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steuard: (lake)
Sunday, April 6th, 2014 10:36 pm
I meant to share this earlier (and I don't think I already have), but I've been swamped. I'm still swamped, but I want to close some browser tabs. So here's my fifteen five three and a half minutes of fame in the Alma College student newspaper: Physics professor Jensen receives special recognition for effort inside, outside of classroom; students concur.

This was an award from one of our campus sororities, and I was truly touched when the student who nominated me repeated her nominating speech to the assembled group. She had good things to say about my physics teaching and my dedication to helping her and other students learn the subject and be successful, which was great. But the thing that she really appreciated most was the attention that I have given to women's issues in the classroom: I don't do a whole lot (and for the most part I don't even devote class time to it), but she said that I'm the only male teacher she's ever had (here or at her previous college before she transferred) who ever commented on those topics at all (without it being his actual academic specialty, anyway).

It's a shame that "this guy pays the slightest bit of attention" is enough to merit an award, but if doing my little bit is appreciated that much then I'm awfully glad to keep it up.

On a side note, I have no idea why there's a black and white photo accompanying this online article while the printed newspaper had a color one.
steuard: (lake)
Saturday, May 25th, 2013 11:48 pm
I've recently read two science fiction stories that proved to be more closely related than I expected, given that they were recommended by entirely different sources in (as far as I recall) entirely different contexts. Some of that may just be a matter of who I am right now and what I've been thinking about lately (apart from physics teaching and research), but I thought I'd share them. Both are worth reading, though the second has had a firmer grip on the back of my mind in the time since I read it. I may say more about my thoughts on these later, but I'd rather give anyone who's interested the chance to read them first, so for now I'll just give the titles and links:

The Women Men Don't See, by James Tiptree, Jr. Much of the point of this story lies in the choice of narrator. And yes, trust me, it's sci-fi, though it's fair to say that the overt sci-fi isn't itself the point of the story.

Bloodchild, by Octavia E. Butler. This is one that sticks with you, which may be why it won a Hugo and a Nebula. [Edit note: This deserves a trigger warning for pregnancy complications. My apologies to anyone who was caught off guard.]

Edit: Since I've commented on awards for "Bloodchild", it may be worth mentioning that well-known anthology editor Gardner Dozois said of the 1974 Hugos that, "The award in novelette should have gone to a story that wasn't even on the ballot, Tiptree's 'The Women Men Don't See'."
steuard: (lake)
Sunday, April 21st, 2013 10:22 pm
Quite a while ago, I mentioned the "#WowGood2Know" facts that I'd started including with the homework assignments in my intro physics classes; folks seem to like them. Well, this semester I mostly ran out of my existing list of those, and I decided to do something a little different: I shared a slightly longer discussion inspired by a (linked) blog post. That went over pretty well: according to my anonymous midterm course feedback survey, most people were at least a little interested and read what I'd written (even if they didn't usually follow the links), so I kept it up sporadically throughout the semester as I found more relevant links to share. I've now collected all of those discussions onto a web page: "Important Stuff Nobody Thought to Tell You (probably).

If you have a look at that list, you'll find that I wound up focusing on a specific theme: broadly on our social attitudes toward women, and more specifically on sexual violence. I might go further and say that the topic was fundamentally "rape culture", except that I made a point of not using that bit of jargon anywhere (though of course some of the articles I linked to do). I think that every single week that I included one of these discussions on the homework, I had at least one student stop by either after class or at some other time to thank me for drawing attention to these issues and for sharing such thought provoking reading. (A few became downright enthusiastic about what I was doing.) That made me feel awfully glad that I was doing it... and kinda cruddy that the bar was so low.

Not surprisingly (but disappointingly), every single person who gave me that sort of feedback was a woman.
steuard: (lake)
Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 11:23 am
I just received the American Physical Society's monthly newsletter, APS News. In the "Letters" section, they published a letter entitled "Nothing Wrong with Fewer Women Physicists" by someone names Jeffery Winkler from Hanford, CA. Winkler was evidently "shocked" by a February article about how encouraging women to pursue careers in physics is a priority for the APS.

I won't try to formally rebut his arguments, but it's like shooting fish in a barrel: this guy thinks he's boldly standing up for some moral principle, but his entire letter is a classic example of sexism and ignorance. He insists that targeting any particular male/female ratio is equally wrong, whether 50/50 or 100/0. He then says, and I'm not making this up, that nurses, elementary teachers, and secretaries are 90% women and "Nobody thinks that's a problem." So clearly, he says, it's just as unreasonable to push for greater equality among physicists.

I have no idea how this tripe got published in the newsletter; maybe they were low on content this month. (I've already written to ask.) Not that I'd object to having a serious discussion about how and why we should encourage women to study physics! But this clearly isn't an example of that. Instead, it's an example of how much sexism is still present in the physics community and of how that sexism gets reinforced. And that's deeply frustrating.