Reading an article about the lack of girls studying physics in year 12 and university, got me thinking about what made me like physics (since I am a girl).
Initially biology was my favourite science, like many girls I wanted to be a Veterinarian. Actually this had been my dream job since I was about 8 years old. Now I must admit, I was never the girliest girl, never really into fashion, I loved dogs more than cats, had very little interest in horses and spent a fair amount of time being obsessed with V8 supercars.
However I took my first physics class purely to help boost my university entrance score, with no real knowledge of what I was getting myself into. By the end of my year 12 studies I was hooked on physics and forgotten all about Veterinary science and biology. So, what happened?
The first thing I notice was that my physics classes were always male dominated. The boys in the class seemed to know all about how to calculate stuff and where to plug stuff in for the labs. I initially felt I could only really be useful because of my neat and readable handwriting, compared to my lab partners - somehow I always end up being the scribe! I didn't understand any of it.
First up was mechanics...boooring! Yeah so balls roll down incline planes and F=ma, *yawn*. Then came electromagnetism, maybe slightly more interesting, but the terminology hit me like a ton of bricks...current, yeah that's cool but what the heck is voltage and then sometimes I'd read something about impedance? was that like induction? and capacitance, what the heck... aww man, I don't know I give up. And oh boy did I fail that test! The teacher tried to make it interesting by drawing electrons with smiley faces and top hats, but I didn't get it.
So, things went on like that for a while, then later we were allowed to take on an independent project, I couldn't find a topic that the teacher liked so she assigned me one...I had no idea what I was doing, something about wavelengths of different gasses. I just followed what the teacher told me to do, and I wrote down the figures and then tried to figure out what to do with the resulting data...So I graphed it, that's what you do in physics right? Graph stuff?....no idea what I had graphed...I probably graphed it on the wrong axes like I had a habit of doing. The teacher looked at it and said something like, what the heck is that supposed to be?!?
Well that was of no help what-so-ever, I had the mid semester break to write up my report on the experiment and I had no idea what I was supposed to do...so I researched like crazy about wavelengths of different gasses and came across quantum mechanics...little did I know I wouldn't be able to teach myself quantum mechanics in the 2 week break and give my teacher what I thought she wanted...It seemed so important that I was sure that was what she must have wanted - I was wrong, and to this day I never did find out what she wanted! I failed that assignment too, but I found my love for physics...the strangeness of the quantum world. Finally we got to atomic and nuclear physics, and many of my classmates who excelled at mechanics seemed to dislike nuclear physics, but there was something about it that I really liked...was it the small particles? Then I started thinking, what was my favourite part of biology...answer...haemotology...studying blood cells...small things...microbiology, genetics, not things like ecology.
The moral of the story? well I'm not saying that all girls are going to like the things in physics that I liked, obviously, since some of them like things like ecology. But I think what was most important for me was coming across the real story of real physics. Weird and cool things like QM, relativity, bose-einstein condensates, all that stuff. Sure we were "taught" about quantum mechanics in that we were told that it exists and that photons are neither particles nor waves and made to sit through the history of the atom told in the most boring way possible. I think teachers need to allow more freedom for the students to design projects that are interest them, I think there need to be more open-ended assignments where you give a starting point and ask for a report on the information the student finds.
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