Triple Helix

I forgot how easy it is to loose track of the audience is when you are trying to teach a lesson. It’s funny because I recall being in a similar kind of desk in at a middle school  years ago and the Urge to shoot paper spit wads is unforgettable. What I also remember thinking that I actually wanted to care about science class, but just couldn’t. It would be years later that I learned to channel my energies into social science.  So, when explaining air masses to middle school students, I caught myself doing the internal “why aren’t they fascinated by this” rhetorical game and managed to stop for a second. Why didn’t they care about weather fronts and storm fronts? To me, it conjured up images of powerful storms, exciting rain clouds and lightening arcing through the clouds like the backbone of some terrible beast. More practically, it was useful for figuring out how to decide where to live and what kind of weather would likely be there.

These are all thoughts that I have because of my background. I’m a grad student. I’ve done the transformation from lay person into scientist that education expects. I have had the opportunity to make these choices about where to live and how I was going to spend my money on clothing that combats weather because I’m in that part of my life. What do they care about?

“Hey. You wanna know why it was raining last week instead of snowing?”

I find more and more that this is the best way to start a conversation that goes somewhere useful. While underlying the question is some science concept that I think is important, I think just expressing knowledge to the kids as something that they can have if they want makes a big difference. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter if they fully grasp what you were talking about. I explained to an honors student today about bell curves in statistics in relationship to flipping coins and averages. I think she sorta got what I was implying, but I could see her really get it when the class gathered all their data together and it came closer to fitting the bell curve than her individual data had. “See? As you gather more and more data, it comes closer to the average we talked about”. I don’t know if I changed her life, but I know she understood that she was given a peek into the world of something bigger than the 8^th grade.

The next question comes up about how I can translate that into a teaching method for more kids. To begin talking about bell curves, I had to ask her if she was decent in algebra. What about the kids who aren’t decent in algebra yet or have a hard time connecting these two abstracts together? The route I’ve taken thus far is to relate something that we’re learning to something that they might want. Thus, the importance of learning about mineral identification becomes the search for gold through minerals found in close proximity. The understanding of the earth’s crust and layers becomes a talk on why the earth spins the way it does. A life science discussion moves from the idea of mitosis and meiosis to why these forms of reproduction enabled life to emerge victorious on our planet during periods of great change.

More and more, I’m learning that the best way to begin talking about science is not with what they need to know or what they should know, but a simple question:

“Hey. Do you guys want to learn something cool?”

I was recently watching an “RSA Animate” video, featuring Sir Ken Robinson.  He was talking about the reforming of 1st world education, and how countries are fundamentally reinventing their current systems.  The (seemingly) paradoxical trends of economic uncertainty and unprecedented interconnectivity as a result of global commerce has left many governments thinking about how to educate their young citizens.  You can see the video for yourself here:

RSA Animate’s Sir Ken Robinson

With that video fresh in my head I walked a few blocks away for some coffee. On my way, I just so happened to overhear a conversation between a parent and their college-aged son.  The student was complaining about school, and the parent- after having listened to the difficult classes said, “Well, just wait until you get into the real world.  Then you’ll see what’s difficult.”  The son couldn’t think of a good response.  There were a few more sentences back and forth until the pair moved on to a different subject.

This all begs the question- “Do we still believe in school?”  Should we?  Its a question I bring with me to Hackett every day.  The teachers certainly respect the job and the roll it plays in society.  The students respect each other, and they respect anyone that can show them how to make sense of the world and do well in it.  Everyone in the building knows that learning is important, and that the uninformed will not succeed.  But there’s a disconnect.  No one can agree on the information that’s important in the world.

While I’m not saying I have the answers to the questions Sir Robinson poses.  It seems clear so far, that the key lies in making learning tangible.  Making it applicable.  Making it real.  Science and math become more than words on a page and memorized terms when inquiry is left to the world around you.  You think about math and science all the time when you can recognize that it is happening all of the time.  Presenting knowledge in terms of subjects and sections worked when students’ options for work were well-known and established fields. But today we have all new kinds of challenges that demand new industries that we haven’t even invented yet.  Presenting knowledge in terms of resources to solve problems becomes the new name of the game. We can’t tell our kids what they’ll need to know, but we can help them learn to find the answers on their own.

The students always ask how much the equipment costs.  Any kind of exotic glassware, strange chemical, or goofy goggles brings up questions like, “Where do you buy these?” “Can I eat it?” “Who invented this?” “Can I do this experiment differently?” These questions bring up topics of economics, nutrition, history, and science.  But we cannot cover these interesting questions because we have a unit to complete.  There is a preset curriculum made under the presumption what we know what the next generation will need to know.

I’d like to wrap this up with another bit of media.  This time, from a web comic called XKCD:

Some kids have a well-defined passion and they need no further encouragement.  They’ll spend the weekend messing with PERL or they’ll spend hours with a microscope.  They seek out the information they crave, and find it with the newest technology available.  Could school be a place where kids find their passion?  Could they integrate mobile devices, black box theaters, and Playstations? I hope to answer questions like these in the comings months.  I hope you find my observations interesting, and I’ll try to regularly add some media to my posts.