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!"

Comments

School isn't there to enrich lives

[rsilvergun]

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...

Re:School isn't there to enrich lives

[Chris Mattern]

If kids need more sleep, wouldn't it be sufficient to go to bed sooner?

No. We have times that are natural for us to go to sleep and to wake up, regulated mainly by our perception of sunlight. This is shown by studies of shift workers (Working nights and sleeping days is very bad for your health).

While the natural bedtime and waking time is different for each person, studies have also shown that both, on the whole, get later for teens (and then get earlier again as we age). It really would be better if high school students could sleep in. Making them be at school at 7 AM is not good. Your point that it was made for the convenience of the working parents is quite true, but doesn't make it any better physically for the kids.

Re:School isn't there to enrich lives

[sjames]

Again, no. Small children naturally wake by the crack of dawn and are ready to go soon after. Teens naturally wake later. They can force themselves up earlier given sufficient motivation, but they will not be ready to learn at that time.

Re:School isn't there to enrich lives

[Chris Mattern]

Yeah, 8:45 AM or even 9 AM was usual for me too, but that was a long time ago. Most of the suburbs around the DC area had opening bells for high school of 7:25 AM until just recently (like this school year) when they moved them 20 minutes or more later, largely because of the research I just cited.

Re:School isn't there to enrich lives

[TapeCutter]

Small children naturally wake by the crack of dawn and are ready to go soon after.

It starts happening again when you're in your 50's, but the only place you are going is the toilet.

Science Requires Effort

[mlookaba]

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.

Re:Science Requires Effort

[PvtVoid]

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.

What, exactly, is useful about memorizing facts, in a world where any fact you want is at your fingertips on demand? Being usefully conversant in facts is not about memorization, it's about understanding relationships between things. Understanding how stuff works. The facts you need will be memorized along the way.

Re:Science Requires Effort

[AthanasiusKircher]

What, exactly, is useful about memorizing facts, in a world where any fact you want is at your fingertips on demand? Being usefully conversant in facts is not about memorization, it's about understanding relationships between things. Understanding how stuff works.

I agree with you that the "understanding relationships" etc. is more important in being an educated person than memorized rote knowledge.

The problem, however, is that one actually needs something in your brain to "understand relationships" between. You can't "understand how stuff works" if you don't even know there is "stuff" to begin with.

I'm absolutely NOT arguing for lots of rote memorization. But I think a common error (and an increasingly serious problem) today is the idea that memorization is worthless because... well, "Google can answer it." Yeah, that's great if you're looking up some atomic fact. But what if finding an answer to a problem depends on connecting seemingly unrelated atomic facts? If they are both in your brain, you may be able to figure it out. But if not, you're out of luck (unless someone has solved that exact problem before and posted it on the internet).

Traditional specialization in a career, for example, usually required adaptability. If you were a mechanic or a machinist or whatever, having 25 years of experience wasn't just about making fewer mistakes -- it was about having a brain full of knowledge that could make such connections when needed. That often included a lot of obscure facts derived from experience... "Oh, don't even bother trying that part on that model, because it uses X and although they say it's different from Y, both the mechanisms on based on principle Z."

Memorization can SOMETIMES be a way to fast-track understanding and make those subsequent connections easier to make. Memorization for the sake of memorization is stupid, but if you're memorizing information that you can actually use on a regular basis, it might actually be helpful in doing stuff like you say: "understanding relationships between things" requires knowing something about "things."

The facts you need will be memorized along the way.

That does tend to happen when you use information frequently. But sometimes it can actually be helpful to force oneself to KNOW stuff in advance. (I can't believe I actually need to argue for this....) And sometimes you don't know what you might need to know, and knowing SOMETHING that is potentially relevant can give you an advantage over someone else who just has to blindly Google things rather than actually knowing anything.

In medieval times, when books were expensive and scarce, there used to be an entire "art of memory," a method which facilitated memorization of long passages of writings and even entire books. There were drawings showing people "eating books" too -- this was the symbolism given to the act of memorization, because once one had these complete texts in one's brain, it allows a much more thorough "digestion" of the ideas and contents of these texts.

I'm not saying that we should go back to that. But there's something different about knowledge that is actually in your brain, and memorization can sometimes be a useful TOOL to get it there.

Re:Science Requires Effort

[Hognoxious]

What, exactly, is useful about memorizing facts, in a world where any fact you want is at your fingertips on demand?

Because there may come a time where they aren't.

Interesting fact: Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Francis Bacon were all totally shit at using Google.

Re:Science Requires Effort

[serviscope_minor]

I think though that one naturally memorizes stuff. If you keep having to make use of a fact and keep having to look it up, after not especially long you commit it to memory automatically. The trouble with just mindless rote memorization that it's awfully easy to memorize wrong without understanding, awfully easy to have a list of facts but no idea how to use them and it's boring as all hell and guaranteed to put off the majority of students.

Do, rather than memorize and the memorization will come naturally.

Re:Science Requires Effort

[turbidostato]

"What, exactly, is useful about memorizing facts"

They are the bricks to build comprehension.

"in a world where any fact you want is at your fingertips on demand?"

Facts outside your brain are of no value. In order to get value as nodes to tie connections in between you need to already have them in your brain.

"The facts you need will be memorized along the way."

Are you sure?

Just like Homer's use of epithets basically made them into a single substantive, it seems USA is changing "memory" into "rotten memory" as if it were a single word. It isn't: memory is a most useful tool, and exercising it is only good for growing minds. Change your education system to avoid rote memorization but don't make the mistake of thinking that all memorization is rotten.

Not everything is fun

[Yergle143]

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.

Re:Not everything is fun

[PvtVoid]

Maybe we should stop raising children to think that everything is fun.
Impactful science is a heck of a lot of work.

Yes, but it's also more fun than just about anything else if you're doing it right. The great breakthroughs in science, as in art, come from minds that are full of play.

Re: Not everything is fun

[J-1000]

Spoken like a horrible teacher. Your problem is that you interpret fun to mean unimportant, easy, or silly. In fact, fun as it is used here simply means that the student discovers and embraces the desire to do it. Learning to play music isn't fun? That attitude is how you become a crappy musician.

Science isn't a game

[mattwarden]

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.

Re:Science isn't a game

[AthanasiusKircher]

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

Re:Science isn't a game

[Anonymous Coward]

Science isn't supposed to be fun.

Speaking as someone with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and who is currently working in a scientific laboratory (as in, it's Sunday afternoon and I'm literally sitting at my desk in lab while I type this), this statement comes as a surprise to me.

I definitely didn't choose it for my health (viz. I'm working in lab on a Sunday afternoon), and the money certainly isn't all that great. "Fame and fortune" are not really in the cards, either (there's no Kaley Cuoco knocking on my door) - the most I can hope for is respect among my peer group in the rather narrow field I'm in. Given the current science funding climate and the abundance of Ph.D.s in my field, job certainty also isn't all that grand either.

So why am I doing it? Because I enjoy it. Because there is immense satisfaction in staring the world in the face and wrestling knowledge from it's byzantine grasp. Is science a laugh a minute and all excitement? Certainly not. It can be slow, tedious, and at points soul crushing. I have yet to meet a scientist who doesn't look at their time as a Ph.D. candidate and think that most of it was a pointless waste. And still ... "third time pays for all", as they say, and the good times outweigh the bad. It *is* enjoyable, and any time I forget that, I just need to go to a seminar where a colleague is presenting their latest research, and I'm reminded about how fun and interesting this whole enterprise really is.

So I, as a scientist, completely reject your statement that "science isn't supposed to be fun". If you're dong it right, it *is* fun and it *should* be. But it's fun in the same way that playing sports is fun - you have moment of glory in the game, but tempered by hard work and perseverance during practice, with an underlying satisfaction about doing a job right. It's not nonstop excitement, but then neither is anything else in the world.

I certainly agree that the "I Fucking Love Science" crowd really doesn't understand science -- but in part that's due to the very way we're teaching science that's being decried in the article. Science is presented as amazing knowledge bequeathed upon the world by mysterious adepts. The "How come? Why? What's this?" attitude which is really the core of science is replaced by "Thus sayeth SCIENCE!" proclamations. Actual scientist who do actual science have a much more "play like" attitude to the process: "what happens when I do X?" "I want to tweak X, Y and Z, and figure out what happens." The grade school formalism of "scientific methodology" is a caricature of what actually happens (much like the "how a bill becomes a law" story is a caricature). And this stilted formalism only serves to cement the image of scientist as stolid masters of arcana whose word is "truth".

So, yeah, ccience is a method, and it is rigorous, but it's fun, too. And people would be better off if they understood why it's fun.

Science is dangerous and math is stressful

[Tokolosh]

"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.

Re:Science is dangerous and math is stressful

[Rhywden]

When I'm doing my safety lecture, I'm always demonstrating why some behaviours are not smart. Either by showing videos and photos, or actually doing an experiment which "goes wrong".

Much better if pupils know why some stuff is forbidden.

However, I'm, also showing them that the acids and lyes they'll be working with are not something to be massively afraid of. Respectful, yes. Afraid, no.

Science is really two topics

[joe_frisch]

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.

Not just science ...

[Xaemyl]

This is a problem for school overall. Its pretty fucking boring.

Re:Time vs. "fun"

[PvtVoid]

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.

We had "Hot Wheels week" in high school physics

[sandytaru]

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.

Re:Time vs. "fun"

[Anonymous Coward]

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!]

New Paradigm in Education

[trout007]

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.