Role Models
thusspakezuska | November 17, 2006The second line of that quote, you know is "Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King".
At the Frontiers in Education conference held in San Diego at the end of October, there was an interesting work-in-progress titled "Evaluation of Canadian High School Girls' Perception of CSET Using A Play" by Anne-Marie Laroche and Jeanne d'Arc Gaudet. (CSET = computer science, science, engineering, technology) The authors developed a new play that
present[ed] different professions which are linked to CSET in a humorous manner, using everyday language and representations of several historically…
thusspakezuska | November 17, 2006This is a first - a post that gets classified under both "moron management" AND "role models".
If you are a female professor who has ever had to deal with rowdy, disrespectful boys in your classroom, I urge you to read Susanna Ashton's column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. This must surely rank as one of the most clever examples of moron management I have ever heard of. Ashton had a class of 22, 17 of whom were men, and 11 of those were all from one fraternity - the wittily euphemized Kappa Wokka Wakka. The KWW's were rowdy and disruptive, albeit in a fraternal, mutually…
thusspakezuska | November 17, 2006Congratulations to Donna C. Boyd, professor of forensic anthropology at Radford University! She is one of four professors (and the only woman) to be honored as Professor of the Year for 2006 by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Professor Boyd was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education announcement of the award as follows:
"When you have unrecognizable human remains, our job is to try to identify it. Media depictions of forensic anthropology, like CSI and Bones, are a double-edged sword. They have brought in…
thusspakezuska | November 8, 2006Since I brought up the X-Gals, I've been thinking of another model of group support in academe, the Mujeres Universitiarias Asociadas at Central Florida. They were featured in an article in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education special issue on diversity.
The Mujeres (pronounced moo-HAIR-ays) typically gather over lunch each month. They share tips on such issues as which campus administrator to approach with a problem and which to avoid. They have coached one another on compiling tenure portfolios and offered pointers on applying for the university's $5,000 teaching award. They have…
thusspakezuska | November 7, 2006Back on October 6, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a column titled The X-Gals Alliance and I missed the chance to blog about it at that time. The second in the ongoing series of columns from these fabulous women is now out, Balance It Out.
From the original column:
"We" are the X-Gals, a group of nine female biologists who began meeting weekly over a few beers in 2000, as several of us wrote up our dissertations. (Our name is a double-pun on the X-Men superheroes and on X-Gal, a laboratory chemical sometimes used in biology.)
Back then, we read one another's dissertation…
thusspakezuska | September 27, 2006I originally wrote this as a comment to my interview over on Page 3.14 and then decided it ought to be its own entry. I thank BSCI for raising this issue, and admire BSCI's prescience, for lauding my role models and mentors is, indeed, the subject of a forthcoming post.
BSCI, regarding the role model thing: role models can do many, many different things for a person. One of the things they can do is model for the person a particular way of being a particular kind of person in a particular field of endeavor. Men have many, many, many models to choose from of how to be men in science.…