Acting STEM

I watched with rapt attention as Mr. Benner, biting his lip and eyeing each one of us individually with intensity through his plastic safety goggles, struck a match theatrically, dropped it in the glass bottle he held in a rubber-gloved hand, and set a boiled egg on the bottle’s mouth. I leaned forward in my desk. The match went out and with a quiet sucking sound, the egg slid into the bottle. The classroom of thirty fourth grade students cheered, and Mr. Benner took a bow like a practiced magician, raising the egg bottle above his head in triumph. Our attention didn’t falter as he walked around the room, gesturing enthusiastically as he explained the magic trick—a difference in air pressure. Not magic, science!

I always looked forward to science class with Mr. Benner. You never knew quite what to expect when you walked through the door into that room full of taxidermied animals, potted tropical plants, and articulated skeletons, the scent of chemicals in the air. Science class was an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy come to life. One day we taped together foam tubes, cut them in half, and covered the entire room with an elaborate marble racing course to learn physics. Another, we went to the elementary school’s courtyard to check on our bean plants, suspended in the air with their pots at odd angles—they always grew up towards the light! Yet another, we observed the classroom chinchillas. Some days Mr. Benner would let his pair of tortoises roam the classroom, much to our delight. When we future scientists graduated high school, Mr. Benner promised, he would tell us if it really was a baby alien in the jar of formaldehyde in the glass cabinet, as rumors held.

I transferred to a private school for middle school and found I no longer wanted to become a scientist. The magic "Science" class became Earth Science 1 and Earth Science 2, then Biology, then Chemistry. Each year we were given a thick, hardbound book and told to read a chapter per week. Every day in class Mrs. Hampton would sit at the front of her classroom in her “twenty years of teaching” labeled honorary wooden chair and lecture—sometimes about the textbook chapter, sometimes about something unrelated that happened to her ten years prior. By the time I got to high school and was assigned to a new teacher for upper level biology, chemistry, and physics courses, my passion for science was all but gone. We did experiments again, like we used to in elementary school, but the steps were complicated, and I got things wrong. Once, I knocked over a beaker of hydrochloric acid onto my lab partner and wound up in detention. Another time, I burned my arm on a Bunsen burner. The teacher told me I wasn’t cut out to be a chemist.

In my junior year of high school, I took Advanced Placement Physics I and II to keep my friend Alex company—we were the only students in the class. He was a future electrical and computer engineering student at the University of Michigan; I was a future undecided major at a local liberal arts college. Thermodynamics, magnetism, electric circuit diagrams, calculus—it all came easily to Alex. It didn’t to me. I did all the “STEM” stuff expected of a high school senior taking AP Physics I and II at a private college preparatory school. I joined the robotics club. I did an internship with a local industrial robotics company. I took AP Calculus AB in my senior year. I spent many late nights working on problems and studying. Alex tried to help me, but he couldn’t understand what wasn’t making sense to me. To him, everything was intuitive. I applied, like Alex, to competitive universities with top-rated STEM programs. I felt like a fraud, pretending I was bound to be a programmer at Google or an electrical engineer at Boeing.

When the far away Harvards and the Princetons of the world weren’t interested in me, I decided to do what sounded a lot more comfortable (and cheaper) to me anyway—attend a local liberal arts college and live at home. I tried for a while to be the STEM student I’d been practicing being throughout high school. I took computer science courses, attending tutoring sessions and reading forums late into the night as I struggled to get the programs to work as they were supposed to. I got A’s, thanks to my hard work and extensive time spent in office hours, but I still felt like a fraud. I didn’t love the work, as I knew other students did, it didn’t come “naturally” to me as I knew it did some, and I didn’t write programs for fun in my spare time as I knew others did. Eventually I did find disciplines I really enjoyed—cultural anthropology, sociology, geography, environmental studies—and I didn’t look back.

Sociologist Erving Goffman famously used a dramaturgical metaphor to describe everyday life. Goffman theorized that all human interactions are dependent on time, place, and audience. In a true “all the world’s a stage” fashion, he thought, we all present ourselves to others differently based on varying social contexts. Our identities are not stable and unchanging; they are constantly remade through our interactions with others. We choose roles and then play them throughout our lives. Our destinies are our own, yet also determined by those around us. From an early age I chose science, partially because I liked the specific sort of science Mr. Benner represented, and partially because society—and especially my private middle and high school—values STEM so highly. So, I self-selected into the STEM “role” and played it the best I could. Others chose the “non-STEM” side of the culturally constructed binary early on and played that alternative way of being in the world. Once you choose the role you’ll play, in this case, it’s really quite hard to change your own mind. As I read and wrote more in anthropology courses I learned about scholars like Bruno Latour and the related field of Science and Technology Studies. I learned that scientific method is just one way of seeing and understanding the world and that scientific facts are, like most other things, socially constructed and influenced by cultural contexts. I wish I’d known what I know now in my middle school science classes. Perhaps then, choosing my role in the play might not have been so uncomfortable.