Slashdot Mirror
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This lament is probably relevant.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
My wife is a hands on type science teacher. Build bridges, set things on fire, build and race cars, etc. 150 students. At least 1 hands on activity every 2 weeks (usually far far more) during a 36 week year. That's 18 activities. Say she does that every year for until 2020. That's 150*18*6. That's 16,200.
1,000,000 hands on science experiences? That's just the regular job of 62 teachers. Just a couple schools.
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.
Any other children of the 70s remember the big brown box? It came from some company; but I forget the name. Our school would get these every other month or so. They were full of basic science experiments for elementary aged children. There was one with seeds to sprout and instructions, for example. Another might have had some relatively safe chemicals in it. Then you'd do stuff with the chemicals like put water or vinegar on them. Perhaps based on some earlier lesson you'd then answer questions like, "is that an acid or a base?".
The opening of the box was always eagerly anticipated, and they usually brought in a teacher's aid or a parent volunteer to help with "experiment day" if it was something they thought might require that.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Science isn't supposed to be fun. It's a method and its rigorous. The problem isn't that the fun is being taken or of science. The problem is the the "I Fucking Love Science" crowd has popularized science among people who do not understand science. 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". 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.
Whenever we had to do anything in school that was supposed to be "fun", I wished I'd skipped school that day. I could have used the time to do something I actually liked doing, but instead we spent hours learning something we could have learned in a few minutes. And it wasn't fun.
Fun and a sense of "discovery" aren't really possible in a highly structured school environment. You can't do anything but follow the instructions. How is that fun? What did I discover other than the fact that science experiments sometime work and sometimes don't?
I doubt professional scientists think their work is "fun". Rewarding and interesting maybe. But probably very, very rarely "fun".
Perhaps that's the real problem: the people who say science is "fun" are grossly overselling it. Kids aren't having fun in science class because it's just not genuinely fun.
is not 'science'. Knowing how to repeat a recipe is not a scientific endeavour, neither is the process of repeating it. Your barber knowing about pH is not a scientific endeavour.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
"I don't want my child anywhere near chemicals. They are bad for us and evil companies are destroying the planet."
My son was excited to take high school chemistry. After the first day I asked him what they had done. Nothing, just a lecture about good behavior and harassment. Second day: lecture about safety. Third day: more safety and protective equipment. Fourth day: Had the fear of god put in them for doing anything whatsoever unauthorized. Fifth day: Forced to sign a "contract", brought home for parent's signature too.
Second week: Fully kitted with coats, glasses, gloves - observed effect of vinegar and baking soda solution on litmus paper.
Lord help us.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
Despite the subject’s reputation, and the fact that schools treat it like the class where fun goes to die, kids are more excited about science, on average, than math, English and social studies, according to a new report.
So science classes must be doing something right.
Seriously though, school isn't entertainment. If kids want to enjoy themselves, they should be taught the pleasure of learning something new.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
She's an engineer. She probably doesn't even know what "pH balance" actually means, somebody just told her that "this in hair good, that in hair bad". She's probably never even read a peer-reviewed journal. And she doesn't need to. Of course all this was at some point discovered by scientific researchers, but the research itself was "fun" in the way most kids perceive fun. It was probably hard work, and boring. Science is study, discovery and hard work. Engineering is applying the results of that study.
Everyone was freaking out 15-20 years ago about how the Chinese and Japanese were ahead of the US on science/math scores, so..we went and followed that method. Problem is, creative problem solving has suffered with the focus on rote memorization. I'm not sure it serves any of the cultures mentioned well.
The essence of science is discovery, true. But the enterprise of actually doing science requires quite a lot of memorization. One cannot independently rediscover every discovery ever made, and it would not be a useful investment of time even if it were possible.
An interest in discovery, alone, will not make one succeed at science. One must have the ability and desire to memorize a lot of stuff and make good use of that knowledge, in order to succeed at science.
And it turns out that plenty of people DO have an interest in discovery, both before and after school. But far few people have the memorization power (or will) necessary. So, filtering such people out of the set of potential scientists as early as possible makes the best use of everybody's time.
Mythbusters do it right - they show that it's nothing special with science.
The problem is that today it's more popular with implausible reality shows.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Where? In the US that wouldn't be allowed for fear of lawsuits if someone got a splinter. In the UK it would be supporting terrorists. In France it would be a breach of workplace rules. And in Germany they'd find some tenuous link to holocaust denial.
By my reckoning that leaves Australia and that place with the funny shaped stamps.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Science does involve knowledge of facts as well as hypotheses and theories. Without knowledge of the known facts determined by scientific experiment one might just be condemned to relearning what others have already discovered instead of extending that knowledge to ongoing studies or new areas of discovery.
Furthermore, one of the problems in some parts of the world and in particular some states of the USA is an anti science culture. Some folks have used various governmental school agencies to restrict the teaching of many scientific disciplines including evolution because they think it contradicts biblical authority.
In Colorado recently a state authority has reduced the standards for high school graduation by allowing lack of competence in science by graduates. Imagine a small school district that has budget problems and finds that the best way to solve it is to eliminate science education from the HS curriculum. Apparently that's possible with the new rules. These HS graduates obviously will be at a disadvantage trying to get into college, but the school district may have balanced its budget.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
There is also the danger of selling something as "fun" in the way that going to a carnival might be "fun" versus selling it as something that is "rewarding" like perhaps the efforts necessary to train as a team to win a race, or the preparations necessary to do tasks like rock-climbing or other challenging tasks. If you tell someone "This thing is FUN!" then it seems much more likely that when they encournter aspects that are not effortless and completely entertaining, they will (rightly) decide that it is not "fun" and have much less chance beliving that is worthwhile.
Coaches generally don't tell the players that "running lines" or doing pushups is "fun", but the players believe that doing those tasks is worthwhile and necessary to do what they want to do - get better at their sport and do well in the competitions. Almost nothing we do is "fun" in every aspect. Helping people to develop the ability to get satisfaction from doing a task well, and recognizing the benifits of focussed effort should be a primary goal of our general educational system. Having the student understand why they are doing whatever they are doing might also go a long way towards providing motivation for the activities. Having the instructors understand the purpose of activites as well is probably worthwhile too...
With that said, unless one is trying some revers psychology or something, we shoud be trying as much as possible to limit the unpleasant aspects of learning in all areas. Pushups might be necessary in order to build athlete strength, but we do not have to do them on a field of broken glass.
There's several electronics hobbyists that have already proven his "clock" was a scam... http://blogs.artvoice.com/tech... People that donated to this "cause" got ripped off big time, including POTUS.
Oh sure, we were calculating velocity and acceleration and angles, but we were putting it to practical use with a Hot Wheels car on tracks set to angles to make them fly through a target. It was tons of math but also lots of giggling 17-year olds playing with cars like they haven't done in ten years.
During another unit, we calculated our own personal horsepower by running up the stairs.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
There used to be a saying that getting up earlier for DST confused the cows, so no it wasn't for the animals. https://www.bing.com/search?q=...
The problem as I see it is that in the old days teachers were educated intellgent young unmarried women. They dedicated their early years to their students. Parents respected the teachers because typically the parents were less educated then the teachers.
But this is no longer the case. The most intellgent women now become doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, business people, etc. Teachering is now a life long profession for C students. If you have ever gone to parent teacher night I find many of the young teachers to act very uneducated. They also have their own young children so basicly clock out when the school day is over because they have to pick their kids up from day care or school. There are a couple exceptions to where education is a calling buy you can't build a system on this.
In addition the parents are often much smarter and more educated then the tecahers. This I beleive is what is behind the homeschool movement. It is in our family. We got tired of C students trying and failing to educate our children. It got to the point we were spending entire evenings teaching our kids what they should have learned that day. So we homeschool them now and have much more free time with the kids. And I live in an "A" school district (whatever that means).
We need to transition to a new system. I have no idea what it should be. Maybe have retired professionals teach their subjects of expertise. How great would it be to have a Chemistry teacher who was a researcher or worked in the petrochemical industry? Or a NASA engineer as physics or math teacher? You need people with a passion to transfer that passion to students.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Recalling my Physics and Chem classes in high school (not even mentioning Math here), you lost half the general population after v = s / t.
Newtonian Physics is already too hard to grasp for most students (in general) except for the ones in Advanced Math/Science classes.
Yes experiments are fun, but they just showcase the problem or the reaction. The actual understanding comes from deriving formulas and doing the actual paperwork. That's the biggest part of the actual science.
This is like saying they should make English Litterature more fun by introducing more Comics.
While in grad school, I was lucky enough to be selected to teach elementary school science in an inner-city school as part of the NSF's GK-12 program. I team-taught with the main classroom teacher 4 afternoons a week, using inquiry-based methods. Our pedagogic approach was very hands-on, and we had to think on our feet a lot. It was not easy for us to lesson plan, but we did our best.
The results? Out of ~35 kids, all of whom were getting free lunches (and all save one living in single-parent/grandparent households), most of whom had no previous science education, roughly 55% passed the state-mandate science proficiency test. That might not sound so great, but since the previous year's class had a passing rate of about 17%, we were ecstatic. We also had good participation in a "science club" held after-school, with more inquiry-based activities. At one point, late in the year, our students even understood free body diagrams (they were about 10 years old) as part of understanding Newton's 3rd law- something my college students typically struggled with.
Inquiry is powerful stuff. It harnesses the thing that makes people interested in science in the first place: innate curiosity.
Never blame the human for mangling that autocorrect hath most probably wrought.
On a side note, you are just the kind of pretentious stuck-up grammar nazi that we would all expect to back the slow moving train wreck that is modern public school.
On a further side note, Teachering is a brilliant word and is used more commonly than you would seem to realize. Or did you not realize languages evolve.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The vast bulk of elementary school teachers in the United States don't like Science, just as much as they don't like math.
I am *NOT* saying that they are not good teachers. But rather - you're taking someone who probably never really liked those subjects in the first place, and are trying to get them to instill a joy in something that they, themselves, don't have in it to people. It just is not going to work!
Let's look at the elementary school teachers here in the US.. most of them are coming from a liberal arts teaching background. Which is great, because they're expected to teach a plethora of subjects, and also spend the bulk of the day with the students. So they also have the crowd control skills and so on. But ask them in a non-school setting about any basic science - most of them would roll their eyes at the questions, and even tell you that they never even liked it. A lot of them look at science as almost a voo-doo thing, and they just do what's in the textbooks/curriculum.
What really should be done, is to bring in science (and math!) specialists for just those subjects at that level. Let people who have a ready understanding on the material, and who can relate it to every day things interact with the kids for those bits. Let them explain every day things to these kids, to keep the joy of learning there!
Note here: I am an engineer (still consulting) turned Chem/Physics/Math HS teacher in the public sector here in the US. I have also worked these alleged crazy new fangled math stuff that are trying to conceptualize things, when they really need to just go back to basics, and instill basic skills so that the advanced things can be 'fun' , or at the very least be seen by the students as something that they can do, because they already have the tools to do so. Instead of just flat out giving up.
And yeah, we should involve more parental involvement and so on. And oh yes, say it's ok to drop out. Go get a job, and see how awful it truly is without an education - and when their heads are screwed on right - to go get their GED/whatever degree from that point on.. as they'll be self motivated - as opposed to having us to motivate them!
"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"
That doesn't describe any school I've ever been to.
It certainly doesn't describe my high school, which was mostly experiment based.
And it certainly doesn't describe my daughter's high school, which is pretty much entirely experiment based.
As far as my limited sample goes (which included a number of high schools in the area) the curriculum is much more experimental than when I was in school, and I wouldn't call my classes anything remotely like rote memorization.
Maybe she should do some more experiments on schooling.
Maybe we should stop raising children to think that everything is fun.
Maybe we should start teaching children to beware of any superstimulus. We've designed foods that are tastier than found in nature -- but we've dissociated food's tastiness from its healthiness. We've designed entertainment to be fun, addictive, etc -- but it is a dead end, boredom now leads to the rut instead of away from it. We've sabotaged almost every drive we have, soon sexbots will complete the job. This is what we're doing, only one level removed.
Science is a combination of work and fun. It used to be done only by people who had enough money to do anything they wanted, the reward was satisfaction of discovering something and fame. Now people put in that sort of work to "level up" their character or unlock/discover rare "equipment" or "achievements", sure it's less work, but the reward is dissociated from real world value.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Any subject in general could be extremely fun to learn if the educational pace was more easy going. THAT is the problem.
We are a generally long-lived species these days. Why in the hell do we need to compress several times the knowledge of 60 years ago into the same time span they had 60 years ago? It makes no sense to me. High school teenagers in AP (advanced placement) classes are competing so hard that they need to be up until 1am or 2am in the morning three or four times a week just to keep up with the homework. 4 to 5 hours of sleep per night. Terrible sleeping and eating habits. No physical activity. It has gotten RIDICULOUS. I don't know what in the hell we think we're teaching kids these days, but we're sure not teaching them that learning is fun.
There has to be a breaking point soon. Kids should be able to enjoy being kids. Kids should also feel like they don't have to pressured to have half of their college credits finished by the time they graduate high school. They also shouldn't feel like they should need to get their PhD by the time they are 21.
What are we doing to these kids?
Science is pretty much illegal in the modern school system. Back in the prehistoric days (before 2011) school administrations were actually interested in teaching students knowledge, instead of teaching social conformity. I remember many science demonstrations in my school that would land the instructor in prison today. For example we built a "physics gun" which fired a ping-pong ball with compressed air at the same time it released a second one that fell straight down (shows that gravity affects both objects at the same rate despite differing rates of horizontal velocity). The fact that this demonstration has the "G" word mentioned in the title and actually shoots something would cause modern school administrators to panic and call the Feds to come and protect them from reality. My high school chemistry class had actual Bunsen burners available. Today school administrators would be afraid of the liability, imagine the horrors if little Johnny burned his thumb and had to be hauled away and put on life support for the rest of his life. Sure you can do titration labs, but everyone loved the electrolysis one because they could ignite the results (hydrogen/oxygen) with a bang afterward. That would get them expelled in a modern school and probably charged with terrorism.
Science is boring in the modern school because the administrators are afraid some student might learn science and use electrolysis to try to blow up the school.
For uninteresting reasons I droppedo uto f high school and took the GED. After the science portion, the woman administering the test asked if I liked science. I said "no..." assuming the worst. I scored in the 99th percentile. I got every question right. It took me a while to figure out what happened: I didnt hate science. I hated science *class*. I in fact loved science. But after 11 years, science had gotten so mixed up with science class in my head that I thought I didn't like it. That upset me. I wonder how many others have fallen into that same state I was in.
It's the teachers job to make science fun, not the schools.
Mean student debt is ~$30k/student. When normalized against the wage premium of a college degree, student debt is now lower than in the 70's.