Letters to the Editor

Evaluating Evaluations

Recently, I had the experience of receiving some scathing evaluations from a group of students in a cultural linguistics course I taught. Since I have always had good to great evaluations (and great evals. from the university evaluators), I took time to ponder the comments. There was an unusual amount of venting on the part of the students. This appeared to be the result of having had to take a course most didn’t want to take but needed for student teaching, and/or to improve a grade average.

The course was too hard some said, and the text was followed too closely. (Hmmm…) A number of students in an Early Childhood Education Master’s Degree Program which was discontinued mid stream were placed in my linguistics class–a class for which none had any of the prerequisite experience to understand the subject matter.

I worked at making the class ex-perience leveled for all the various students…but obviously failed for
those who struggled with the content and terminology. I created study outlines, brought in videos, etc…. I think I could have stood on my head, spit wooden nickels and nobody would have cared.

Here’s my point: evaluations from students, I find, have little to do with the quality of the course instruction provided. I have no solution to offer as a better format or system, but I think it would behoove us to delve into the evaluation system and improve it–making it one that is meaningful and helpful…and in some way able to counteract the hidden agendas of disgruntled students.

– J.V. Latin, Teacher Education Program, National University, San Jose, CA

Gender Choice and the Sciences

Professor Patricia Selinger, in a recent opinion piece in this journal, bemoans the continuing low proportion of women in the (physical) sciences. She notes that the number of women earning bachelor’s degrees in such “highly marketable” fields such as computer science peaked in the 1980s and has fallen since. She notes that “while women today make up 30 percent of doctors and lawyers and 50 percent of the overall workforce, they represent fewer than 10 percent of engineers.”

Professor Selinger views this situation with dismay, and attributes it to the way our culture treats boys and girls. She holds that what we don’t have but do need to create in homes and schools is a culture that tells girls that it is cool to be an engineer or programmer.

It seems to me that a problem with her perspective is that over the last quarter of a century, our culture has gone to great lengths to encourage the participation of women in the sciences and engineering in particular, and collegiate life in general. This has been backed up [by] advertising campaigns and grants, as well as affirmative action. In fact, women now constitute a disproportionately large percentage of the undergraduate population–almost 55 percent, with some experts predicting that this figure could well hit 60 percent by the end of the decade. So there already has been a concerted effort to create the culture Professor Selinger desires, and women are just not choosing to study in the disciplines she hopes they would.

I want to offer another perspective, one that I feel more accurately fits the current reality. From this perspective, research has increasingly proven what parental observation has suggested all along, viz., that there are significant cognitive and emotional differences between men and women, that these differences are not so much cultural as biological, and that these differences are in great measure what result in the statistical disparities in gender choices of profession. In particular, that women choose to become engineers in fewer numbers than men is not deplorable, so long as their choices are free, that society has enough engineers, and that the occupations chosen by women who forego engineering are worthwhile.

I think we need to develop a culture that says it is cool for a girl to be a programmer, but one in which she doesn’t feel pressured to make choices in accordance with anyone else’s agenda. And we need to develop a culture that remembers that boys need to be encouraged to develop whatever their talents are, as well.

– Gary Jason, San Clemente, CA