Is it just me or are the comments flaking out again?  Been trying to post one and nothing happens.

Also wondering if there's something else going on with the Salon blogs since my home page won't update properly.  A category shows as updated but not the home page?

Huh?

11:07:56 AM    comment []

Jill’s recent post regarding gaming and narrative struck a chord for me.  She was reflecting on an article by Brenda Laurel wherein Laurel maintains that girls require narrative to sustain interest in games.

It’s bigger than that.  Way, way bigger.  HUGE.

Most females need narrative to engage and fully participate – whether it’s gaming or sports or science and math.  This is what Lawrence Summers doesn’t understand about women or even about his own daughters.

Summers, you’ll recall, made some truly ignorant comments about the dearth of women in science and math.  It was women’s inherent inability, he speculated.  He used the example of his own daughters in the course of his remarks, noting that given a truck to play with, his daughters treated it like a doll.

Exactly!  It’s not just his daughter’s innate need to learn and develop nurturing skills that are vital to the survival of the human species, but her need for context and narrative.

What the hell is a truck, by itself?  It’s a tool, an object, a thing.  It has no narrative, no construct into which it can be inserted.  Or at least that’s how a girl might look at a truck (this particular girl definitely would view a truck that way).  But a truck that can interact, has a relationship with the owner?  It has a narrative – and that’s fun.  Hence Summers’ daughter treating the proffered truck like a baby.

We lose girls’ interest in grade school because science and math are presented in a vacuum, a silo, presented in such a way that there is no narrative.  Girls quickly decide that this isn’t for them; solving for X in the absence of a compelling human reason to do so is simply not fun.  Were math and science presented differently across the course of the grade school curriculum so that a narrative was presented or creation of a narrative was encouraged and rewarded, we might see more girls involved in math and science.

Go ahead, pshaw all you want.  Here’s another example for you: chick flicks.

What is it that makes a chick flick?  It’s narrative.  A chick flick might even have action and adventure in it – the best date movies are those that have both narrative and action/adventure.  But it’s the narrative that engages most women.

Think about it if you’re a guy; the very thing that makes your eyes roll back in your head out of sheer annoyance and boredom during a chick flick is the thing that works for women.  It’s not that you don’t get it; it’s not that you don’t appreciate a good story.  It’s just that it doesn’t move you persistently, consistently.  You’d rather watch head-to-head competition or a big shoot-‘em-up with lots of pyrotechnics.

What if young girls felt the same way about math and science?  What if, in spite of the fact that they get it, might even be able to do it with ease, remain unmoved by math and science?  What if for the duration of their school years these subjects were presented in such a way that they were completely unengaged?

If you’re a man, imagine being forced to dedicate a couple hours a day for your entire school career to something as unmoving as a chick flick.   What would that do to you, year after year?  Do you think you’d choose creating chick flicks as a career path – even if you had the talent to do so?

(And what if the entire system actively worked against encouraging you, throughout your education?  What if it still actively discouraged you if you chose this career path anyhow?)

Still don’t buy this premise, that the method by which math and science are taught encourages girls and women to flee from these fields?

Read this speech (PDF file).  It was presented to the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space in July 2002.  The speaker uses the example of girls being interested not in building an earthquake-proof building, but instead in building an earthquake-proof room.

For which would it be easier to build a personal narrative: a room in which one can imagine becoming intimately involved with individual humans, or a building?

10:15:05 AM    comment []