My college primarily teaches technicians - people who will spend their
careers taking things apart. When I first started teaching here (ten years
ago), I found that my classes were overwhelmingly full of people who took
things apart to see how they worked, fixed things themselves and tinkered
with cars. Since our students are mostly from rural areas, they had lots of
experience fixing things on the farm where it is an economic necessity to be
able to fix it yourself.
I, on the other hand, had not spent much time tinkering being more of a
bookish kid than a take it apart kid. This was true despite having an
engineer father who did nothing but tinker with mechanical things from the
family car to restoring a Model T from the ground up, to model airplanes and
a brother who was right there with him every step of the way. My brother
went to a "technician/technical" college while I went off to the more
traditional college.
My point (yes there is one) is that maybe education (at least in the U.S.)
has changed somewhat. We have many post secondary schools for people who
like to tinker. It seems as though we imply that anyone going to a
university to study something so high falutin' as physics ought to be very
cerebal and, by extension, not very handy/practical. People who are
handy/practical on the other hand should spend all their time at an
institution like mine where except for a course or two they spend all their
time exercising that skill.
By the way, there seems to be little or no gender difference (in terms of
childhood experiences) among the students in our technology programs.
Interestingly enough, there is a difference in those students who are in
non-technology areas (such as a medical field).
R. Allen Shotwell
Chair, Science and Math
Ivy Tech State College
Terre Haute, IN