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i'm having a really hard time responding to these readings in a way that feels productive to me.  i mean, they're familiar arguments - i've been trying to tell my "non-science" friends for years that science is just another story of the universe, another way to look at and talk about the world (i'm almost entirely sure i brought this up in anne's class last spring, and quite sure i got it discussed in an education class i took two years ago... bmc's used to me saying this).  but by that same token, they feel almost old to me - ok, i get it, i've always gotten this part, what do we DO with it?  well, alright, professors at bryn mawr talk about it amongst themselves and sometimes with us, and they incorporate these ideas into their classes, and we have things like serendip, which are technically global forums (boy, does that ever make me nervous!), but... but the problem exists on so many other levels.  it exists with my intesely awful chemistry teacher at my first (very poor, inner-city, southern) high school, who not only invented the dry lecture format, but worshipped the ideal of science as having all the right answers (which were of course not accessible to me), who scoffed when i told her i wanted to do physics and told me, flat out, that i wasn't smart enough.   it exists with every post-bacc student i've had in the past three years who's complained that he or she has never had to use physics before, so why should they learn it now?  it exists with every politician who gets a new basketball gym named after him or her while the bio department has nothing to dissect, and the physics department can't buy calculators, and the chemists run out of glassware.  i know this is pretty uncharacteristically pessimistic of me, but that's my reader-response.  how do we change such a fundamental belief, at its roots; how do we shift the paradigm of science from that silly scientific method we learned in elementary school (yeah, paul, i was taught that first one, too, and i've disliked and mistrusted it since about fourth grade) to an inviting, accessible, assailable, HUMAN world of storytelling?  that's an even more involved and interesting question for me than solving the three-body problem, or finding a way to converge quantum mechanics and relativity.  and for me, for my children, for my daughters and granddaughters, it's a far more important question, because the answer to that one will lead to answers to the others.