JISHOU, HUNAN — Dr. Isis at Scienceblogs.com has published a few more letters from women scientists, as part of her “Letters to Our Daughters Project.”

The daughters are not necessarily the scientists’ biological daughters, by the way. Isis wants young female scientists-in-training to stay the course, get their degrees and begin science careers. As a former high school science teacher, I’m blogging about these letters because they contain sound advice for teenaged science students, too. Girls can be scientists, without giving up romance, motherhood, or … shopping.

The third letter in the series is by Wendee Holtcamp, a free-lance science journalist who blogs at Animal Planet and has written for Scientific American and other big time publications. She reminisces about the doubts of others around her whether she could or should pursue a doctoral degree.

It seems that the higher I climb up the totem pole of success, the more resistance I encounter. Whatever happened to those feel-good messages from kindergarten: You can be anything you want to be! Girls can do anything boys can! Go make your dreams come true!

What I’m discovering as I journey toward my doctorate is that while women may cheer our abundant opportunities in the 21st century, equal opportunity does not always mean equal treatment. The little voices of doubt rattle around at the back of my mind.

Dr. Janet Stemwedel (aka Dr. Free-Ride), who also blogs at Scienceblogs.com, holds two doctoral degrees in chemistry and philosophy. She is an associate professor of philosophy at San Jose State University. Not surprisingly, her letter is more, well, philosophical.

May 29th, 2009 | Tags: Dr. Isis, female, letters to our daughters, math, Science, scienceblogs, scientists, women | Category: Astronomy, China, Commentary, Science, Teaching | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — One of my favorite Internet hangouts is ScienceBlogs.com, which has a veritable pantheon of engaging and intelligent bloggers commenting on everything from creationist malarkey and real science to … shoes. One of the goddesses there is Dr. Isis (her mortal form is depicted below), who recently started a project to encourage more young women to enter the sciences.

Dr. Isis and I share the same concern. I spent more than two decades teaching physics to sometimes reluctant teenagers, and because our school basically required everyone to take physics to graduate, I managed to teach nearly everyone who passed through those hallowed halls.

Roughly half my students were girls. I don’t have any hard statistics, but I think about as many women as men among my students entered medical, scientific or technical fields. The numbers for both genders are comparatively small, given the arts-and-humanities bent of the school, but it’s the parity of the numbers that I am proud of.

For a student to love math and science is hard enough in the United States — such students are labeled nerds, geeks, and weirdos, because math and science are supposed to be (a) really hard and (b) really boring. To love something simultaneously hard and boring makes you a bit of a social outcast. [Cross-cultural aside: This kind of ostracism does not happen in China, or in Asia as a whole. Here, math and science students are virtually worshiped, which might help explain why Asian students kick American students' asses on international math and science exams.]

May 8th, 2009 | Tags: Dr. Isis, female, letters to our daughters, math, Science, scienceblogs, scientists, women | Category: Commentary, Random rants, Science, Skepticism, Teaching | Comments (4)

The family that blew the whistle on a California cheerleading coach’s nude modeling denied on TV yesterday they were trying to seek revenge.

The coach, Carlie Beck aka Carlie Christine, was a Playboy.com “cyber-girl of the week” in early February. As cheerleading coach of Casa Roble Fundamental High School outside Sacramento, Beck cut several girls from the squad for excessive unexcused absences, per school policy.

One of the cuts, Adelle Geniella, 14, and her parents found Beck’s cyber-girl photos on the Web and submitted them to school officials. Beck then lost her coaching job.

Adella and her parents deny that they were trying to get back at Beck. Instead, they insist Beck was a poor role model — cheerleaders cannot post nude photos on the Web, for example — and should have been fired. They failed to note that high school cheerleaders are underage, and Beck is not, of course.

Whatever.

Here’s the link to the report.

April 21st, 2009 | Tags: Beck, Carlie Christine, Casa Roble, cheerleader, coach, geniella, model, nude, Playboy.com | Category: Commentary, General stuff, Schools, Teaching | Leave a comment

A few posts back, I wrote about the efforts by anti-evolution members of the Texas State Board of Education to emasculate the state’s science standards. It was big news, because Texas periodically buys its textbooks en masse, giving it a disproportionate influence on the content of the nation’s school textbooks.

To put it another way, if the Texas SBOE had mandated that Texas children learn about Intelligent Design in Biology or the steady-state-universe theory in Earth Science, the SBOE would then prefer to buy textbooks that cover such topics. So, textbook publishers would scramble to add this content to their existing texts to remain competitive.

If the changes were limited to Texas, it would be bad for Texas schoolchildren. But textbook publishers cannot offer 50 or more different textbooks versions, one for each state and territory of the USA. It would be neither feasible nor economic. So they target their textbooks’ content to the three biggest buyers, Texas, California and Florida.

Tamim Ansary, who used to work in the textbook field, wrote an expose of sorts about the textbook mill for Edutopia in 2004. It’s been reprinted on the Edutopia website, and well worth the read, especially if you have school-age children.

Here’s a taste:

April 18th, 2009 | Tags: publishing, SBOE, Schools, Tamim Ansary, texas, textbooks | Category: Commentary, Schools, Teaching | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — A high school cheerleading coach has lost her job after students and parents found her nude photos on the Playboy.com website.

Carlie Christine Beck (or Becker — news sources can’t seem to get her name straight), 20, (left) appeared on Playboy.com back in February, about the same time she was hired to coach the cheerleading squad at Casa Roble Fundamental High School (a public school) in Orangevale, California.

Bad timing, I’d say. Apparently, Beck did the Playboy.com shoot before taking the coaching job, and she says she was upfront about her modeling career.

Nothing much came of her nude modeling until she cut some girls from the squad for having unexcused absences. The offended girls and their parents then presented the bare facts (sorry, I couldn’t resist) to the high school principal.

She then lost her coaching job. The whistle-blowers (or tattle tales) deny they were taking revenge for the cuts, of course. “This is something that I would have brought to the attention of the principal whether she was on the team or not, as a parent,” Heather Geniella, a cheerleader’s mother, told News10 in Sacramento.

Uh-huh.

Every cloud has a silver lining, though. The publicity surrounding her dismissal has given her a lot more exposure (no pun intended this time), ensuring a successful modeling career — and 15 minutes of fame — for Beck.

April 16th, 2009 | Tags: Beck, Becker, Carlie Christine, Casa Roble, coaching, nude, Playboy.com, tericka dye | Category: Civil liberties, Commentary, Media, Schools, Teaching | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Texas is a big state, with about 6 million schoolchildren. When the Texas State Board of Education speaks, textbook publishers listen. After all, if the publishers can sell their texts to Texas, it’s a big deal. It means money.

So, when the Texas BOE met in March to discuss controversial changes to the state’s proposed science standards, science educators all over the USA were worried. Would the BOE, chaired by an unapologetic creationist, introduce language into the standards to allow the teaching of creationism and and its clone, Intelligent Design, in the Texas schools?

To do so would be seriously damage science education in the Texas public schools. It would also likely influence textbook publishers’ treatment of evolution in biology texts, thereby affecting schools all over the USA.

The Texas BOE is nearly evenly composed of creationists and more sensible members, so the results were by no means predictable. In the end, the original changes, as proposed by the openly anti-evolution chairman and board members, were rejected. Instead, the BOE passed more coyly worded standards that still could be used to introduce pseudo-science and religion into Texas classrooms, but did not exactly trample science teaching.

Whether the new standards will induce textbook publishers to edit their books to make them more palatable to Texas remains to be seen.

A lot of bloggers have capably covered the Texas fracas already, so I will not go into the details here. Rather, I’d rather provide some background as an interested observer.

April 7th, 2009 | Tags: boe, creationism, don mcleroy, evolution, intelligent design, Schools, standards, texas | Category: Commentary, Schools, Science, Teaching, evolution | Leave a comment