Quick hit with some links

[feuervogel]

Some NYT wanker "dares" discuss science and gender. Dr. Isis explains why this topic bores her to tears (and pokes giant holes in Tierney's "argument" in the process.) Via Zuska, who also links to Boing Boing with more links on the subject.

A dad writes about his four-year-old son playing GTA. It's kind of cute, actually.

People are asking the wrong questions in talking about the societal effects of the porn industry.

Heading back to the US tomorrow, should be home around 10 pm. I think DFS is picking us up; that's the plan as I heard it, anyway. Time to start organizing my suitcase and trying to shove everything inside.

Comments

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

It's more likely a result of the rigid gender norms in US society that say girls don't belong in science, and those damn "math is hard" Barbies that are a product of this norm.

And the representational bias - when a guy is bad at math, it's either because he is bad at math or because he hasn't studied hard enough. When a girl isn't doing well at math, there's often a "reassuring" response that it's not her fault, or she's doing OK, for a girl... Relevant XKCD comic (http://xkcd.com/385/).

For guys, math trouble is framed as a personal failing to overcome, and for girls, it's just a force of nature. No wonder more girls are socialized to give up.

Of course, it doesn't help that math, for example, is unnecessarily terrifying for a lot of people, including teachers of math. I'll never forget my college course for Intro to Logic, where the prof opened up by saying she was terrible at formal logic as a student and hated the topic. Way to set the tone, there.

[feuervogel]

OMG. I'm so glad I never took any classes from her. I thought about taking ethics, but I'd heard she had a biased grading system.

[smarriveurr.livejournal.com]

It was pretty atrocious, and fairly clear that she didn't come by the material cleanly, from the somewhat torturous way she taught it. I imagine if you'd had all the exact same stumbling blocks she did learning it, it might've been helpful, but for someone who figured out De Morgan's law in third grade, it was unnecessarily obfuscatory and unrelated to any reasonable applications. The whole time it was very clear that she was teaching something she personally had to learn by rote and didn't quite understand in fullness. I don't remember much about her grading, though, I was too caught up on her teaching.