,

I know exactly what you mean about the pattern recognition. I'd simplify an equation, line by line, then get stuck. The teaher would then rattle through the solution at high speed and pick out the required pattern which I'd usually overshot by four or five lines. I'd then be so angry about being 'cheated' by the conjurer-like technique that I'd not be listening properly to the rest of the solution.

That was the only time school lessons ever made me feel out of my depth and, not knowing any better, I masked the fact that I was struggling and never asked for help.

[Old_Geezer]

The neurons in the brain have to connect up and sort themselves some way. Since we are not all identical, some will find one thing easy, another another. Some will be adept at many things, some struggle with the few they can tackle. It's not just in maths one can find genius thrive at a young age.

[DaisyNonna]

Taught by fantastic History, English and Language teachers.
Rubbish Maths and Science teachers.
No Contest.

[boxtops]

I reckon it's popular because a great many professional careers (e.g. nursing) require you to have good grades in Maths and English before you'll be considered for University entry.