Students are “turned off” by science, read a large number of news articles in the past 10 years. If that’s the case “we must then do something about it.” Obviously we must be teaching it wrong? I doubt it, a reality must set in here; science is hard. The suggestion that science class will be or can be interesting to all students is bullshit. Why the hell are we trying to make a class that everyone likes. Is there any class that everyone likes? Maybe “Eating Chocolate 101”. A class doesn’t need to be fun, in fact shouldn’t need to be fun, in order to do its job.
What should a science class do? Someone smarter than me once wrote:
“Learning is a process of discovering errors in your way of thinking.”
Let's try that.
Science theory and philosophy are—from the student perspective—just the facts learned by other scientists. Should we have students learn lots of these facts? That is what scientist learned before, to enable them to converse in the sciences. Science should force us to confront the way things work. Science is empirical, science proceeds in a skeptical manner. Is this the way the class should progress?
I teach sciences at a school where I have overheard a student say the joking quote “why do I have to take an English class? I speak English.” The sad part of this question/statement was that the student was not joking. I have walked down the hallway with a button advertising a new evolution display at the local museum and had an instructor question me “You don’t believe that do you?”. This is the school in which I teach. In my opinion that instructor shouldn’t be teaching …any subject, because they have showed their ignorance and stupidity to a large degree.
Imagine teaching science in this situation. After many years of teaching I tend to ignore the, “why do we have to learn this”. Simply stated, you don’t, you are adults. If you don’t want to learn this, or anything else, you can go home…but if you want to take the next step to becoming informed about the world we live in, by all means hang around.
I’ve really set this up as a doom and gloom situation but in reality those extremes are balanced by other extremes. A student, not knowingly interested in biology, took my General Biology class. Decided to become a biologist. Got degreed, got a job. I had coffee with them the other day, some 12 years after they attended my class. They are good at their science job; they have had several promotions. They ponder perhaps doing some teaching in the future. A success by any measure. Another student under similar circumstances messaged me the other day looking for some help in a particularly difficult graduate level class. I’m delighted that they thought I was smart enough to help, but in this side-area, outside my expertise, they had progressed beyond my abilities. That, is also a success.
Those who teach science often attempt to make difficult concepts simpler, by analogy or other method. Sometimes if you over simplify the concept, you’re teaching incorrect information. Should we stop teaching a subject because it is challenging? No, this sets aside the A-student from the C-student. If you are thinking everyone should (or deserves) to get an A, you are one of the things wrong with the education system.
I am worried that beyond over simplification there are some attempts to degrade the sciences.
Recently I was sitting on a committee focused on implementing aspects of biotechnology into a program or perhaps starting a biotechnology program. The administrator in charge, not trained in science, was insistent that including a animal science class (with no specifics of what the class was to cover) was enough to enable us to ‘add’ the subtitle “biotechnology” to the program. I asked for particulars regarding what the class was to cover since ‘animal science’ usually was an agriculturally oriented class focused on animal biology. This turned out to be the case, the class covered the biology of species of interest in an agricultural setup and had little discussion of biotechnology practices or methods. The discussion degraded further as it went on to the extent that at one point the administrator suggested the since cows are made of cells and biotechnology dealt with cells then the class was a biotechnology class. An astounding level of oversimplification, misdirection, and downright lies continued to spew from the mouth of the administrator so much so that I assume they voted for Trump. After that meeting, I declined being involved with that particularly half-assed attempt to game the system.
The insistence persisted to such a degree that I, and my biologist colleague, left the meeting never to return to that committee: A further note, we began a biotechnology program centered on the science department, without the involvement of this older committee. The biotechnology program is…wait for it…hard and involves actually biotechnology classes. It is a challenging program, but we have 10 companies ready to snap up those that can persist and get trained in this area. If we ‘lower’ the program’s standards then more students would attend, but companies might stop snapping up the graduates.
Education, college education also suffers from Student apathy.
For this I have no solution: My goal is to bring energy and interest into the classroom and inspire the few that I can.
Take-home Lessons, not necessarily discussed here but this is a run-on, stream of conscious blog:
- Hard does not equal bad.
- You don’t have to like the class, or the instructor, to gain something from the class.
- You didn’t fail the class because the instructor doesn’t like you. You failed because you didn’t/or couldn’t, show a level of mastery of the material.
- Keep thinking, keep asking questions. Care what the answers are.
- Science is responsible for you being alive right now. I’m only mostly joking; more than 1/3 (probably closer to 1/2) of the people you encounter each day would not be alive if science hadn’t progressed since the year 1500. AND it’s not just the medical arm of science, clean water, clean air; you owe your life to science.
No additional readings this month: Damn I'm lazy.