Emily, no, I didn't mean to imply that you thought math was hard,
although that is a myth (remember Barbie "Math is hard"?) about women.
So I wanted to make the point that math isn't any harder for women than
men, other than the social prescriptions that lead to Barbie-isms.
What does rather shock me is that the response of some on the list is to
defend math, and a mathematical view of coding, just when they have been
told that doesn't always work for everyone. I will use Bess's talk at
c4l13 as an example:
paraphrasing Bess: I was going to call my talk "being an evangelist for
your open source project." A friend who is Jewish told me he isn't
comfortable with "evangelist" because it is a Christian-themed term. So,
I changed the name of my talk.
Another approach she could have taken was to explain to her friend that
1) his feeling is wrong and 2) evangelist is not only just fine as a
term, and is even the best term for what she means.
I agree with what you say here: "you can get a lot of good coding done
with a natural aptitude for logic and pattern, not necessarily math or
computer science." But someone will undoubtedly feel threatened by that
and will explain that to be a GOOD coder or a REAL coder, you've got to
know math. In other words, there's an us and them, and US is better than
them.
I despair of ever getting through to some folks.
kc
On 2/22/13 10:08 AM, Emily Morton-Owens wrote:
I can't tell whether you're agreeing with me, or disagreeing with me, or
just riffing off of what I said, but I hope you didn't take what I said to
imply that women think math is hard, or are bad at math, or that I
presently think I'm terrible at math! Actually, through learning
programming, I got into formal computer science, and discovered a form of
math (discrete math/algorithms) that I aced! Which would have shocked a
younger me.
But I never would've gotten there by a path that related coding to "math"
in the way I pictured it at the high school/college level. Math -> coding
isn't a leap I would've taken. Languages -> coding -> algorithms worked for
me. Maybe for someone else the path would be to relate coding to something
else they like, such as business analysis, or gaming, or some other
connection that's equally relevant and more personally motivating. A good
mentor could find that connection for a student.
If we're talking at cross purposes here, it's probably because of the
difference between programming and computer science. As others have said,
you can get a lot of good coding done with a natural aptitude for logic and
pattern, not necessarily math or computer science.
On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 7:30 AM, Karen Coyle <li...@kcoyle.net> wrote:
On 2/21/13 7:48 PM, Emily Morton-Owens wrote:
This was just the right thing to say, because he was connecting it to
something that I consider myself talented at (languages), rather than
something I don't (math).
I want to clear up the "math is hard" and "programming is math" myths.
First, the ratio of women to men in graduate math programs is approaching
50/50, although women are still struggling to be hired and gain tenure in
math departments. So "math is hard" for many of us, but it's not
necessarily a gender thing. (I'm looking for the cite for this -- I've done
too much random reading recently and didn't mark this. May be book below.)
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
