How I can tell the younger son is my child… January 28, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in younger son, math.Tags: math, younger son, negative numbers, minus
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The younger son is learning how to manipulate negative numbers in math. However, he was getting very irritated when listening to the ‘lectures’ yesterday. The lecture would use the term ‘minus’, as in -6 is pronounced ‘minus six’. Every time it did that, the younger boy would make some exasperated grunt and say, loudly, “Negative!”
I can only think this may be because I always call them ‘negative’. The term minus, to me, implies an operation. If so, he obviously picks up on subtleties a lot better than I thought.
Am I missing something here? January 27, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, engineering, science, teaching.Tags: grades, homework, teaching
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Like everyone else, I came across the article on why college students leave engineering.
I was reading it with my jaw hanging open. Specifically this:
The typical engineering major today spends 18.5 hours per week studying. The typical social sciences major, by contrast, spends about 14.6 hours.
My first thought was: Where the heck can you go to school and study for 18.5 hrs/wk and still manage to pass enough classes to get an engineering degree?!
My second thought was that it explained something that has been puzzling me. Last semester, my students complained about the amount of homework I assigned for my 1-credit class. There was about 1 homework assignment per week, and I figured this meant they’d be spending an average of 1-2 hours outside of class on assignments.
When I started school, the rule of thumb was that 3 hours per week outside of class PER CREDIT was required for an A, two for a B, one for a C. This meant that if you planned to go to school full time (which was 12 credits per semester) and get an A average, you needed to be spending about 36 hours per week just on homework in addition to your 12 hours of seat time in a classroom.
I also learned that, for some classes, this was a significant underestimate (usually math, engineering and physics classes) while for other classes, it was an overestimate. I remember one senior-level sociology class that I took where I spent, on average, three hours per week on homework and still came out with one of the highest grades in the class. This is why I always felt it was a good idea to have a nice balance between technical and non-technical classes: it would even out the homework load a bit.
My understanding of a typical homework load is obviously a couple decades behind. (Although I am not sure I plan to change my tune any time soon.) However, I did feel good about one point in the article:
STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) have also had less grade inflation than the humanities and social sciences have in the last several decades.
Apparently you can study less in engineering than you used to have to obtain a degree, which I have to admit bothers me a bit. However, it’s still harder than humanities and you’re more likely to actually have to earn those grades. Despite the fact that we’re probably pushing STEM fields more than we really need to, I do hope employers take that into consideration. STEM students have to be more committed to make it through their fields, which are also more technically challenging. I’d think that should be worth something.
Motivation January 26, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in engineerblogs.org.Tags: engineerblogs, engineerblogs.org, motivation
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This week’s theme at Engineer Blogs is motivation. I have my post up where I discuss how I love to figure things out. Please go take a look!
Wordless Wednesday: Microcat forced me to work at home January 25, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in photography.Tags: microcat, pictures
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Stupid mistakes January 24, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in gifted, physics, research, societal commentary.Tags: gifted, mistakes, perfectionism
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I used to be one of those people who beat myself up whenever I found a mistake I’d made.
Okay…who am I kidding? I still do that.
In fact, I just did it. I’ve been sitting here for about 2 days, trying to figure out why something I was programming wasn’t scaling correctly. I was trying to add a little bump to something big…but my bump was a lot bigger than the stuff I was adding it to. When I finally found the problem, it turned out that my scaling factor had been multiplied by the big thing, not the bump.
*facepalm*
First and foremost, this is why I can’t code at 11 p.m. when I’m about ready to pass out. These things happen a lot more often.
However, the bigger issue is that my automatic reaction to these things is that I must be really stupid to make a mistake to begin with. I’m trying to train myself out of that particular thought process. I try to think instead that I’m obviously not stupid or I would have taken what I did and run with it. Instead I did notice there was a problem and I fixed it.
This is particularly important when you’re doing simulation work. I found this out working on my master’s thesis: if you see a problem with your results, dig into it immediately. Look at everything and make sure that no numbers are off. This is where the notion comes from that you should have a good idea what sort of results you expect before you get them. Now, that won’t always happen. And, in fact, getting results that are ‘off’ is sometimes good as it can lead to new areas of research. However, more often than not, it can also be a result of bad input.
I’m not sure where this comes from, although I have some rather perfectionistic tendencies. I also believe some of it comes from the fact that, as a kid, I was often ahead intellectually of where I was placed academically. I was able to get everything right, so I always assumed that being smart meant getting things right all the time. If I got things wrong, I never was told that maybe I just needed to be more careful or slow down or spend more time on something. I’d been told that I got things right because I was smart…leading me to believe that when I got things wrong, I must be stupid.
Now, however, I try to remember that it’s not as important to get it right the first time as it is to be able to find my mistakes and correct them. Therefore, I need to check over my work thoroughly, and when I’m done with that, I should have someone else check it over. (I’ve often found, though, I’m more likely to find my own mistakes than others because I know what I’m looking at.) What would be stupid is to not correct the mistake or to not identify it when it’s glaringly obvious. Still, I find the impulse is there to berate myself for making a mistake to begin with, especially when I’m short on time (which is always).
Why are the women so good? January 21, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in education, engineering, feminism, teaching.Tags: feminism, sexism, sexist comments, students, teaching, women in engineering
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I’d been thinking about writing this post last semester. However, it slipped my mind until some trollish comments showed up on EngineerBlogs today. I think that Chris, Gears and Katie gave the troll a good smackdown, but one comment bothers me:
few women are capable of handling these kind of demanding environment.
I’ve heard this before (pretty much since I started as an undergrad). However, after teaching my class last semester, I have to wonder what the hell these people are talking about.
I had 90 students last semester, 5 of whom were women. All five of those women were easily in the top 25% of the class and were more likely in the top 10% of the class. They were the students who repeatedly handed in assignments on time and seldom (if ever) had to redo any of them. I will say that none of them chose to do the programming – but that is likely because they had turned in all the optional assignments required for an A before the matlab assignments were given.
If anything, what I saw was puzzling to me. The women seemed the most prepared to meet the demands of a college class, were able to communicate well both in written and verbal form (and one of them was a non-native English speaker), and contributed well and frequently to the class. It was almost strange how they were on top of things when the majority of their male classmates were struggling.
I’ve heard it argued that the women most likely to be in engineering are generally those who are in the top of their classes. Women who may be good at math but not outright brilliant will be swayed to go into other careers. From what I could see, this was true.
If you listen to trolls on the internet, you get the impression that women are incompetent engineers, however. The women in my class were some of the most competent and motivated students, but I admit that they were more passive than the male students, which I still think leads the male students (and probably later on, male professors) to believe that the female students don’t know anything. But it’s interesting to hear this comments after witnessing the exact opposite of what everybody “knows to be true”. I can only think that people who make these comments are really overestimating their own abilities or wrongly judging what it takes to be a good engineer. Maybe both.
And so it begins… January 20, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in career, engineering, research, work.Tags: layoffs, work, workplace
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Yesterday afternoon, two emails came through at work letting us know that about 1/4 of the people working at our center would be dismissed. This morning, the front page of the local paper had the story.
Our center has primarily been funded under earmarks along with some other projects coming through industry collaborations. When congress cut all earmarks, we lost the most significant portion of our funding. (I find this frustrating as cutting earmarks doesn’t actually reduce the budget…it just means that no portions of the existing budgets can be allocated to specific projects by congress. So our center losing most of its funding changed nothing in terms of the US budget.)
Today was surreal. Someone came up to tell me they were one of the ones let go. Another person announced it at the end of the meeting. I had no inkling before they said anything that they were on the list. I didn’t take it well.
Right before Christmas, two people I know let me know they’d been laid off (both EEs in technology industries). I’ve heard of companies pulling such tactics as they approach the end of their fiscal year. I will say that despite the fact we knew things were going to be happening, I was hugely relieved that, in the case of our center, they at least waited until after the holidays so that people could enjoy the time with their families.
And the people that have been let go are not necessarily going because they weren’t smart or hard working. That is both the hardest part and the best part. I know that these people aren’t to blame for their predicament – it was simply a matter of whether their expertise is necessary on some of the projects we have coming in. I’m confident these people can move on and still be successful.
On the other hand, it sort of flies in the face of the “work hard and you’ll always have a job” mentality that so many people put out there. That’s simply not true…and that’s why this is really hard. I’m also feeling a twinge of survivor guilt. I still have my job, as does my husband. It seems unfair that I just happened to luck out to have some of the skills that will be required moving forward.
Most of the people will still be around for a month, but it’s going to be hard to work as though nothing happened. And after they’re gone, the place is going to be uncomfortably empty.
Engineer Blogs post January 19, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in engineerblogs.org.Tags: engineerblogs, engineerblogs.org, office space
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If you haven’t been over to EngineerBlogs, my post this week is about office space and productivity…or lack of it.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
When you think of a scientist… January 26, 2012
Posted by mareserinitatis in science, societal commentary, younger son.Tags: science, women in science, younger son
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On the way to school yesterday, the younger boy started telling me that Dr. Frankenstein wasn’t a real scientist. I asked him what he thought of when he heard the word scientist. He was very quiet, and I started feeling anxious that this was going to end up in a “dude in a lab coat with beaker”.
I interjected, “You think of your mom, right?”
“No,” he paused for a few moments more. ”I think of someone who is already dead.”
Oh great. So to be a scientist, you can only be recognized post-mortem, right? I wondered if it was someone crazy like Tesla.
“Already dead?”
“Yeah, she discovered radium, I think.”
I was kind of stunned. He wasn’t thinking of guys in lab coats – he was thinking of Marie Curie. Upon conversing further, it turned out that he knew quite a bit about her. There was a Magic School Bus book on science fairs at his classroom, and he had read about her in there.
I had to admit that I was hugely relieved that not only did he suffer from a common misconception about what a scientist is but that his first thought of a scientist was actually a very accomplished female scientist.
Although I’m still a tiny bit sad he didn’t think of me.