Re: Female characters

Monique Y. Mudama wrote:

Of course there was that lovely Diff EQ professor who, because he was
an awful teacher and I was having trouble in his class, proceeded to
tell me all about which CS classes I would supposedly have trouble in
because I wasn't good at math and logic (because I didn't do well in
his poorly-taught class). Surprise, surprise, those were the classes
I did best in.

I've never met a good Diff EQ instructor. And this is despite taking
Diff EQ from an instructor I KNOW can teach well in other math classes
(possibly the best professor at my department).

The problem is that good mathematical insight and reasoning abilities
simply don't help when what you are doing is basically memorizing a
few dozen special case solutions and some rather arcane tricks to
transform other problems into them.

Diff EQ would probably be better taught by the Physics department
where at least they have concrete examples to help with your intuition
and to hang the results on.

But that would mean requiring the poor engineers to take even more
physics courses, and the physics requirement was already where the
college of engineering lost most of its flunk-outs...

Maybe other women encountered fun individuals like this and believed
them ...

I suspect it's worse when it's an otherwise good teacher/class. I can
clearly and easily identify the four best mathemeticians in my
highschool class at graduation (partly a side effect of having a math
team, partly from going to a small private school). Same for the best
students in the preceeding and following years.

All male. (And most now with Ph.D.s in math or some other hard science
or tech field.)

But if you'd asked me as a sophmore I'd have been much less less sure,
and there'd have been several girls in my proposed list. But the best
math teacher at our school didn't think girls were any good at
math.... I don't actually remember him doing anything much wrong in
class but I was socially clueless and it wasn't aimed at me and I
STILL caught that he didn't really think the girls were worth his
time.

The best math teacher at my little sister's school was a woman with no
similar opinion, and her best students were a lot closer to 50-50 in
sex ratio. I suspect there is some slight sex linked statistical
difference in aptitude (I'd be quite surprised if there isn't, sex
ties into to many other things), but I doubt if it's even in the same
league as individual variation and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it
turned out that whatever sex based differences there are actually
favor women as often as men if you could somehow factor out
enviroment.

DougL

.

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