Trapped Between 2 Languages. I think it has less to do with the educational system and more with motivation and encouragement at home. These kids don't have supportive parental figures to help in learning. I was lucky. In a way, I was in the same situation when I entered kindergarten. I knew little English--my parents spoke Cantonese to me and the neighborhood where I lived my first years was entirely French--but I didn't end up in an ESL class. It was total submersion for me and somehow, I floated instead of sank. It must have been due to my early fascination with books.
We Are Our Own Glass Ceilings. This post on Blog Sisters just blew me away. I have no doubt there are some nasty go-getter women. Like those grudge-holding secretaries I mentioned a while back. Some women aren't delibrately mean, although they manage to perpetuate assumed goals because of their own upbringing. As for women in high places, at Tech, there's a female prof to male prof ratio of 1:11. Not good. But unlike the woman at that other tech school that the post mentioned, all the women professors I've met or heard about at my school were nice. It may just be my naivity speaking, but science doesn't seem as conducive to fostering "queen bee" behavior as maybe an office environment. So either this woman has worked in a cubicle at one time or is a serious anomaly.
This is not a medieval woodcut. This was actually part of a presentation that my first year physics professor did in a physics seminar before any of the data was published. Even before I decided that I wasn't cut out to be a hardcore, unkempt physics major. Pretty cool stuff, though.
On a tangential note: Is the Universe Really Consistent? A flawed, yet interesting essay. The scientist in me says, "Yes, dammit, it is consistent. Your little tarot card argument can't sway me."
