What is your image of a woman scientist?

@maxdancona,

Im listening to your points . I just dont buy them.

When we lost many cultural programs by actual DEFUNDING, parents and newly elected school boards wanted to know "WTF"? is this new buzzword "STEM" representing (see not all our public schools are STEM ) and STEM schools were mostly vast cultural deserts in which kids learned skills but missed the elements for what civilization has been about. Parochial chools have maintained a cultural and academic superiority, by maintaining a blend of Stem and culture academics. It turns out that many of the parochial schools have become so selective that they are like some well connected prep schools

Weve lately married up the stem programs and the Arts . IT WORKS
Whether you feel that its not a valued part of a Stem program, Ill just stick with our definition and our acronym.
You teach in a community college yes?

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@farmerman,

I have taught Physics in both community college and in high school. I no longer work in education.

Now, I am working in a STEM field Wink

.

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I'm a parochial school kid with mixed experiences, but my generalization would be that the high school that was, um, idiotic, was an aberrance, and even back then (50's) was not representative of what was going on in catholic high schools in LA. In memory, my new york and chicago and LA elementary schools were as a group, spectacular. I say this as a now non religious person - I regard those very well.

I'm posting because I don't remember getting any art lessons in elementary school, except for a few months of kindergarten, at a public school when we were back in LA for a while. Well, I remember art paper maybe once, in elementary school with the nuns, once, twice, three times, but very little. The nuns did teach me how to write the alphabet fairly well. But the parochial schools, particularly one, taught me much more about looking around at the world (were there slides? I don't remember, I think so, it's why I've long wanted to go to Rio, and did go to Rome), also re standing up and talking.

I ended up majoring in science. In early work years (immunology), I took a zillion classes in art after work. I ended up a landscape architect (more school again), which involves both science and design, and yes, art.

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@ossobuco,

Replying to myself, arts matter as much as any other knowledge. For both science and art, and I see no need for a dichotomy, ability to visualize is a key.

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@maxdancona,

Just to clarify my point, I currently work as a software engineer working on a speech recognition product. There are a specific set of hard, testable, skills that I have to have mastered in order to do my job. I need to understand threads and concurrency and linear algebra. When a colleague states that an algorithm is O(nlogn) I had darn well better understand what she means without needing to think about it.

These are STEM skills. Some of of these skills, particularly math, are pretty common to STEM careers. Some of them rely on a very similar set of cognitive processes (understanding concurrency uses the same type of rational, analytical thinking that understanding concepts in Physics requires).

That is why the STEM term is useful to me.

My arts program in school was pretty dreary, but I have participated in the arts. I do choral singing pretty well, and I do salsa dancing not so well (but I sure appreciate the music and the culture). The arts certainly are useful, they exercise creativity and an appreciation for beauty that make life better and probably make me better as an engineer.

But there is no specific art that is required to do engineering. If instead of choral singing I had taken up painting, or photography, or learned the violin I probably would have found my life just as fulfilled and had the same benefit to my career.

The term STEM is a perfect way to describe the set of rational analytical skills that are needed to do engineering (and related) jobs. As important as art is, it doesn't fit in this grouping.

I have a great deal of sympathy to the political point that art should be taught in schools. But that is something different altogether. Students who want to be scientists or engineers absolutely must study calculus. Without calculus they will be unable to master their subject or have any success in their careers. They don't have to learn how to paint.

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@maxdancona,

NOONE said that art was a STEM subject.(I think the acronym of science , tech, engineering, and math re explanatory. THE "ART" portion is a culturlly focused area that has shown the student to actully bemore cukturally aware.
Art does not limit you to "drawing", cultural accomplishments like rchitecture, art appreciation , the hitory that is the work of LEonardo and how he was arguably the foirst to use real engineering drawings.
etc.
Music and music theory, spatial development and manipulation can be important inputs in graphic modelling etc.

The STEM program is the next two counties over, include art and rendering as part of a games development segment for applications sensitivity for the skills.

Many colleges were not amused at how the initial several batches of the purely stem kids were often ignorant of their culture, and no extra curricular programs to fill in the cultural gaps. (Not such a great thing )
Were happy with the way things are beginning to go and Im sure there will be papers .
Just like America has gone, we usually swing in these great arcs of " derived bandwagon truths", be it diet, learning, entertainment etc.

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@farmerman,

from Education SPotlight

Quote:

I propose we shape STEAM programs by exploring opportunities where art naturally fits in the STEM arena. Art can be treated as an applied subject—just like math and science. Here are a few ideas for giving STEM projects some STEAM:
Design. Art can serve a practical function. Students might apply design and decoration to products that were created during the course of a design challenge. They could use computer graphics to create logos or stylized designs to include in communications or presentations. Through industrial design, students could improve the appearance, design, and usability of a product created during a STEM project.
Performing arts, such as drama and speech. What about technical or persuasive writing? Those arts fit naturally into the “Communications” stage of the engineering design process. They would work well as part of a STEM project. (If you want students to get REALLY ambitious and creative, check out this video of students in Paraguay who made instruments out of discarded materials!)
Creative planning. As students brainstorm solutions for an engineering problem, encourage them to adopt a playful, inventive, artistic approach. Calling on their artistic right brain can help them to generate more creative and innovative thinking.
Just one word of caution, though. Art is often touted as a method of adding creativity to STEM—but keep in mind that engineers are rarely lacking for creativity and ingenuity. Just look at the world around you for proof. The purpose of STEAM should not be so much to teach art but to apply art in real situations. Applied knowledge leads to deeper learning.
All of that is to say: I don’t yet have a clear picture of what an ideal STEAM project looks like. In my effort to find some clear examples, I wrote Dr. Howard Gardner to ask him if he had ideas for how to include art in STEM. He responded: “I don’t have strong views about whether arts should become a part of STEM or be self-standing. What is important is that every human being deserves to learn about the arts and humanities, just as each person should be cognizant of the sciences.”
I don’t think anyone could say it better than that. A STEM program is just one part of a child’s education, focusing on math and science. But our children need a well-rounded, quality education that enables them to make informed decisions that will impact the world and the way they live.
We need students who are motivated and competent in bringing forth solutions to tomorrow's problems. When push comes to shove, it’s not STEM vs. STEAM—it’s about making every student a fully-literate 21st-century citizen.

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@farmerman,

No, but the Arts are STEAM subjects, rather than STEM subjects. What you (along with much of the American public) fail to recognize is that the arts are primary in importance, a class of fundamental ways of thinking and expressing ideas, information, transforming, ideating, innovating, etc.
Before the integration of the Arts with computing, Apple computer didn't exist as we know it, nor did its predecessors at Xerox PARC. Nor did the World Wide Web, nor did the fields of Computer Graphics, Computer Aided Design, modern (computer-based) Graphic Design, Web Design, Bioinformatics, etc. Computing was a third-rate sideline for nerds who were thrilled by text strings and programs that went something like this: 10 PRINT "Hello World"; 20 GOTO 10.
Steve Jobs was among the early businessmen to realize that what was lacking was vision... not conceptual but literal vision, applied to technology. Visual programming, visual design, visual communication, etc. And he didn't get it from thin air. I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980's when he made his first trip there to "steal ideas" and the most important one he came away with was not "Science" "Technology" "Engineering" or "Math..." It was the Arts, and how the arts could transform technology, engineering, math, science and computing. He gambled the future of Apple computer on it, and won, leading it to become the leading technology company in the world. You can read accounts of his "fishing trips" to CMU here and elsewhere:
http://www.pittsburghmagazine.com/Pittsburgh-Magazine/November-2015/What-Steve-Jobs-Did-During-his-Three-Visits-to-Pittsburgh/
Take a moment to find out what the Internet (Arpanet) was like before it was merged with the arts, with graphic user interfaces and design. I was there, and the audience then for arcane text-string based computer communication was indeed very small. You could type commands such as "BB APN" or "FINGER SMITH @ BBN" but that is not what created the Web revolution. The Web as we know it, in fact virtually all of modern computing as we know it was an arts revolution. Arts as in the set of skills used to visually and otherwise sensorially represent, transform and analyze information. And don't think for a moment the people who created these transformations were unaware of the impact at the time. The giants of the 1960's-1980's who led these changes largely came from traditional arts backgrounds, people like Chuck Csuri at Ohio State, Charles Eastman at Carnegie Mellon, Don Greenburg at Cornell, etc etc etc. They set out to rectify what was obvious to them... that computing, science, technology, math, etc. were largely useless without visual and otherwise sensorial expression.

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@Banana Breath,

sounds like youre agreeing with me

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@Banana Breath,

It annoys me when people lecture farmerman when they don't know him at all,.
He knows art at great length.
You are lecturing the wrong person. It is possible he can be wrong, but I never not listen to him.

I suppose some of the disposal re farmerman is that he has mangled fingers, thus messup posts.

By now, I find those posts dear. Dear sounds corny, I'm not corny, but all his posts take effort.

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@ossobuco,

Also, I'm the one who mentioned vision.

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@farmerman,

Farmerman,

Are you arguing that art is an important part of education? If that is all you are arguing then we are in agreement.

It sounds like you agree with me that STEM and art are in fact different.

In younger grades, I would be willing to mix art and math or science. In the older grades I think this is inappropriate (and sometimes leads to some horrible misconceptions about what science is). If my Electricity and Magnetism class had anything to do with water colors, I would have run away screaming.

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@Banana Breath,

Quote:

Take a moment to find out what the Internet (Arpanet) was like before it was merged with the arts, with graphic user interfaces and design. I was there, and the audience then for arcane text-string based computer communication was indeed very small. You could type commands such as "BB APN" or "FINGER SMITH @ BBN" but that is not what created the Web revolution. The Web as we know it, in fact virtually all of modern computing as we know it was an arts revolution.

You have this wrong Banana. I know, because I was there. I was working for a military tech company, on Darpanet when the first browser came (NCSA Mosaic).

Right away you had a split. The engineers who liked algorithms and analysis became what is now called "server-side" engineers. The artsy people came in to do interfaces. There are very few people who enjoy both.

The world is still spit between people who do algorithms and architecture and people who do visual design and user interface.

What I do has very little to do with what any user sees on the screen. We have user interface designers who tell us the functionality they need for the users, and we figure out the algorithms to provide what they need for their artsy design.

An awful lot of my work is still done on the command line.

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@maxdancona,

The opposite, while art is important since early age, the contact with it, the introduction to creative expression and all that, is in fact at later ages you develop the minimum of brain maturity and complexity to take art seriously and fully appreciate it. That is if you are forming people for a civilized society and not a North Korean robot army....

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@Fil Albuquerque,

You can take art seriously and fully appreciate it without having art education forced on you. In fact, I fell in love with music and dance on my own.

I feel about art education the way I feel about military music.

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@maxdancona,

We have a saying in our industry...

"Asking a software engineer to design a user interface is like asking a strip miner to design a landscape."

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@maxdancona,

The world has already voted. Those who chose to interact with the Internet via regular expressions, programming, and command lines did indeed line up to be counted. All three of them have since died. The other billions of users chose graphic user interfaces and the WWW as we know it.

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@Banana Breath,

Really Banana Breath, you don't think there is anyone programming on the internet any more?

Factually, most software engineers today use a combination of tools, which include command line tools and GUI. I use Eclipse (a graphical IDE), but I also use tools like maven and some audio conversion tools from a Linux command line. I don't know why you include "regular expressions" in your list. They are very much in use (both from the command line and from graphical IDE's). A software engineer will not be able to do the job without a mastery of regular expressions.

But this discussion was really about the people developing software. If you go to a tech job site, you will see jobs for "backend engineer", "UI/Front end egineer" and "web designers".

These jobs are specialized, many "backend engineers" will never design or write a UI to be used by an actual user... and you wouldn't want them to. Their expertise is in algorithm development, or architecture, or something else that users don't want to know anything about. We don't are about art, or UI. We care about .things like correctness, scalability and performance

We leave UI design to the UI people.

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@maxdancona,

I'm sorry for you.

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@ossobuco,

Why Osso? Many people have never written a logarithmic compression routine. Do you feel sorry for them?

What's wrong with letting each person find joy in what they are good at? If we all had the same interests and skills, not only would we be less productive working together, the world would be a much more boring place.

People are different. We all have different things that interest us, and different sets of abilities. I think this is a good thing.

1 Reply

What is your image of a woman scientist?

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