Fascinating, Captain
Things wot I learned from yesterday's poll:
1) Fans do, as I suspected, hate the telephone; the telephone (which I suspected) and irc (which I didn't suspect) were the only two forms of communication that had more people who DISLIKED them than liked them. I was curious about the telephone, because I hate it and have found lots of sympathetic telephone haters in fandom, and I wondered if we were a breed. (Esp. to the extent to which we're women; aren't women "supposed" to love the phone?) Irc--well, I like irc, but I've heard a lot of horror stories about overlarge chats, and nobody can have any meaningful communication in an overlarge chat. So my guess is that the irc hate has to do first and foremost with people being asked into unreadable, fast scrolling chats and coming out hating the whole medium. If it's something else, I'd be curious as to what you hate.
2) We ARE an atypically sciency and mathy group, even given that some of you are really good at EITHER science OR math (which ok, fine, my blind spot, though my inner Rodney McKay is snorting, what is this SCIENCE that doesn't have any MATH in it. Oh, fine, then!) Point is, the number of you who then commented to tell me that, ha, my poll was off because you were terrific in science and hated math, or were amazing in math but hated science: hello, you're mathy and sciency. Similarly, you hilarious people who told me you were merely AVERAGE in your advanced fractal geometry classes at Cal Tech--honey, please. The only thing this confirmed for me was that many of you have no idea what "average" students are even like, but that just makes me love you more.
I was also struck by the sense--and granted, this might have been louder to me than other strands in the comments because of my own biases, but--the sense that a lot of you loved science and/or math but crashed and burned at a certain point, often when the classes went bad. (Disclosure: this was my experience. I won scholarships to college for math and chemistry, got on a theoretical math track, and graduated an English major. \o/ No, I'm not bitter.) (OK, yes, I'm a little bitter, actually--I mean, this humanities gig has worked out for me, but sometimes I feel like I let down the team.) Anyway, I myself always felt that the teaching of math and science got--not just bad in some vague way, but specifically bad in gendered terms. Part of that, for me, was that the words fell out of math, partly because there were so many international students and teachers, and partly because--and this is my failing, I know--because at some point in math you speak MATH. And I wanted to talk in English about math. Anyway, all's well that ends well; being a math professor is brutal, endless intro sections forever, plus most theoretical mathematicians do their best work before they're 30, which means that I would already be so, so over.)
3) We're readers almost to a woman (and even the one or two people who said they weren't readers weren't counting fanfic because it was insufficiently literary! Harumph!) Now in light of the previous two things, I think I would have added a question about science fiction: I'm wondering to what extent we like science fiction because it continues to give us words/stories/explanations/concrete metaphorical examples of otherwise abstract concepts of science/math--like, I always liked physics best when it was--you know, the ball dropped out of a speeding train, the balloonist who crashes, the frictionless monkey. And I've been reading Feynmann lately (because actually, sadly, I turn to science like some people turn to religion when times are hard; it makes big problems seem solvable!) and I've been struck by the extent to which he's intent on connecting theoretical things to practical effects; he's really a storyteller in that way. And obviously, the 20th century is full of these science guys who were also science fiction guys. I guess I just wonder if science and math teaching has been hurt by the separation of "science" from "stories".
1) Fans do, as I suspected, hate the telephone; the telephone (which I suspected) and irc (which I didn't suspect) were the only two forms of communication that had more people who DISLIKED them than liked them. I was curious about the telephone, because I hate it and have found lots of sympathetic telephone haters in fandom, and I wondered if we were a breed. (Esp. to the extent to which we're women; aren't women "supposed" to love the phone?) Irc--well, I like irc, but I've heard a lot of horror stories about overlarge chats, and nobody can have any meaningful communication in an overlarge chat. So my guess is that the irc hate has to do first and foremost with people being asked into unreadable, fast scrolling chats and coming out hating the whole medium. If it's something else, I'd be curious as to what you hate.
2) We ARE an atypically sciency and mathy group, even given that some of you are really good at EITHER science OR math (which ok, fine, my blind spot, though my inner Rodney McKay is snorting, what is this SCIENCE that doesn't have any MATH in it. Oh, fine, then!) Point is, the number of you who then commented to tell me that, ha, my poll was off because you were terrific in science and hated math, or were amazing in math but hated science: hello, you're mathy and sciency. Similarly, you hilarious people who told me you were merely AVERAGE in your advanced fractal geometry classes at Cal Tech--honey, please. The only thing this confirmed for me was that many of you have no idea what "average" students are even like, but that just makes me love you more.
I was also struck by the sense--and granted, this might have been louder to me than other strands in the comments because of my own biases, but--the sense that a lot of you loved science and/or math but crashed and burned at a certain point, often when the classes went bad. (Disclosure: this was my experience. I won scholarships to college for math and chemistry, got on a theoretical math track, and graduated an English major. \o/ No, I'm not bitter.) (OK, yes, I'm a little bitter, actually--I mean, this humanities gig has worked out for me, but sometimes I feel like I let down the team.) Anyway, I myself always felt that the teaching of math and science got--not just bad in some vague way, but specifically bad in gendered terms. Part of that, for me, was that the words fell out of math, partly because there were so many international students and teachers, and partly because--and this is my failing, I know--because at some point in math you speak MATH. And I wanted to talk in English about math. Anyway, all's well that ends well; being a math professor is brutal, endless intro sections forever, plus most theoretical mathematicians do their best work before they're 30, which means that I would already be so, so over.)
3) We're readers almost to a woman (and even the one or two people who said they weren't readers weren't counting fanfic because it was insufficiently literary! Harumph!) Now in light of the previous two things, I think I would have added a question about science fiction: I'm wondering to what extent we like science fiction because it continues to give us words/stories/explanations/concrete metaphorical examples of otherwise abstract concepts of science/math--like, I always liked physics best when it was--you know, the ball dropped out of a speeding train, the balloonist who crashes, the frictionless monkey. And I've been reading Feynmann lately (because actually, sadly, I turn to science like some people turn to religion when times are hard; it makes big problems seem solvable!) and I've been struck by the extent to which he's intent on connecting theoretical things to practical effects; he's really a storyteller in that way. And obviously, the 20th century is full of these science guys who were also science fiction guys. I guess I just wonder if science and math teaching has been hurt by the separation of "science" from "stories".