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| Google images also does not believe that women can lead in social dance. However, men can apparently follow - in case you're interested, here's the article that goes along with it - it made me smile. |
So I am very glad that I am not, in fact, a professional columnist, or that my capability to acquire edible food is in any way tied to the frequency of posts on this blog, else I'd be a might bit peckish at the current time. In my defense, April happened.
Everything happens in April. This is what April is for, apparently.
So, if you have perchance read any of my other posts* or you know me personally** you most likely know that dancing is one of my critical needs for mental survival. At the moment, this need is primarily filled by salsa and contra dancing. And I really must highly recommend the dancing community in Boulder, because unlike many experiences I've had in the
salsa dancing scene in Vancouver, I actually
still have yet to encounter the Token Creepy Guy at the Boulder salsa dance, which I count as nothing short of miraculous, frankly.
*There's all of, what, nine of them currently, it's not too hard....
**Highly likely, as I rather doubt anyone beyond my Facebook-verse encounters these posts, which is...really, okay.
The dancing environment is
so good, in fact, and the lessons beforehand
so cheap, that I've felt comfortable enough to take the leap and start learning to dance lead*. Aside from the initial kerfluffle of explaining to several very courteous men that thank you, I'm dancing lead for the lesson, and feeling just a twinge guilty about dancing lead when there was a shortage of follows, things weren't actually all that awkward.
*Whilst wearing a cute skirt, naturally.
The only aspect that bugged me, at first a little, and later, a lot, was the comments I kept receiving from my follows (all female):
"Oh, you're dancing lead! I'm so impressed, I could never do that!"
"Oh, that must be so difficult."
"You're doing what I could never do!"
At first, these comments made me feel flattered and proud. They approved of me dancing lead! They admired that I was taking on something difficult! But that inevitable follow-up comment, "I could never do that," just kept bugging me.
It finally dawned on me why - why did all these women think they couldn't do it? I mean, goodness, I've danced with enough struggling male beginner leads to know that
they certainly find leading difficult at first. And good following, in my opinion, isn't necessarily easier. It may be easier to pick up in the beginning, but to really follow
well requires a considerable practiced ability to listen and understand a myriad of subtle non-verbal cues, that are all going to be different from person to person. So why are all these women so very convinced that they lack the capability to lead?
I keep reading articles expounding on a common theme, that women don't advance, particularly in STEM fields, because they aren't confident, because they're socialized to think that if they struggle with something, it means they're too stupid to understand it and therefore they'll never get it. I don't think I really believed that idea, until I realized I was most likely witnessing some of that very aversion to struggling in my salsa class. And it made me just a tad annoyed. Annoyed, because I know it doesn't have to be this way.
The whole idea that women apparently keep getting this message that if they struggle with something, it means they're innately incapable of doing it, makes me fume just a bit because it is just so alien to my own experience. I mean, people keep telling me I'm "smart", but I've encountered really smart people, and personally I don't think I'm one of them. Okay, maybe I'm a little quicker on the uptake sometimes in some areas.* But really, I think the reason I seem smart is that I can be dang stubborn, and I've always been taught to be that way. My parents rarely if ever let me give up because it was hard, although I'm sure there were times they would
liked to for the sake of our collective sanity.
*As long as it's not a pop culture reference. I make a bad trivia team member.
And if I continue along that thread this post
will turn into "blah blah, BACK IN MY DAY, blah blah". I could go on all day about this or that thing that programmed me to not give up in the face of something hard, and end up trivializing the struggles of all the girls in trigonometry or physics or [insert hellishly hard STEM class here], which I don't want to do, because, yes, they
are hard. Even with all the things I had going in my favor, they were
really hard for me. And no, you may
not get some of it, or a lot of it, the first time round. Or the second. Or maybe even the third. But, I've learned recently, rather to my surprise, it doesn't mean you can't.
I've been finding this to be true more and more in my current job, and this is one of the aspects of my work I think I most enjoy. Okay, does anyone out there remember Taylor series? .....I hear crickets.
Anyway, it's this thing where you take a derivative of a function and multiply it by the value of that function at 0, or whatever, and then you make a series out of all these second and third and so on derivatives, and I really don't remember the exact definition and I'm feeling too lazy to look them up and it would be in math-speak anyway. For a long time I knew them as these things I learned at the very end of calculus, and they were tedious, and they were hard, and I had no concept of any
use for them. They certainly weren't something I really understood. I mean, I think I passed the tests, but I'm also pretty sure the knowledge only stuck around just as long as it needed to, for survival purposes.
So, enter my job now. Erm, I'm going to struggle explaining this a bit, but basically when you measure gravity, the gravity meter has to be level, so you're consistently measuring the vertical force of gravity. Since we do not live in an ideal world, the meter isn't always going to be level, so you track how off-level the meter is and correct for it. Well, there are these constants you have to set that determine how the computer translates the electrical signal from the levels into a signal than actually means something in terms of angles, rather than volts. If these constants are off, the angles the sensors spit out aren't correct, and the tilt of the meter isn't being corrected for properly, and you see a corresponding signal in gravity vs. time, which we want to be flat (because gravity at one location isn't actually supposed to change*). The way to remove this pesky extra signal is to tweak those constants.
*Unless VOLCANOES.
And this is where Taylor comes in*. See, these constants for converting electrical signal to actually useful data signal are wrapped up in this nice nasty formula involving multiple trig functions**, which mean you can't just take the level data the meter spits out, multiply it by a number, and yay, you're done. No, you have to multiply the level data by a number and then take the COSINE! And then MULTIPLY the cosines! And subtract THAT from something ELSE! All of which makes it an absolute nightmare to figure out what these special constants should be after the fact. And this is where Taylor series come in - you can make a Taylor series of this nasty trig expression, and the resulting Taylor-ized expression IS something you can easily just multiply constants by and poof, no more tilt signal!
*And you thought I had totally gone off on a tangent. You were almost right...
**Regardless of how I feel about Taylor series and least squares now, I STILL hate trig.
You still with me? Okay, I think there may be at least three of you who haven't run off screaming in horror. Anyway, the point of all that was, a) Taylor series turned out to be kind of cool and actually useful and b) I didn't really understand Taylor series in my math class years ago, but I
was, in fact, able to dust off what remnants of that knowledge I had left, and use it to make a hard problem actually doable, for a practical purpose. And there's all sorts of other math examples like that I'm finding - things like least squares, FFTs, various aspects of matrix manipulation, and so on. Things that, despite my earlier encounters, I find I can understand after all, and better yet, can apply to do some cool stuff. I'm actually finding I
like math, and although I've never felt I was bad at math, I never used to feel like I was good at math or that I liked it. Honestly, I still don't feel like I'm
good at math.
BUT, I can use it, and that's really all I need.
So I want to send out some encouragement to all the women and girls out there struggling with science or math - no, you
don't have to get it
all right
right now. Enough to pass the class is probably helpful, enough to understand the science, also good. But you
don't have to get it perfect, you
don't have to be
that kid who knows out to 100 digits of pi*. This isn't your last chance. You will get many more chances to bang your head against a wall with this stuff, and eventually, most of it will get through. Or at least, enough to makes some pretty graphs of properly corrected gravity data**!
*Something tells me at least three of my friends are that kid.
**Because all of you are going to go into gravity geophysics, right???
So, back to dance - I think it also dismayed me so much that all my follows found it intimidating to lead because I think I developed the guts to attack math – and, by extension, leading –
from following in salsa dance. There's something about following, at least for me, that grows a kind of gutsiness. The kind of gutsiness from knowing that, although I have
no idea what this lead's going to throw at me, I'm going to try my best to follow it, and if I end up flat on my face, well, at least I've got a
great story for later, and will have probably learned a thing or two. And the overwhelming majority of the time, I end up doing things I didn't think I could do. Like, for instance, gracefully handling getting flipped upside down.
That was fun. And, for me, after being challenged like this over and over, and still (rarely) falling flat on my face, it's not really so big a leap to make the jump to lead.
So, yes, it's hard, yes, there's that annoying kid who gets everything in three seconds - but
you can do it. If not now, the next time, or the next, or the next. But I
promise you, it is possible. Embrace the fight – it doesn't mean you're weak, it's just what you have to do to learn something new and potentially awesome. If you find yourself thinking, "I can't do this" – do it anyway. You might just surprise yourself.
That post got a bit mathy/sciencey, so I most whole-heartedly welcome your stupid questions, because they are my very favorite kind.
