“Little girls may learn to fear math from the women who are their earliest teachers. Despite gains in recent years, women still trail men in some areas of math achievement, and the question of why has provoked controversy. Now, a study of first- and second-graders suggests what may be part of the answer: Female elementary-school teachers who are concerned about their own math skills could be passing that along to the little girls they teach. … Ninety percent of U.S. elementary-school teachers are women, as were all of those in this study. Student math ability was not related to teacher math anxiety at the start of the school year, the researchers report in today’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But by the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female students (but not the boys) were to agree that ‘boys are good at math and girls are good at reading.’” (01/26/10)