Word: pygmalion
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...with the onset of puberty, when girls become more interested in boys than in building skills like math. Since the rise of feminism, however, female underachievement in math has been generally chalked up to sexism: the low expectations of parents and teachers are said to produce a 'reverse Pygmalion effect." According to Educator Elizabeth Fennema and Psychologist Julia Sherman, in an article on the subject, "Sexual stereotyping of mathematics as a male domain operates through a myriad of subtle influences from peer to parent and within the girl herself...
...woman, as in the legend of Pygmalion. The most entertaining example is the life-size doll Olympia, a luscious soprano in Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. At the end of every verse in her main aria, however, she droops and swoons until revived by several noisy turns of a crank in her back...
...told in the first person by young men who loosely share some common characteristics. An ex-college wrestler is given brief command of his squad during his own basic training and learns that trying to be fair is a kind of condescension. A sophisticated Eastern writing teacher plays Pygmalion to a gifted but corn-fed coed in Iowa. A stoic, weanling New York lawyer is gently and blessedly maneuvered into an affair with a middle-aged woman. An incipient Washington administrator's friendship with a young Soviet reveals the bureaucratic fate that awaits them both...
...theater does not survive on its masterpieces but between them. Much the same is true of Shaw. His finest works, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House and Pygmalion, are rarely performed. Conversely, scarcely a season passes when the overestimated Saint Joan and Candida do not show up on some theater's docket. One could hardly underestimate The Devil's Disciple. Shaw himself thought that this 1897 play would eventually be considered a "threadbare popular melodrama...
...career, he was a music critic signing himself Corno di Bassetto, which means basset horn. The cadences of his speeches are like arias, and Donnelly delivers them that way with an ingratiating Dublin inflection. Indeed, most of Shaw's greater plays could be transposed into operas, just as Pygmalion was made into My Fair Lady...