Stereotypes, A Swarm, and Soccer

Today was Tuesday, which meant that it was late-night soccer day. Instead of playing on a grass field like last week, today we played on the turf field just off of the athletic complex. Before I even thought about soccer, however, I was learning about how math anxiety and cultural stereotypes can affect teaching and performance on tests.

In class, we went over a study that showed that Asian-American women performed more highly on math tests if encouraged to identify with their “Asianness” as opposed to their femininity. Especially in the United States, there are strong stereotypes about how gender and race affect performance in math, some of them being that Asians are good at math and females are bad at math. The study showed that when people thought about these stereotypes during their testing, they tended to perform to the expectations of the stereotype. This phenomenon is intriguing to me; I always thought that negative stereotypes would bring people down, but I never thought that positive stereotypes could have the opposite effect. However, I don’t think that championing these stereotypes around is a good idea because while they might boost one group, they might also leave other groups feeling incompetent in comparison.

We also learned about the concept of math anxiety and how it can affect teaching. Math anxiety is pretty much what it sounds like; someone with math anxiety professes to feeling sensations of discomfort, dread, and (of course) anxiety when faced with math problems. These sensations typically disrupt their performance on math-based tests or quizzes. There was a study that we read as a class that showed how teachers who experience math anxiety can actually harm the mathematical abilities of their students, and how parents with math anxiety hurt their children’s math skills when they try to help with homework. I can think of several people I know with math anxiety, and it seems like a very unfortunate trait to have. However, I think that this could be (and is) used as an excuse for not doing well in math, so I think that an intervention targeted at these people would be useful.

After class, I went to the library (again) to try and do my work. Recently, my floor of the dorm has been really loud, so I try to study in other places as much as possible. On my way from the library to the dining hall, I noticed how interesting the clouds were, so I had to take a picture of their reflection off the windows of the Regenstein.

Another one of the library. *sigh*.

At the dining hall, I was unpleasantly reminded of the amount of people who eat here these days. A bunch of new programs have recently arrived, and so they eat in the same space as the Summer Sessions students. These new kids range in age from what looks like late elementary school to high school. There are so many of them that it’s become kind of annoying. I can’t get food without someone running into me or spilling something on me or both. The dish return is also a mess. I’ve seen someone drop something every single time I’ve been there for the past two days.

Despite the excessive amount of people, dinner was fine, and afterwards it was finally time for late-night soccer. We got to play on turf this time, and there were lights, so it went on for around half an hour longer than last time. I scored the opening goal and my team won, although towards the end it was getting kind of ridiculous, so I stopped paying attention to the score. We’re technically not supposed to even keep score in the first place, but I’m a naturally competitive person, so it’s something I feel like I have to do. Playing on turf was a lot more fun and also easier than playing on grass, because I don’t actually have cleats with me, and also because there were lights so we could see past around 830 PM.

Scenes from the game.

I came straight back to the dorm after soccer, because I have a pretty heavy load today and I wanted to get a good start on it. The coursework here takes so much longer than the homework that I’m used to, so I’ve had to adjust my planning. It’s a good thing that I get a taste of what even just 1 college course feels like, though, because it won’t be such a shock when I finally get there. This is the kind of thing that I signed up for ILC for in the first place.