We must be willing to pay inspiring math and science teachers who have high paying alternatives in industry more to teach and reward students who take more challenging courses in high school.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic Chinese Japanese Korean or Russian combined.

Today over half of China's undergraduate degrees are in math science technology and engineering yet only 16 percent of America's undergraduates pursue these schools.

I was sent to a finishing school which didn't last long when mother found out how badly chaperoned we were. Then I 'came out' before going to a domestic science school.

People challenge my nerd cred all the time. I just show them the photo of me winning my middle-school science fair wearing my Casio calculator watch and eyeglasses so big they look like they can see the future.

I was on the football team because I wanted to experience the different iconic social classes of high school. So football for me was an attempt to socially integrate in an interesting way. And then I didn't like it anymore and stopped doing it and focused more on drama and science and other forms of art and music.

American high school students trail teenagers from 14 European and Asian countries in reading math and science. We're even trailing France.

It was generally believed that Catholics were not interested in arts and science graduate schools. They weren't going to be intellectuals. And so I put the theses to the test. And they all collapsed.

I do not think we are ever going to be able to for a long time get the kind of quality of school personnel that we need in our schools especially in the areas of science and math. One of the answers to that problem is to use more educational technology.

Usually girls weren't encouraged to go to college and major in math and science. My high school calculus teacher Ms. Paz Jensen made math appealing and motivated me to continue studying it in college.