Robert McIntosh wrote:
>
> John, You raise so many interesting points. One that interested me was
> when you said,
> Also, a majority of the teachers I
> had were female. Should we demand more male teachers? And how
> would we get more males into teaching? Apparantly this is not a top
> priority in this technophile society.
>
> One suggestion I have is to pay teachers more. This is clearly the main
> reason that men go into other fields besides teaching. If teachers were
> paid like technocrats, we'd have no problem attracting men into the
> profession.
>
> As far as women programmers, I taught programming for many years and
> always had a difficult time attracting women to my classes. I
> attributed this, at least in part, to the fact that women are socialized
> to value relationship over all else. Programming is generally an
> isolated activity. Just you and this box. It's a complex issue and an
> important equity concern. Technological illiteracy is having
> increasingly dire consequences as we proceed through the information
> age.
>
> Bob
> McIntosR@nwrel.org
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: John Meyer [SMTP:john_meyer@geocities.com]
> > Sent: Wednesday, May 06, 1998 12:46 PM
> > To: edequity@tristram.edc.org
> > Subject: Educational brainstorming
> >
> > I've been watching this debate for some time now, and I even wrote a
> > research paper about it, and I have a few thoughts as to the equity or
> >
> > inequity of boys and girls.
> >
> > First off, I noticed that a lot of the push was towards
> > getting girls
> > into technology, which is fine by me. Having a girl in technology,
> > having
> > everybody in technology, takes off a little bit of the stress in
> > working
> > with technologically illeterate people.
> > But I don't see many feminists shouting about getting boys
> > into more of
> > the humanities, which are suffering in terms of being cut out of
> > funding
> > and such. With boys having a disproportionate percentage in the
> > illiteracy
> > group, and with the dire need of humanities in school, you would think
> > that
> > we would be pushing humanities as well. Also, a majority of the
> > teachers I
> > had were female. Should we demand more male teachers? And how would
> > we
> > get more males into teaching? Apparantly this is not a top priority
> > in
> > this technophile society.
> > Also, it will take a special kind of person to succeed in
> > technology,
> > and I am not talking about male or female. Let's take programming,
> > although that is only a small part of the whole technological puzzle.
> >
> > When you program for 50 hours a week, looking at a monitor with your
> > eyes
> > focused like a laser, trying to find a single bug in your program that
> >
> > keeps it from working, you find out a true test of endurance. If
> > feminists want more female programmers, that's fine; just remember
> > that
> > putting a person in programming and having them survive for long are
> > two
> > different ideals.
> > My own belief is that in order for education to thrive, we
> > need a return
> > to the "Renaissance Man/Woman". We need men and women who are
> > interested
> > in a varity of topics, not just "specializing". And with the turnover
> > and
> > layoff rates in the economy, a lot of people are going to have to
> > broaden
> > their horizons as well. So, what do you think?
> >
> > john_meyer@geocities.com