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were fascinating to me, illuminating and somewhat disturbing.  i've got to say first that i'm REALLY glad i didn't go someplace like the university of arizona!  it was really helpful for me to see different pedagogical systems and ideas, because i really want to be a physics teacher, but it was also a little weird to have so much negative stuff brought to the front and repeated.  i started with "they're not dumb..." and got pretty angry at several points, but i think my anger served to show me exactly where my experiences differed so much with these students'.  on my best days i might consider myself a second-tier kind of physics student, but i'm well aware that it's my tenacity (stubbornness) and determination (pride) that's kept me in the major for so long, not so much any natural talent in science or math itself (as my department can attest).  anyway, what was particualrly interesting to me were the responses from the professors to the auditors' reflections and field notes, because they illustrated for me a departmental and collective thinking of the "professoriat" that i haven't had to deal with - bryn mawr physics profs are SO much more aware, more helpful, more personal than any of these guys!  which is, in part, why it was neat to first see reference to professors i've heard of if not met, and then read something from juan burciaga.  it feels good to know bmc is part of this larger conversation, and has been for years.  anyway, the short article was, again, particularly interesting to the science-teacher part of me, perhaps because i've never felt explicitly excluded from a curriculum and here i got to see ways it happens and how to avoid/fix them.  it was somewhat boring to read the same statistics over and over again, and to continually revisit (but never directly address) things like the potential loss of women in the field to family concerns, but i appreciated that both these readings had more specific focuses and real, practical solutions to try against the problems they raised (sorry, anne, but that wertheim reading was worthless to me in its grand, theoretical and [i think] pretty impractical desire to completely overhaul what she thinks theoretical physics is).  maybe that's the experimentalist in me, but it was so comforting to see programs being used and studied and developed, rather than simply more discussion of data.