Although I didn't know it at the time, the question of women and our education has been of particular interest to me as far back as my grade nine math class. I was in an all girls' class in a large co-educational urban high school. The potential for that all girls class was indeed great (1). Yet the experience of it has burned its intentions into my consciousness in ways that only recently became clear to me.

His favourite student was a young woman named Lydia. Lydia personified feminine acquiescence.

Mr. Brown (a pseudonym) was a teacher recently out of a university teacher education program. Misogyny was not a word I knew at the time. Nor was I able to fully understand the practices intended to marginalize us, his female students, from the intellectual environment of our school. Not able to set us off against male students more deserving of his attention in matters mathematical, Mr. Brown engaged in a practice of teaching us appropriate femininity. His particularly favourite student was a young woman named Lydia (again a pseudonym). Lydia personified feminine acquiescence.

At the time I could not make sense of Mr. Brown's favouritism. Lydia never spoke above a whisper. She always sat near the back of the room, a position which emphasized her quiet voice and self-effacing manner. There hung about her an aura of vulnerability which nevertheless seemed to vaporize in our all girls' physical education class where we were joined by a female teacher. Mr. Brown kept a watchful eye on Lydia and never missed responding to her raised hand.

She offered a measured pace of whispered wrong answers - wrong answers which were always rewarded by Mr. Brown's bemused and positively reinforcing attentiveness. I, in contrast, always sat in the front row. I let it be known that I loved math. I never had difficulty projecting my voice and never thought I had to contain it. Mr. Brown seldom acknowledged my hand; I don't recall him ever encouraging my questions or classroom responses to mathematical problems. I often left the class feeling angry.

In retrospect, it seems to me that even as a thirteen-year-old I knew at that subconscious level that made me feel uneasy and often angry, that Mr. Brown was teaching mathematics secondarily to what we were meant to learn in his class: that good girls speak softly, good girls master the fine art of making themselves visibly invisible, and above all good girls never ask or answer questions that suggest they take their education seriously.

It is only now that I understand how my unwillingness to participate in particular forms of feminine behaviour was seen by Mr. Brown as insubordination. My refusal to embody his debilitating version of femininity was read by him as a personal thwarting of his power to define me as a woman - and find me wanting. As young women in his class, not only were we asked to adjust to patterns of behaviour which in our culture are judged to be deficient (and which are not required of men) but to provide the evidence of our own deficiency.

The result was that I knew my intellectual ability was not judged by how well I performed as a student but by how well I performed as a woman. And it was clear to all of us (even - or perhaps especially - to Lydia) that what Mr. Brown considered appropriate femininity was a learned and demonstrated feebleness both intellectual and physical.

Four years later I entered the University of Waterloo as an honours math student. Despite my apparent success, it is significant that this is the story I carry with me about my educational experience. The stories of other women connect with my own, beyond the surface, creating the compounded resonations of a shared knowledge spoken often for the first time. As part of the requirement for many of the courses I teach, both in the Sociology Department and the Faculty of Education, I ask my students to reconstruct their educational experiences in the form of weekly reflective journals. It is through our stories we can explore how young women experience education not as a transformative and liberating process but as a way of reinforcing their subordination and lack of possibility within a patriarchic system of privilege (2).



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