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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.
"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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.