Are you math phobic?

I spent the evening at a workshop learning how to tutor GED students (in a handful of high school subjects) and came home to a lively twitter discussion called #mathchat. The topic of the night was math phobia. Where does it come from and what can math teachers do about it?

At the workshop, even the person teaching us how to teach math made a few math-phobic comments - not about the things we’d teach, but more about the things we don’t have to, like thank god there’s no trigonometry, or graphing calculators.

I used to be math-phobic too. That changed, not when I learned more math (I didn’t) but as I saw other people being math-phobic and realized it was a little out of proportion. Is math really that bad? Really?

Some of the comments from #mathchat really brought back memories, mainly the idea of being “bad at math”. I always thought I was bad at math, but I got decent grades and was in the high level classes. And in what other subject do we - especially once we’re out of school - say things like “oh, I can’t do that at all, I’m bad at social studies.” Or “OMG, I can’t deal with anything that mentions the French Revolution”.

I’ve given a lot of thought to why I disliked math classes so much. Partly I felt like I was bad at math because even though I could do the problems, I didn’t understand how the concepts connected to each other. Almost every math class I took was taught the same (boring, disconnected) way. I loved geometry, though! It was visual and full of puzzles.

I also liked science classes that used math, so long as the math was a tool to answer an interesting question. Not so much when the experiment was a transparent set-up for a boring math problem.

These and other ideas cropped up in the chat, which will be archived here. These are some of the relevant tweets:

@familyonbikes I so wish we could remove that idea that being bad at math is OK. Where did that come from anyway?

@lovedrummin I believe [w]hen teachers stop teaching by rote and math begins to encourage ingenuity students become engaged. http://bit.ly/cXOM7l

@maggiekb1 It took years before I learned there was difference between “can’t do math” and “can’t do enough math problems in 3 minutes.”

@NicolRHoward #mathphobia may be a fear of not being able to use rote memorization forever

One tweeter mentioned CGI Math, a strategy in which teachers ask students to come up with ways of solving a problem, then the class discusses and compares the methods they came up with. Another said that a great way to teach number places (the ones place, the tens place, and so on) is to bring in a ton of beans and give the class all day to count them. Soon they’ll be grouping the beans, and grouping the groups, and discover the idea on their own. The CGI Math page says: “students who learn the standard addition algorithm often learn little more than a procedure to find the correct answer. Students who develop their own strategies to solve addition problems are likely to intuitively use the commutative and associative properties of addition in their strategies.”

I loved the recommendations to use discussions, bookless lessons, puzzles, applications the students are interested in such as video games, and pervasive everyday math, like choosing a cell phone plan, or catching a thrown object (hello parabola!). Dan Meyer’s blog has examples of a fun approach: show a picture or some other piece of information, then ask the students what questions they have about it, and let them figure out how to answer them.

What do you think? Are you math phobic?

Postcards to the fetus

I mentioned last week that a new book by Annie Paul likens a fetus’s experience in the womb to getting “biological postcards” from the world outside. Babble followed up their review of the book with a couple of excerpts.

One is on food, and I love that Paul doesn’t just parrot warnings about sushi but observes that setting up food as dangerous to a fetus, and the mother as responsible for that danger, has as much to do with our culture’s screwed-up attitudes about eating and motherhood as it does with biology. Taking the postcard view, a mom is sharing flavors (not to mention nutrients) with her little parasite.

The other one, on stress, is likewise fascinating. I’d love to hear the story of how stress went from “not on the list” of risk factors for pre-term birth to being considered a number-one cause of it. Meanwhile, the placenta breaks down some of the stress hormone, cortisol, but mild stress may be necessary for later cognition.

I just came across a study today showing that people who were in utero during a WWII famine in the Netherlands may have trouble with selective attention tasks as they get older. The authors think this means their cognition is declining faster than average, because people typically do worse on this test as they age. Previous studies on the “Dutch Famine Birth Cohort,” as this group is called, showed that they are more prone to heart disease and diabetes.

I have to wonder, in light of the “postcards from outside” hypothesis, whether being worse at selective attention means being better at something else. Could a supposedly poor score on the test reflect something like multitasking ability? And could that ability be adaptive in the face of periodic famines?

Quick links: reproductive & digestive tract edition

So much good stuff this week! A lot of these warrant their own posts but it’s a busy week for me so all I’ve got is the links. Better short than never:

Researchers turn off severe food allergies in mice by feeding them a modified form of the food they’re allergic to. This binds to a special receptor on immune cells in the digestive tract, apparently re-training the immune system.

Sneaky comb jellies suck prey into their mouths without the prey noticing. Neat!

Breaking news: somebody is finally looking at how (monkey) dads’ bodies and brains change when they have a kid. Plenty of this research has been done on moms in the past, of course.

Review of Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives. It seems a mom’s body sends signals to the baby to prepare him for life on the outside. If food is scarce, for example, his metabolism will be prepared for that. The author likens the phenomenon to “biological postcards from the world outside.”

Gene found for age-related macular degeneration. That’s a major cause of blindness in old folks. The gene, when working normally, protects the cells of the macula with signposts that tell the immune system not to destroy them.

Pictures of a python digesting a rat. No comment, except this is awesome.

Underwire bras make you poop less: What bewilders me is that every outlet that reported this story used pictures of women in bras, but none used pictures of poop.

An oxytocin nose spray may help people with autism or other disorders connect with others socially. I know that when I had to take methergine, an oxytocic drug, it made me super happy and talkative. This comment on the article makes some good points (with pubmed references!) about the effects of oxytocin, a link to autism, and the ethics of this kind of therapy.

Antibiotics play hell with gut flora - you probably could have guessed, but the germs living in your intestines are important to your health and digestion - and killing them off with antibiotics is wiping out a whole ecosystem. You might not get some of those species back, afterwards. Tying that into our other theme for today: I wonder how routine antibiotics during birth (given as a “better safe than sorry” sort of measure) affect the gut flora of the newborn. More about gut flora & babies here. This is an area I’d love to dig into more.

Quick links: Ancient antibiotics to Yo-yo dieting

Ancient Nubians may have purposely brewed antibiotic-rich beer and fed it to sick people.

Scientists discover the properties of the perfect sports bra, but no bra on the market fits the description.

Study claims to disprove that “diets don’t work” by finding that it’s eating more post-diet that makes dieters fatter in the long run. Their results say the opposite to me: if the binge is typically triggered by dieting, doesn’t that make dieting the culprit?

To avoid overheating during exercise, you should drink more water, right? Probably not, say the guys at Science of Sport. Drinking a little extra doesn’t affect your body temperature much.

Some universities experiment with opening the online portion of classes to everybody - different than OpenCourseWare projects since the students can interact with each other.

It’s off-topic, but this guy is traveling the world with no baggage of any kind, just a vest with pockets. (The trip is sponsored by the maker of the vest). Yes, he keeps a change of underwear in his vest. Like the idea? Check out One Bag for tips on traveling with just a carry-on, no matter how far or how long you’re gone.

How safe is the HPV vaccine? A nice visualization of the risks of dying from the vaccine, vs. dying from the cancer it prevents, vs. dying from other causes including “ignition of nightwear.”

Take a look at this skull. Look again.

Take a look at this skull. Look again - it’s a pair of children. Now back to the skull. Now back to the children. Scientists may have found the part of the brain that switches between two interpretations of an image. People who switch faster between two options (in the experiment, a sphere that seems to be rotating one way or another) show differences in their superior parietal lobes. Possibly the switching occurs because our brain re-evaluates what we see, to be sure it doesn’t get stuck on a wrong interpretation.

Want to see some more neat optical illusions? Sure you do. Here are some.

More on gene patents

Five months ago, a federal judge struck down gene patents. The ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation were suing Myriad Genetics over their patents on breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. (See the piece I wrote about this suit and why I don’t like gene patents.)

Why is this news now? Well, mostly because I missed it five months ago. But recent weeks have brought some renewed analysis, including this essay on sharing scientific data and this discussion of what exactly is under scrutiny in a (different) gene patent case. Technically the genes in our bodies aren’t patented, just the isolated version - so that isolating the gene amounts to manufacturing a patented item. According to the NY Times:

[Judge Sweet] said that many critics of gene patents considered the idea that isolating a gene made it patentable “a ‘lawyer’s trick’ that circumvents the prohibition on the direct patenting of the DNA in our bodies but which, in practice, reaches the same result.”

News bits: Bacteria are team players; your brain-controlling helmet is on its way.

1

Great news, everybody! The brain can be stimulated, without implanting electrodes, by a new ultrasound technique. Who is working on this? Military scientists! Why? So they can make brain-controlling helmets. Um, OK!

2

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria send chemical signals to their neighbors that help them fight the antibiotic’s effects. Some are calling it altruism. As a player of a team sport, I know the feeling. If you’re the strongest blocker in the pack, you can’t do everything yourself; you communicate with your teammates, tell them where to go and what to do, because you’re nothing without your team. Heck, you can’t even block if you’re 20 feet out of the pack. Unless you’re the, uh, jammer bacterium. (Clearly more research is needed on microbial roller derby.)

3

5 myths about the female brain: Empathy, multitasking, playing with dolls, sucking at math - Do women have an advantage in those areas? Not that we know of. These excerpts come from a new book called Delusions of Gender. I haven’t read it, but one review says: “Instead of a ‘male brain’ and a ‘female brain,’ Fine gives us a glimpse of plastic, mutable minds that are continuously influenced by cultural assumptions about gender.”

We get really attached to virtual body parts

I wrote a while back about the rubber hand illusion, where clever trickery can make a person feel like a rubber hand in front of them is part of their body.

A recent study shows that having people play a video game where they see arms in front of them - first-person-shooter style - induces the same effect. Subjects sat at a virtual desk playing virtual games. Toward the end of the experiment, an in-game lamp fell toward the player’s virtual arm - and the players’ GSR spiked. GSR is a measure of stress via skin sweat, like what lie detectors use. When the game used a 3D arrow in place of the hand, there was no such effect. (here is the author’s presentation on how the experiment worked. Results are included.)

The traditional rubber-hand setup can help amputees with phantom limb pain as they trick themselves into thinking the pain-free rubber hand is really theirs. I’d love to hear whether this VR approach works therapeutically (amputees weren’t involved in this study).

Whodunnit? Maybe the pollen knows.

[This posting was delayed because of technical difficulties on my website’s back end. We now return to your irregularly scheduled program.]

Sometimes I take a little field trip to the library to catch up on science news from dead-tree magazines. On yesterday’s expedition I found a really nice little magazine called Science Illustrated. It’s full of stunning pictures and the articles are simple and accessible.

The hardest thing in presenting science visuals, I think, is connecting the pictures to the text without any gaps in understanding. The article on pollen had a nice picture of pollen stuck on a bee’s leg, which gives you an idea of the size of a pollen grain and where pollen can be found (stuck to things that have come near flowers, for example). Then you have some context for the isolated shots of pollen grains - really gorgeous hand-colored micrographs showing different shapes and types of pollen.

What they missed, in this example, is explaining what pollen is - that each intricate blob is a carrying case for sperm cells. One of the pictures showed an aperture in the pollen grain, and the text necessarily mentioned a few flower-anatomy words, but without explaining what any of them have to do with each other.

The article itself was fascinating: it was on forensic palynology. Pollen that sticks to a person’s clothes, or that winds up in, say, a jet engine, can serve as a fingerprint for a place and time. A body found in New York was traced to the other side of the country because the pollen species on the dead person’s clothes were characteristic of the Southwest. Pollen found in a wrecked jet engine settled the question of whether plant debris had caused the engine to clog up, or if the debris had been picked up from the field the plane crashed in. In that case, investigators found that the pollen was not the windborne types you’d expect at high altitude, and that the mix of species was the same as in the field.

Pollen can survive on clothes after washing; it’s so durable it can be used to date rocks that are millions of years old. It can be recovered from graves and from bullets. Cases have been solved from pollen on gun grease, inked signatures, and murder victims’ earwax.

It’s not a new technique: a murderer was convicted in 1959 on the strength of pollen evidence from his muddy boots. A pollen case was featured on Hawaii Five-O. It seems palynology hasn’t really taken off because the data is time-consuming to analyze - DNA is far easier if you can get it - and because the same qualities that make pollen forensically useful, like its tendency to stick to everything, make for easy contamination by investigators if it isn’t collected very carefully.

Little bites: cancer antennas, olms, pandas, surgery, and history

Why do Westerners get more breast cancer than the Japanese? Because we sleep on box-spring mattresses that act as TV antennas. That’s what this Swedish study says, anyway.

A long-ranging study of olms shows that they are very long-lived. An olm is a slippery blind salamander, and much is being made of the fact that olms seem to live longer than other salamanders. Great, but I suspect the only reason we think other salamanders are short-lived is we haven’t studied them in as much depth as the olm.

Footprints in the Sands of Science: essay by Neil deGrasse Tyson placing physics discoveries in a Western history timeline.

Stats lesson of the day: ACOG revises their guidelines to OK vaginal birth after multiple cesereans (VBAMC). Well-Rounded Mama surveys the evidence behind VBAMC risks and finds that while the more stringent guidelines are based on uterine rupture rates, these rates are drastically different for women whose labors were spontaneous vs. induced. She writes:

Really, it’s the spontaneous rupture rate that is the MOST important to consider when making a decision about whether to consider VBAMC. Women and their caregivers need to know that the VBAMC rupture rates usually quoted are rates distorted by induction and augmentation and that the true risk is likely much lower with spontaneous labor, as it is with VBA1C. … This is the information not being disclosed in the new ACOG guidelines.

The revision addresses some other aspects of VBAC that mean fewer women will undergo unnecessary surgery.

Fragmented bamboo forests mean that panda populations can’t get to each other to breed. Replanting the forests to reconnect them could help. This study was brought to you by grad students DNA-fingerprinting panda poop.