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Stop Taking All the Fun Out of Science
HughPickens.com writes: Heidi Stevens writes in the Chicago Tribune that according to NASA astronaut Mae Jemison schools treat science like the class where fun goes to die. "Kids come out of the chute liking science. They ask, 'How come? Why? What's this?' They pick up stuff to examine it. We might not call that science, but it's discovering the world around us," says Jemison. "Once we get them in school, we turn science from discovery and hands-on to something you're supposed to do through rote memorization." But science doesn't have to be that way says Jemison. Especially in the elementary school years. "When you have teachers saying, 'I don't have enough time for hands-on activities,' we need to rethink the way we do education," says Jemison. "The drills we do, where you're telling kids to memorize things, don't actually work. What works is engaging them and letting them do things and discover things." Jemison has teamed up with Bayer to advance science literacy across the United States by emphasizing the importance of hands-on, inquiry-based learning opportunities in public schools. Bayer announced recently that it will provide 1 million hands-on science experiences for kids by 2020. "Science is around us everywhere," says Jemison. Farming is science. Cooking is science. Even styling hair involves science. "When we go to the hairdresser, we want her to know something about pH balance," says Jemison with a laugh. "Boy, do we ever want her to know something about pH balance!"
it's there to get people ready for the workforce. That's why we have bells and it's why we start it early when research shows kids need more sleep. I always find it annoying to see people who can't or won't acknowledge that virtually everything in our society exists to serve the ruling class. You'll never get anywhere with reform until you acknowledge and deal with that basic root problem. It's why FDR was so successful and it's what Eisenhower was afraid of when he talked about the Military Industrial Complex...
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Unless we want to re-invent the wheel over and over, it's necessary that people have a basic understanding of the work that has been done in the past.
The problem isn't how hard it is to memorize facts. The human brain is capable of memorizing a lot of facts. The problem is that (US specifically) kids are just too lazy to do it. They have the ability, but not the desire. (Source: My wife is a high school science teacher of 30 years).
Let's address the real issue and stop trying to give participation trophies.
Maybe we should stop raising children to think that everything is fun.
Impactful science is a heck of a lot of work.
Guess it's more about doing rather than viewing.
Listening to a musician is fun. Learning to play is not.
There are two parts to "science". There is learning some of the vast amount of science that has already been done, and there is learning how to do science. Both are important, and both can be made interesting by a good teacher and dull by a bad one.
This is a problem for school overall. Its pretty fucking boring.
I doubt professional scientists think their work is "fun".
If that's true, it's only because professional scientists spend the vast majority of their time doing things that aren't science: grant management, administration, job interviews, committee meetings. Every scientist I know is desperately trying to get away from all of that bullshit and get back to having fun: i.e., doing science. Science is so much fun that scientists are willing to put up with all the PHB college adminstrators that fill their days, just for those moments of science, which are pure joy.
Science isn't supposed to be fun. It's a method and its rigorous.
Scientific education can very well be fun. The best way to convince people ignorant of science that the scientific method is useful is by doing exploratory exercises with them (often "fun") and then gradually introducing rigor to show them how scientific methods work better.
I speak as someone who has taught high-school science. One of the first activities I would do with physics students was to give them a few different types of pendula and a stopwatch. I would divide them into groups and tell them to come up with a way of predicting what the period should be.
That's about all the instructions I gave.
They'd get a few days of this -- I'd bring the class together at the end of each period, and we'd talk about what they had discovered. Hmm -- the mass of the weight at the end of the string didn't seem to matter. The initial angle didn't seem to make much of a difference either. Etc.
I'd walk around the room in each class and gradually give suggestions and hints on better ways to collect and organize data, answer questions, provide additional equipment upon request, etc.
By the end of a week, most of them had learned more about the scientific method than many physics students do in a year (if they only performed calculations and solved equations). And most of them found it interesting -- it was a puzzle to solve, a physical thing that they were expected to figure out how it worked. Once one group figured out that graphing their data might help, all of sudden someone would realize it was a parabola... and pretty soon they could come up with an equation.
Exploratory science is essential for education -- that's how little kids learn. But many of them have is stomped out of them by middle school, forced to sit in desks and learn things by rote or by doing dozens of repetitive exercises. There is certainly a place for memorization and repetition, but there's no reason why science can't also include fun exploratory activities.
You can talk about the definition of a "theory" or "hypothesis" or whatever until you're blue in the face, but nothing beats making kids actually have to DO IT.
Science is treated like a religion, and the philosophy of science and especially its skepticism is missing in the discussion, covered instead by "omg isn't this science looking thing cool".
And this is precisely the problem with science education that isn't fun and exploratory in nature. If kids spend years sitting in science classrooms being dictated to and told the "facts" of science, when and how exactly are they supposed to acquire the skills to form and evaluate their own hypotheses with appropriate skepticism? If they never try to do it, how would you expect people to be able to do it regarding other science they encounter in the world in their lives?
Of course those sorts of skills are hard to test on things like standardized tests, so teachers in many public schools feel like they don't have time to actually train kids in the actual process of DOING science, rather than memorizing facts ABOUT it.
Pseudoscience abounds. Looks at nutrition science. You can't even tell anymore what is actual science and what is total nonsense based on anecdote... because the methods are almost the same.
I'm not sure precisely what you're referencing. Nutrition science, properly speaking, is NOT based on "anecdote" more than anything else -- it requires data collection, control groups, data analysis, etc.
But the big problem with much of science -- and not just nutrition, but medicine in general, and psychology, and most "social science" (increasingly even harder sciences) -- is the substitution of (badly done) statistical procedures for any semblance of experimental judgment. We now live in a world where we act as though simple statistics can "do science" for us -- and we have all the thin
BS.
I'm a physicist, doing basic science at a research lab.
I can assure you: None of the people there do it for the money! We all do it because it is _FUN_!
Doing something nobody has ever done before, thinking about things nobody has ever considered before, and building stuff to do an experiment is fun, fun, fun!
Rigorous method and stuff: yes. Grant management, admin, etc.: Yes. Of course we have to do it.
But the the driving force, the reason _why_ we are doing it is _exclusively_ fun!
[ I could easily earn a lot more money, with less work, in industry. But been there, done that: Not so much fun!]
My wife does something similar when teaching science. The first few experiments are ridiculously safe. The goals are to get into a safe habit and (more importantly) figure out which students are going to act like total morons. Later on they get to play with acid, fire, sharp objects.