It's a girl thing

I heard it on Radio 4 this morning as I was contemplating getting out of bed. Vicky Tuck, Head of Cheltenham Ladies College was being interviewed about her presidential address to the Annual Girls' Schools Conference. According to her, one reason why single sex education is more beneficial to girls is that their brains are wired differently to those of boys and a change in teaching approach to accommodate this allows them to attain better results, in maths particularly.
As a lifetime, fully paid up member of Maths Phobics Anonymous, my ears pricked up at this. It appears that girls and boys use different parts of their brains to learn, with girls veering more towards the cerebral cortex and boys the hippocampus. One result of this is that girls tend to relate more to the real world and therefore maths teaching needs to take account of this. While boys are quite happy dealing with the core properties of numbers, this tends to deter the girls; they do better if the teaching is rooted in practical aspects.
Now this not new, but it struck a chord with me. Guess what? I'm not an idiot when it comes to maths (and physics and chemistry - the same concept applies). No, I just haven't been taught properly, being thrust as I was into a mixed sex class.
So, Mr Hemmings, Mr Devonald and whoever else had the misfortune to try to teach me maths, it's all your fault. Just think, I could have been a maths genius under different circumstances.

The hippocampus, incidentally, also plays a major role in spatial navigation, but I'm not going into that one!