The marvelous Jennifer Ouellette has a post up announcing an initiative to promote scientific literacy, and possible career aspirations, in young girls. It’s a great idea, and I’m glad to help spread the word:
The Feminist Press, in collaboration with The National Science Foundation, is exploring new ways to get girls and young women interested in science. While there are many library resources featuring biographies of women scientists that are suitable for school reports, these are rarely the books that girls seek out themselves to read for pleasure. What would a book, or series of books, about science that girls really want to read look like? That is the question we want to answer.
You’ll find several requests for specific proposals at our website. One calls for scientific detective stories based on the life, research, and discoveries of real women scientists. Another calls for stories featuring real young women — aspiring gymnasts, ice skaters, actors, dancers – using a knowledge of science to help them become really good at what they do. A third recognizes how popular Manga and graphic novels are with girls, and asks for imaginative new collaborations between Manga writers and artists to create adventures about girls who use real science to accomplish their goals. If any of these three book ideas interest you, please check out our website (http://www.feministpress.org) for more information about deadline and how to submit proposals.
By way of setting up the announcement, Jennifer relates an all too familiar story, describing the factors that thwarted, temporarily, her long-assumed career in the sciences.
The chemistry teacher—rather than admitting that perhaps his teaching approach might need some adjustment, if so many otherwise decent students were doing poorly in his class – simply told us that we clearly weren’t cut out for the hard sciences, and that if we hated chemistry, we would really hate physics. It filled everyone with trepidation about senior year, if not outright dread. Physics phobia set in early for most of us as a result of one teacher too proud to acknowledge his own shortcomings.
Things didn’t improve with the one introductory astronomy course I took my freshman year of college. It’s astronomy! The stars! Galaxies! Supernova explosions and black holes! How is it possible to make that stuff boring? And yet somehow, the professor did. Again, the focus was on dry, uninspired lectures, made even worse by the fact that on the first day of class, he told us that he didn’t give a damn about the course, or whether we learned anything. After all, we were only there to fulfill some stupid requirement, and why should he bother teaching those who would never become science majors?
It will come as no surprise, I trust, that this experience isn’t limited to girls. Nor to the sciences. I spent about two decades certain that I hated the study of history. This is an odd thing to say considering that I read stuff on 19th century North American politics for fun and relaxation these days. In fact, when I get around to writing that post detailing books that ought to be required reading for voter registration, Bernard De Voto’s Year of Decision: 1846 is definitely going to be on it.
But I thought I hated history for two decades, and the reason can be summed up in words: John Pattantyus. Pattantyus was — for lack of a better word — a teacher at Calasanctius, the school in Buffalo where I idled away the years 1968-1973. Among other subjects, he was charged with instructing us his students in World History. His pedagogical technique consisted of three stages:
1) spend each class telling students which words to underline in our World History textbooks
2) assign homework consisting of copying that day’s underlined words out longhand onto lined paper
3) grade according to how closely to verbatim we were able to write out that same text during exams
I’ve mentioned before my gratitude for some of the teachers at Calasanctius, including biology teacher and CRN reader Dave Roycroft, who managed to infuse a potentially deadening curriculum (getting 11-year-olds to comprehend the Krebs cycle is no picnic) with enthusiasm for the topic. I will admit that I probably learned more about biology, botany in particular, hanging out with Dave outside of class, in greenhouses looking at fern prothallia or hiking around in sphagnum bogs on weekends. But that’s no criticism of his classroom technique, which in fact prompted the pubescent me to want to spend valuable weekend time slogging around in swamps with a teacher.
But damn, that line Jennifer relates about “not being cut out for the hard sciences”... that brings up a painful and humiliating memory.
Calasanctius had an independent study program, not unlike a thesis, required for graduation. This was, for some inexplicable reason, called a “Seminar.” Students could work in any of a huge range of topics: music, English, history, whatever. A student would prepare a work and then defend it before a jury of teachers. The research and writing counted for about the same amount of your grade as your verbal defense or, I suppose, performance.
I never had a moment’s hesitation in deciding on my general topic area. I was doing biology. During my practice run, which was called a “preseminar,” I designed an experiment to test the effect of the hormone estradiol on response speed in the trigger hairs of Venus fly-trap leaves. My ADD got in the way: Nothing triggers the yawn reflex in an 11-year-old like spending Saturday afternoons in the library at the local state university poring over Biological Abstracts. (You see, children, in those dark days before Google Scholar, doing a literature search involved looking through hundreds of shelf-feet of bound tissue paper covered in 6-point type, looking for one keyword after another. Ye who do homework, count your blessings and praise Sergei Brin.) During my preseminar defense, my advisor Raymond David, the school’s chemistry teacher, faulted me (and rightly so) for methodological flaws in my planned experiment, insufficient review of the previous literature, and my pronouncing it “estriadol.” He suggested I find another topic.
And I did. I found a description of an interesting experiment in which rats were dosed with strychnine, then given varying amounts of amobarbitol, and survival recorded. The experimenters thus calculated the amount of amobarbitol it took to neutralize the strychnine. Here it was all laid out, methodology and rationale and procedure, and no one seemed to have done the same thing with phenobarbitol. So that’s what I’d do: copy their experiment but use a different barbiturate.
I don’t even remember all of what Ray David said about my presentation, as I stood there in front of the impassive jury of teachers. He did fault me for using the word “titration” to describe the procedure, unfairly in my view as the paper I was lifting the idea from had it right there in the title. I imagine lack of attention to detail played a role, as did the usual effects of procrastination and hurried deadline work. But I do remember what David said at the end of his critique, the closing sutures in the new asshole he’d ripped me:
Mr. Clarke, it is obvious that you do not possess the discipline necessary to perform a Seminar in a scientific field. My suggestion to you is that you choose a topic in the humanities.
The thing about being 12 is that you don’t generally have the experience necessary to be able to determine when an adult is being a massive dickhead. Instead, you tend to internalize the criticisms the dickhead makes. In retrospect, I have no trouble granting the truth of the criticism of my study habits. Still, those habits had somehow earned me As and Bs in his chemistry class. It was in the humanities where the effects of my desultory habits truly shone: failing grades for years in Russian, in Japanese, and — oddly enough — in History, where I never had the slightest learned discussion to distract me from the joyous task of using up the ink in my highliter.
Correction: I never graduated. I am unbachelored and unbowed.
“Some people shouldn’t be teachers.”
Aye, there’s the rub. No dark sarcasm in the classroom, indeed. How many kids have had a possible fascination with a subject (never mind career) nipped in the bud by a few offhand comments?
Luckily, I was always a stubborn little bastard, so didn’t believe my Grade 10 teacher when he said I wasn’t cut out for physics. And I still hate chemistry.
“The thing about being 12 is that you don’t generally have the experience necessary to be able to determine when an adult is being a massive dickhead. Instead, you tend to internalize the criticisms the dickhead makes.”
huh. my recollection of childhood is that i was picking out dickheads and ignoring them by about age 8. maybe 6. saved me a lot of grief, looks like.
“i was picking out dickheads and ignoring them by about age 8”
A curmudgeon in the making (that’s a compliment in my book)! If you ignore my comment, I’ll try not to take it to heart.
curmudgeon? you bet. i wanted those kids off my lawn when i was their age. perhaps the word we’re groping for is “misanthrope.” or “survivor.”
Mr. Clarke, it is obvious that you do not possess the discipline necessary to perform a Seminar in a scientific field. My suggestion to you is that you choose a topic in the humanities.
I had a professor write the virtual equivalent of this on one of my papers my first year in grad school, only with the appropriate field areas substituted, and referring to my scholarly abilities in general, not just the paper in specific. (And it was NOT that bad of a paper!)
I went on to get my doctorate in that field, but I STILL feel considerable resentment towards her for being so petty and mean at a point in my academic career when I was feeling particularly vulnerable. There was no need for her to turn a dislike of my topic into a personal attack, none whatsoever.
(Of course, I’ve since left that field entirely, but that’s an entirely new story.)
Heavens save us from petty and defensive teachers!