Duration: 3 minutes 26 seconds

[music]

Lily Serna

What I love about STEM and in particular mathematics, is that it's our best tool to being able to understand the world around us, and it helps us get out of our own biases, our own thinking, and helps us understand the world in an objective, logical, precise way.

Mathematics is a universal language because it's simple. It's the same for every single person on this earth today as it was 20 years ago, as it will be 2000 years in the future.

This is a good question because we all know that confidence, particularly for girls, about mathematics, is a big problem and it's a complex issue and obviously has a lot of complexities in being able to solve for this. But I believe that there is a really simple and very effective thing that we can do as teachers, as parents, as a society, not just the girls, but for all students.

And that is to be able to shield kids, especially when they're young from any preconceived notions about what mathematics is. Often people say, I'm not a maths person, I don't like mathematics. If we pass on that judgment, that assessment to children, then they take it on board and they internalize that. So if we sealed it for them, just as my family did for me, and provide a sanctuary for them to explore it on their own, and maybe they will like it, and maybe they weren't.

But the idea is to not impose those preconceived notions on them and let them explore it on their own.

I think mathematics and scientific literacy is so important, especially in today's day and age, because it trains the mind to think in a critical and objective way. So often students and young people say to me, which I'm sure that they would say to you as well, When will I ever use this again? When will I ever use Pythagoras Theorem again?

In fact, someone forwarded me this Twitter account and this lady periodically posts It's been X number of days and I haven't used Pythagoras theorem, which is hilarious. But it's also a bit sad because it misses the point about mathematics, which is it's training the mind to be able to problem solve. And this is why it's critical that we teach kids STEM so particular scientific literacy and mathematical literacy.

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