How They Learn · It’s amazing, contrary to all the clichés, how slowly little kids learn. My little guy, now in first grade, has been learning to read for a year now and still struggles with some obvious-seeming words; oh, those English vowels. But slow is OK, because time is what he has, no end of it; and when you’re my age that time rushes by, fast and unceasing like a spring flood. This evening, reading the first chapters of the first Harry Potter at bedtime, he seemed to want a turn so I pointed him at a paragraph and he hurried through it, the tale’s urgency carrying him over words he couldn’t make out. I remember being the same age doing the same thing, wondering what some word meant, but not enough to stop, or even slow down much.
Co-eds · This week I paid a visit to the University of Guelph, from which I graduated over twenty years ago. They’re fine people and it’s a fine school, and I’ll have more to say about that, but I learned some some shocking numbers. First, of Guelph’s 18,000-or-so students, around 70% are female. At the Veterinary College, it’s around 90%. And in this year’s graduating class of 50 Computer Science students, 4 are female. The visual effect is not subtle: everywhere you look there are swarms of bright, healthy, eager-looking young women. And in the CS building, the usual geekboys. Guelph’s population, they tell me, is not untypical for modern universities. What does this mean, a couple of decades from now?
