Quantitative Data
I don't feel like it's really necessary for me to wait to get my midterm grade back to say out loud that I'm doing just fine in this Java class. Like, I even do the extra credit stuff because it's easy enough and why the fuck not, so I'm running somewhere north of a perfect score at the moment.*
It's been a long time since I took a college-level class. I've never taken a college-level class that involved homework and exam questions with easily-identified correct and incorrect answers. Probably Analytic Geometry, which I took as a senior in high school, was the last time I took a class that didn't have at least one major writing assignment. So part of what's been fun about this class is the satisfaction of knowing you're right. The little program I wrote that checks every five-digit number to find the one where, if you quadruple the number and reverse its digits, ends up being the same number? It returned the number, and I multiplied that number and reversed the digits and yes, yes, that's right. I have to turn it in and get a grade and all that, but it's right. I'm right. I think that the people who've told me that I'll find programming fun are talking about this feeling. It's a powerful feeling and I'm so so tempted to extrapolate all kinds of stuff out from it. Like, consider the unhelpfully-reductive arguments the tech community makes about things like gender. If you start thinking of over-generalized explanations as more like booleans and conditional statement** ("If: Silicon Valley is a meritocracy (and it totally is, duh). Then: anyone who cannot succeed in Silicon Valley is lacking merit.") it's not so much of a shock. People who spend their entire working lives thinking this way end up, you know, thinking this way, even in contexts where it's really really not appropriate.
What I'm saying, I guess, is that I think the people arguing that everybody should learn how to program the same way that everybody should take math classes have a really good point. But it bums me out that in the rush to make sure everyone has a good grounding in STEM, it's being left unsaid that everybody should also learn how to read critically and write persuasively, and that a lot of people are terrible at that stuff, including some people who do it professionally. I'd like to think it's because that's a given, but I kind of doubt it.
Further to the gender thing, I'm wondering anew when exactly I decided to never take another math class again.*** I suppose if I'd gone to a different college, I'd have taken calculus, but not only did I opt out of the AP classes in high school, I went to a college that had no math requirement whatsoever. My one science class there was an honors seminar on the history of science where we read a lot of Stephen Jay Gould and, yep, wrote a bunch of essays. I was always good at what publishing taught me to think of as the 'hard side' disciplines, but never for a second considered pursuing a career in that field, despite having two parents with 'hard side' careers. That I ended up with a career in software organizations is, in a lot of ways, basically an accident. I don't recall the decision being anything other than a personal preference for lit and history over math and science, but it's also one of the very few areas in my life where I did the thing that, stereotypically, girls do disproportionately relative to boys, and that's always worth some scrutiny.
Now watch me just straight up forget to submit the homework that's due on Monday, which I totally finished like a week ago. If I do, I will beg my TA's forgiveness and blame my forgetfulness on something to do with menstruation.
* I'm still not so totally secure that I won't acknowledge I might be jinxing myself here. Knock wood and all that.
** Seriously, WHAT HAVE I BECOME?
*** Though when I had a client project based on a formal logic textbook, I did 'content QA' at night and on weekends for fun.
It's been a long time since I took a college-level class. I've never taken a college-level class that involved homework and exam questions with easily-identified correct and incorrect answers. Probably Analytic Geometry, which I took as a senior in high school, was the last time I took a class that didn't have at least one major writing assignment. So part of what's been fun about this class is the satisfaction of knowing you're right. The little program I wrote that checks every five-digit number to find the one where, if you quadruple the number and reverse its digits, ends up being the same number? It returned the number, and I multiplied that number and reversed the digits and yes, yes, that's right. I have to turn it in and get a grade and all that, but it's right. I'm right. I think that the people who've told me that I'll find programming fun are talking about this feeling. It's a powerful feeling and I'm so so tempted to extrapolate all kinds of stuff out from it. Like, consider the unhelpfully-reductive arguments the tech community makes about things like gender. If you start thinking of over-generalized explanations as more like booleans and conditional statement** ("If: Silicon Valley is a meritocracy (and it totally is, duh). Then: anyone who cannot succeed in Silicon Valley is lacking merit.") it's not so much of a shock. People who spend their entire working lives thinking this way end up, you know, thinking this way, even in contexts where it's really really not appropriate.
What I'm saying, I guess, is that I think the people arguing that everybody should learn how to program the same way that everybody should take math classes have a really good point. But it bums me out that in the rush to make sure everyone has a good grounding in STEM, it's being left unsaid that everybody should also learn how to read critically and write persuasively, and that a lot of people are terrible at that stuff, including some people who do it professionally. I'd like to think it's because that's a given, but I kind of doubt it.
Further to the gender thing, I'm wondering anew when exactly I decided to never take another math class again.*** I suppose if I'd gone to a different college, I'd have taken calculus, but not only did I opt out of the AP classes in high school, I went to a college that had no math requirement whatsoever. My one science class there was an honors seminar on the history of science where we read a lot of Stephen Jay Gould and, yep, wrote a bunch of essays. I was always good at what publishing taught me to think of as the 'hard side' disciplines, but never for a second considered pursuing a career in that field, despite having two parents with 'hard side' careers. That I ended up with a career in software organizations is, in a lot of ways, basically an accident. I don't recall the decision being anything other than a personal preference for lit and history over math and science, but it's also one of the very few areas in my life where I did the thing that, stereotypically, girls do disproportionately relative to boys, and that's always worth some scrutiny.
Now watch me just straight up forget to submit the homework that's due on Monday, which I totally finished like a week ago. If I do, I will beg my TA's forgiveness and blame my forgetfulness on something to do with menstruation.
* I'm still not so totally secure that I won't acknowledge I might be jinxing myself here. Knock wood and all that.
** Seriously, WHAT HAVE I BECOME?
*** Though when I had a client project based on a formal logic textbook, I did 'content QA' at night and on weekends for fun.