i graduated with a double major in math and english and when i went back to get a teaching certificate i had a choice between a math specialization or an english/languange arts/reading specialization. in the end i went with math because i know myself well enough to know that i am too lazy to spend my life marking student writing samples. still, i can help any student check spelling or grammar and at the academic contest we go to in the spring i always judge oral reading because i’m really good at it.
i also know at least a couple of jokes that involve calculus–
what is the indefinite integral of the reciprocal of a cabin?
And I got told I couldn’t do a double in English and Computer Science because comp sci was for math people. This was the same year Brenda Laurel got the first PhD in Computers and the Humanities.
CP Snow’s Two Cultures book and just plain history show us the language/math divide is a recent thing. Before the Industrial Revolution, a well-educated person was well-versed in the arts and the sciences.
My suspicion is that there are actually quite a lot of people who would be good all-rounders – except our education system constantly drums into us that if you like literature you must be bad at math, and if you enjoy doing math and have a facility with it, you must be bad at literary criticism.
ETA: correction – if you are good at math, you must disdain and hold contempt for literary criticism is a more accurate way of putting it.
i am a poet and artist with a mathematical education and i can still do epsilon-delta proofs of limits of functions.
for 15 years i was a math teacher who loves words and art. now i’m a science teacher who loves words and art.
i do what i can to foster well-rounded students regardless of gender, ethnicity, or race. sadly the girls i push to do the honors level science and math courses find themselves squashed by the junior high teachers who “know” that math and science are masculine fields. also whites-only fields but that’s a different thread.
I quibble with that. It seems to me that one reason we haven’t gotten as far as we should in terms of human and civil rights is because we’ve allowed “divide and conquer”, instead of remembering Aesop’s fable about the bundle of sticks:
AN OLD man on the point of death summoned his sons around him to give them some parting advice. He ordered his servants to bring in a faggot of sticks, and said to his eldest son: “Break it.” The son strained and strained, but with all his efforts was unable to break the Bundle. The other sons also tried, but none of them was successful. “Untie the faggots,” said the father, “and each of you take a stick.” When they had done so, he called out to them: “Now, break,” and each stick was easily broken. “You see my meaning,” said their father.
Seconded. To a large degree more often than one might hope; there is a very popular ideal of masculinity that isn’t even chivalry, but straight-up selfish cruelty.
Do you know how Orcs first came into being? They were Elves once, taken by the dark power and enlightened. They got their testosterone back, bulked up, and started acting like alphas instead of chicken-necked cucks. And sure, not everyone appreciates their strength and love of human flesh now, but when the world falls into peril won’t they be sorry. Orcs have studied the blade; Orcs can actually win battles.
Just for some closure, it seems a lot of people did see through it, and it didn’t last long.
But then the Humanities get shafted a second time because “girls can do STEM too”, while laudable for many reasons, also reinforces “stuff for boys is cool, stuff for girls sucks”. It’s like second wave feminism all over again. I haven’t seen any “why are you knitting instead of soldering” commentaries as such, beyond those which wonder why “makers” is only making things traditionally thought of as made by guys, but it’s implicit.
For the current set of adults there’s a bit of insulation, what with biologists and mathematicians using hyperbolic crochet to describe coral reef models, and math and comp sci talents like Norah Gaughan and Shirley Paden turning to knit design successfully and creating amazing work. But I don’t know if the younger generation who are children and teens now are getting exposed to that.
Having read Cheaper by the Dozen and learned about the history of public education I know about Taylor. My personal nickname for him is “Father of Repetitive Strain Injuries”. That’s unfair of me because he did do work to prevent them, but the whole “cog” and “efficiency” concepts he unleashed created an epidemic of them.
I believe he also contributed to entrenching a gendered work force; at a time where disruptive technologies should have been creating opportunities, his work encouraged stereotyping.
Interesting. One thing to consider is that science & engineering have become so complex now that it takes a lot of education to master, especially interdisciplinary ones such as biophysics or ecological engineering. My college schedule was completely full; yet I could only fit one humanities or social science course per semester. Same for my SO. But we both fill our free time with non-technical stuff: jewelry making, writing, crochet, illustration, and so on.
That’s a really good point – not all human endeavours stem from what’s taught in a classroom.
There’s a novel I read as a teacher (there was a class’s worth of copies in a storeroom – the English department was trying to figure out what to keep, and no-one on staff had read it) called The Gate to Women’s Country. As a novel it’s hard to recommend – I wish the writing was better, and it argues for eugenics based on behavioural traits – but one of the concepts I found compelling was that in this post-post-apocalypse society, every capable adult member was expected to master one art, one craft, and one science. One of the major characters was a doctor who participated in the annual theatre festival and also did pottery, if I recall correctly. It’s still something I’d like to see more of in formal education.