Girls and Boys and Math

A couple of weird things happened in my math class this morning. 

1: Several people from the class were sitting around before the professor arrived. One kid, who must be fresh out of high school, declared sagely, "You know, if she's 15 minutes late we can all leave." It struck me as so juvenile and ridiculous. First of all, the teacher wasn't late; we were all early. Second, I've heard that little nugget of wisdom several times since I was in junior high, and it's been a favorite thing to say among would-be rebels since long before my time. Third, and most importantly, THIS IS COLLEGE. It's not like there's a truant officer. If you don't feel like going to class, don't go to class. No one is going to force you. In fact, you have to pay to be here. That's kind of like going to a concert and saying, "If the band isn't on time we can all leave, you know." Yeah. We know.

2: My math teacher divides our class into small work groups, which she changes periodically. So she teaches us some new thing, we do a few practice examples and check with our groups, then she explains the correct answers and how to get them. We got new groups today, and I found myself sitting with 1 male and 4 other females. The male is about 18 and, based on class participation, I don't think he's particularly good at math. I don't think he's particularly bad, either, but whenever there's a Hermione or a Stephen Hawking in a class you tend to know who they are, and I've seen him make mistakes before like the rest of us peasants. So we were in our new groups, and we'd been given this problem: 

"A rocket is stopped 20 feet from a satellite when it begins accelerating away from the satellite at a constant rate of 14 feet per second squared. The distance between the rocket and the satellite is given by the polynomial 7t² + 20. Find the distance between the rocket and the satellite 8 seconds after the rocket started moving."

Now, I wasn't exactly sure how to solve this problem, but I was fairly certain that we needed to put that 8 with the 14 feet per second squared (as in 14(8)², maybe), so I told the group I'd gotten that far and asked for help. The boy completely disagreed with me. He thought that the 8 seconds was extra information meant to throw us off and that we should ignore that part of the word problem. I said that the question is to determine how far the rocket gets in 8 seconds, so it's relevant, but he was so cock-sure and everyone agreed with him. I think it's because he's a boy and we all think boys are better at math than girls. By that I mean I think he was confident despite making as many mistakes as anyone else in the class because of this cultural training, and I think he was unwilling to listen to reason because of this cultural training, and I think everyone went along with him (at least partly) because of this cultural training. I wish I could remember exactly what he was saying about how to work the problem without the 8, but it didn't make sense to me so I just agreed to disagree until the teacher gave us the answer. I was on the right track; you solve it with 7(8)² + 20, and the answer is 468 feet. This doesn't mean that he's stupid and I'm smart, it's just very interesting that everyone was willing to listen to him when he wasn't making sense and clearly didn't know what he was talking about. I believed my whole life that I'm not good at math but I'm actually doing pretty well in this class. We've all been had.