These complicated questions
This Boston Globe article discusses the decreasing percentage of women among computer science majors, and offers this anecdote:
When Tara Espiritu arrived at Tufts, she was the rare young woman planning to become a computer scientist. Her father is a programmer, and she took Advanced Placement computer science in high school. Because she scored well on the AP exam, she started out at Tufts in an upper-level class, in which she was one of a handful of women. The same men always spoke up, often to raise some technical point that meant nothing to Espiritu. She never raised her hand.
”I have not built my own computer, I don’t know everything about all the different operating systems,” she said. ”These people would just sit in the front of the class and ask these complicated questions. I had no idea what they were talking about.”
She changed majors. In the context of the article, this represents a didactic failure on Tufts’ part.
So, I wonder. If not in an upper-level undergraduate college course, does it ever become acceptable for a school to countenance students asking complicated questions based on independent study, and let their peers take responsibility for their own self-esteem? In grad school, maybe? Not even there?
The mistake Tufts made, imho, is letting her pass out of the early classes just b/c of an AP score. AP scores are often worthless in the grand scheme of things. A couple of year of slogging it through "easy" classes would have given her the opportunity to play and absorb more of the culture of DIY. Freshmen always want to rush ahead and it's rarely a good idea. And a good professor does keep the front-row question-askers in check, especially when they are doing so only to show off--a very real phenomena. I say this as someone who has almost always dominated the question-asking in any class I've taken, to the point of minor notoriety.
The real problem of course, usually starts in junior high, and by the time the students get to college, the pipline narrowing habits are already too set in for any one person to make much of a difference.
Posted by Saheli on February 17 2006 09:52
Speaking as someone who was able to use AP courses to get out of taking Chump 101 classes in the fields of english and history, I will say that the practice of letting freshmen skip the basics is no always unwarranted. I was able to start right in on the upper-division english courses and I felt right at home.
But I would suggest that perhaps there are different standards at work for the humanities than the sciences. With an english class, even if the work is ostensibly harder, I would posit that a smart kid can catch up to pretty much any level of discourse. But with math and science, you have to depend on cumulative learning. You can't just skip the basics if you're not 100% solid, or it'll catch up with you. That said, it really is a shame that more effort was not made to help this girl stay on the track - but that's as much a symptom of large university environments as anything else.
Posted by Tim O'Neil on February 21 2006 00:37