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Normal is overrated

Things of Science





[ The title of this essay is taken from one of the best-loved memories of my childhood — the fascinating and exciting contents of the dark-blue boxes that arrived monthly from my membership in Things of Science (distributed by Science Service, the people who bring you the weekly periodical, Science News). Things of Science was pure delight. Each month brought something wonderful — an adventure in color theory or magnetism, cards impregnated with different odors, beans to plant, special papers to investigate, polarizing filters, aerodynamics… I kept every one and then when I moved out of my parents house, I left them all behind; like many such things, they are no more. I regret the loss.


This essay is dedicated to those memories. ]





US Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham gave a
speech today at
SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center).
Spouse (Rich) has been working at SLAC these past 9 months so he attended the speech, then we talked about it over dinner.


Some excerpts from the speech:


[Children] ask a lot of questions about the world around them, which is certainly where scientists start their work, and they are constant observers of nature, another clear sign of a good scientist.

…

So, given that children are by nature curious about nature, given the quick start in math and science they seem to get in the early grades, and given the advantages they enjoy growing up with Internet access, in a nation that is a global scientific superpower given all this, student achievement in science and math should be off the charts.


But it isn’t.


Somewhere in the process something happens. Our children lose interest in science and math, and they fall behind the rest of the world.

…

American students don’t start out behind those of other countries, but they fall behind during the middle school years.

…

…we should remember that basic knowledge of science and math is part of our common culture. Just as with basic literacy, our nation requires a citizenry that can understand, and function in, the modern world.



The Secretary mentioned a number of current initiatives and programs underway to address the problems mentioned above, then said


That is why today I am announcing a new DOE initiative called STARS: Scientists Teaching and Reaching Students.


This is a bold series of projects which we believe will have a very significant impact on the challenge we face.


First, we will address what is perhaps the most vexing problem in student success in science—the steady decline in achievement after the 4th grade.


Starting today, I will be directing each of our labs to design and execute a new program aimed at bringing 1,000 fifth graders and 1,000 eighth graders to their sites each year for math and science appreciation days, with the goal of exposing a broad range of students at an important time in their lives to the exciting possibilities of science.


In this way, we will reach some 34,000 fifth and eighth graders each year and begin to capture and secure their natural interest in science.



It’s an interesting idea…



We will also work with our partners in government who have science facilities, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, to join us in this effort. And we will encourage businesses that have corporate laboratories to open their labs to this age group that is somehow falling through the cracks when it comes to education in science and math.


But can government and corporate scientists talk to kids? Can they even begin to explain what they are doing in such a way as to engage the interest of children in fifth or eighth grade? And what happens when those kids go back to their schools, to their poor-quality textbooks, their rote-memorization classes and their dull science labs?


…starting this summer with a pilot program, we will bring K-12 teachers to seven of our national labs for extensive training with scientists and engineers with the goal of improving their knowledge of science and their ability to teach. Each teacher will be given a stipend to buy equipment for their schools so they have better tools to do their jobs.


It’s not just equipment or knowledge that’s missing. It’s motivation. I don’t know what things are like in today’s schools. I do know what things were like when I was in school.


Thirty years ago, I was in eighth grade. From elementary through High School, I fully expected I would eventually become a scientist. I loved discovering things. I had subscriptions to Science Digest and Things of Science (requiescant in pace)


But I learned some disturbing things along the way. I learned that discovery, problem solving, and learning aren’t valued by most school systems. I learned that repeating experiments from 100 years ago is more important than designing new ones, that rote memorization is more important than understanding How and Why.


I learned that Science simply isn’t valued by the school system. In my High School (in a University town where a very large percentage of the graduates went on to College) we were required to take three years each of English, Social Studies, and Health & Phys Ed. but only one year each of Math and Science.


I personally took every Science class I could register for, but I was… unusual 🙂 In my Junior year of High School my mother had to write a note to the school, giving me permission to miss lunch period one day a week because the Advanced Biology double-period lab conflicted with lunch on that day. In High School I learned that lunch period was more important than Science. (By the way, I never ate in the High School cafeteria through three years of H.S., not even on the days when “lunch period” was not in conflict with a class.)


In College I majored in Biochemistry with a double major in Computer Science (a discipline that is definitely not taught as a science). I learned to keep good notebooks. I learned how to write reports. I learned exponential notation. And I learned that much of Science today isn’t something you can pick up and touch anymore… Biochemistry, at least, is largely piles of data and a lot of concepts that must largely be taken on faith.


The little girl who delighted in turning over a leaf and discovering a large blue salamander with yellow speckles didn’t much relish the idea that “real” Science seemed to be all about memorizing pathways and collecting reams of data for things she couldn’t see or touch. (Spooling DNA is cool (the first time), but even that only gets done in the very early labs.)


I swapped my major for Microbiology, largely to get out in 4 years but also because, at the Bachelor’s Degree level, Microbiology is still about things you can see and touch (and smell 🙂 I had excellent lab technique but I didn’t really want to be a bench microbiologist. This was partly because I had learned something else. Starting salaries for a B.S. in Micro were really poor.


So I headed off to Grad School (in Microbiology, because that’s what I knew). Even in Grad School, the Thrill of Discovery was not on the curriculum.


I remember one Microbial Genetics lab where we discovered that all of our petri plates were contaminated by some unknown microorganism. It was an interesting bug (at least, to me). It had formed hot pink colonies on all of the media. Had things been up to me, I would have cancelled the scheduled lab and had the students design a set of experiments to identify the unknown critter. Instead, the plates were sent to the autoclave to be sterilized and destroyed and we moved on through our mundane classwork, repeating the same labs that had been done myriad times before.


Shortly thereafter, I discovered Unix, found a new advisor, wrote my thesis, moved to California, became a computer programmer, and never looked back.


I’m still interested in Science. Spouse and Self subscribe to Scientific American and Science News. I’ve worked (as a programmer) at a couple of BioTech firms. Spouse is currently working (as a programmer and documentation specialist) on the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) project at SLAC. We enjoy being “science groupies”. But I don’t regret not being a “scientist”.


I approve of what Secretary Abraham is trying to do (although I’m less sure that I approve of his motivations…). But I think we need a lot more than a few fifth and eight grade field trips or some “mentoring” of K-12 teachers by “real” scientists. We need a new way of thinking about Science. We need to create a culture where Creativity, Discovery, Thinking, Questioning, and Problem Solving are valued.


Secretary Abraham said, in his speech:


We live in a world where entertainers and sports heroes enjoy celebrity and fame for what they achieve. As a result, young people are inspired to take up things like sports, music and acting. I believe it’s time we start putting our science leaders on the same footing as other celebrities. We must do this not only because their achievements are so important, but because such focus will help us to encourage children to want to learn science and math, in addition to tennis and basketball.


The words are right. The goals are laudable. Can we implement the changes necessary to achieve the goals and make the words come true?

Vicki Brown's avatar

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Vicki Brown

I am an information technologist and former technical writer/ editor /software developer. These days, I’m largely retired.

2 responses to “Things of Science”

  1. Steve Brubaker Avatar
    Steve Brubaker

    My experience is exactly the same. There is no interest at low, medium and even the highest levels in education in finding scientists who are capable of original thought. Even at the PhD level it’s just about ‘jumping through hoops.’
    One problem is the way we teach. In engineering there were students with capacious memories. Tests inevitably covered homework problems. They would get A’s by simply solving every problem possible before the test., and writing a memorized answer. Well, what could be farther from the spirit of understanding and practicing engineering?
    When, in the course of my industrial career, I used material that I learned in some part of my education, the people I worked with were ever in awe. I was thought of as a god-like being. I guess more people were memorizing homework problems than I realized.
    The first exam I had in engineering that was a test to see if I understood the fundamentals was the EIT – taken at the end of fourth year. One of the students whose grade point average was .75 higher than mine said “wow, that was the hardest engineering exam I’ve ever taken.” I was thinking “Wow, that was the easiest engineering exam I have ever taken.” It was a pretty good test of comprehension instead of calculation.
    Engineering exams were designed to see if you could “get the right answer.” Not to see whether you internalized the concepts. Same thing in grad school.
    During finals week of my third seamster I was reading my conduction heat transfer text – a text used by my instructor to teach every PhD level mechanical engineering student in the Energy and Fluids group at UT Austin for perhaps twenty or thirty years. Saw a graph in chapter two that looked ‘weird’ to me, so I did the math and got a different answer. I wrote it up, and suggested that the author had left a term out of his solution of the differential equation. Well, it was the first time my instructor had heard about it. He checked the math and agreed.
    A week later I visited his office to show him a little movie I had made of isotherms moving in time in a temporal solution to a thermal problem. I was really proud because I had to learn just enough Pascal to call the right Mac drawing routines to draw the graphs over an over in time. It was an ‘extra credit’ project for which I got no extra credit. Same for the error in the textbook. “I wanted to tell you,” said the professor, “You got the highest B in the class.”
    In grad school I understood the material reasonably well – better than most students – but I always made calculation errors on exams. I got B’s in every course. I was too humiliated even to take the PhD qualifying exams. I was less concerned that I wouldn’t have mastered the material than that the people judging me for entrance would find my performance in their classes just not up to par. Certainly if their grades meant anything, I was an under-average grad student. Yet, I had a Freshman English teacher (who also gave me a B because I wrote a searing missive entitled ‘It’s how you sit’ that – for reasons I cannot remember managed to skewer my professor – and earned a D) who told me ‘you’re the only engineering student I’ve met with any imagination.’ We’ll it seems to me that imagination is pretty important when you are in the business of inventing new things. Or am I wrong? Was Einstein wrong, too?
    I think there must be at least three BIG issues in science education.
    The first, interestingly, is reading. According to a recent chart I saw in the Economist, high school age Americans lag far behind people in England and Canada in reading capability. Reading is more than seeing the word ‘red’ and knowing that it means ‘red.’ There is a whole evaluative thought process that is supposed to be running in the background. Except for one elective English literature classes in college, I have seen no evidence that our educational system does anything to teach, measure, or encourage this process. The most important aspect of learning by reading is missing; the understanding part. We do nothing to promote, encourage, or grow this part. Required is the good question and a new teaching paradigm discussed below.
    The second is calculation. American students lag students in just about every other nation that has compulsory education. I think one of the problems is that the discipline required to learn mathematics seems to be at odds with the ideas we have about ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of the Lexus’ It seems that we should not have to work that hard. And since there are so many ‘get rich quick’ schemes in American mythology, it just seems that there is no possible reason one would have to learn math. In other countries where being middle class, professional, and respectable are laudable goals, the idea of working hard to get the requisite skills is still part of the ethos. Our inability to do math symptomatic of a deep cultural problem. Only a serious economic disaster like the great depression or world war two. will succeed in changing this. And that, alone will not be sufficient; it had temporary effects on two generations, but we, as Americans have collectively forgotten all lessons those two events could have taught us.
    The third idea is closely related to the first. It is about how we evaluate students’ progress. We do it the way you evaluate the dimensions of a piston ring on an assembly line. When you apply mass production principles to educating students, what you get is interchangeable parts. But that is not the loftiest goal of education.
    While it is true that one of the major functions of education is to turn out interchangeable parts – students with skills that suit them to various typical entry level functions in the corporate world – it is uniformly true that in a dynamic environment of the corporate world, teaching students to THINK instead of to JUMP THROUGH HOOPS would serve both student and corporation better.
    One is tempted to blame this all on multiple choice tests, but the multiple choice test is more a symptom than the problem. I have encountered multiple choice tests in Physics classes and in EIT and Achievement tests that actually test for conceptual understanding. But this is half the pie. The other half is being able to produce new information. The educational system rarely tests or encourages growth in this area this until after one has passed the qualifying exam for the PhD. By then it is too late.
    The problem is some assumption that pervades the entire educational system. I think it hinges on the function of the teacher.
    In America we think the function of the teacher is to lecture and give grades. Well, neither of these should be true. The function should be to get students to master – i.e. understand and think critically about – the material. Along the way the evaluate their progress and prod them along.
    I think of the movie (The Paper Chase) starring John Houseman (remember the Smith Barney ad “we earn it” ) : Harvard law students are grilled by this curmudgeonly prof who roasts them thoroughly if they do not provide cogent, thoughtful answers that demonstrate mastery of the material. Here is teaching at its best. The art of the good question forces the student to master the reading assignment, not simply memorize its contents. But teacher do neither. Above 8th grade, the lecture should be outlawed except to clarify issues that are not being grasped by all students because of gaps in their reading materials. Students should learn from books, contemplation, and questions.
    The questions, if we study history, are not ‘in what year did Columbus discover America?’ This is just a number. It is irrelevant. More meaningful are, “how did the discovery of America and the Spanish inquisition relate to each other?” “In what ways did the discovery of America change Europe?” (This is a question whose answer is incomplete without a good reading of Gulliver’s travels.) “How did the Spanish view of America differ from the English view and what can we learn from this?”
    And if you care about the year in which the discovery was made, then ask: “who was in power in Spain and how did this contribute to the quest? (The unification of Spain, the driving out of the Moors, a process that took 500 years…)” What lands did Spain rule? (Don’t forget the Netherlands; this is where much of the middle class fled during the Inquisition..) What else was going on in Europe at the time? These are the relevant questions. I learned the answers by watching TV. Not from texts.
    These are crucial questions: if we, as Americans are going to make good choices in politics, art, literature, and the exercise of might, we need to understand some things. But we dont. We simply don’t understand much. Except, perhaps, how to accessorize. We don’t understand how to Ask Questions. We don’t understand what matters. We don’t understand how to get people to evaluate and report. These are all central to the practice of good Science. And to the effective practice of Law. And pretty much everything else.
    The educational process that teaches us to read, to reason about art, history, literature, politics, and SCIENCE is broken. Caput. In grades 4-12, 4 yrs of college, and 3 yrs of grad school I bumped into three or four instructors who were capable of asking questions or who understood their importance. Two were good at carrying out an effective Q&A session and giving strong support assignments.
    If we want are children to be more than stamped parts, we need to think differently about all of education. It is not about teaching facts. It is about getting and evaluating information. Until we do that, American students, en masse, will be inferior to students throughout much of the world.
    P.S. about TV. Does viewing TV ruin our kids? Well, yes and no. When it interferes with doing meaningful homework or when it interferes with social interactions it does some harm. But it also gives us common experiences which are vital in binding us together as a society. And sometimes TV programs are much better at getting us to ask questions than are our teachers! You’ll probably get a much better education in civics by watching McNeil News hour every night than by reading a twelve foot high stack of high school history texts.
    P.P.S. I forgot to comment on the comments by the secretary of education. His ideas are doomed to failure. Since our whole approach to education is totally F***ed, these little ‘get people interested’ programs are destined to fail. If they attract bright students who can think, before long they will be beaten into the ground by the system and end up selling real estate in Dubuque Iowa. If they attract ones who are just good at jumping through hoops, we’ll end up with a few more generations of expensively educated scientists and engineers who are dumber than Mississippi mud.
    So much for my rosy view of the future.

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  2. Simple Country Physicist Avatar
    Simple Country Physicist

    American science is not broken, but it is neutered. We have passed beyond the era of Big Science to the era of Institutional Science. There are three primary types of this: Academic Science; Commercial Science; and Government Science. Academic Science is the science practiced in universities. This type of science is highly incestuous and tainted with political and social correctness. The incest comes from most of this science being funded with government and commercial grants that are awarded based on the review of a proposal by a peer committee. If the peer committee doesn’t like the proposal, no grant. The committee is staffed with people who have gotten a lot of grants. Is the pattern evident?
    The political/social correctness is another limitation. You can’t do research, much less publish, on any topic that violates social correctness. No experimentation on animals because that’s unfair and cruel; no experimentation on people because you might discover differences between men and women, or between people whose ancestors left Africa thousands of years ago and people whose ancestors left Africa a hundred years ago. And the physical science types and engineering types can’t work on anything that might threaten the commercial and government status quo.
    Commercial science is even worse. The only science that commercial organizations pay for any more is that which supports their current operations. But it has to be relevant quickly because we have to have a good ROI. And it has to have cheap implementation that produces product that can be sold dearly so we have good ROI.
    Government science is perhaps the worst of the three. It has no intent other than to make the government a smart buyer, to, in essence, keep the commercial firms honest in their dealings with the government. It doesn’t work because the scientists don’t get the freedom to do real science, they have to work on low risk projects that can be bragged about, and half their time is spent filling out forms and going to meetings.
    The school side is broken. The public schools have largely been reduced to baby sitting roles, partly because of economics and partly because of parental apathy, but mostly because of certification. Teachers today get and keep their jobs based on the education courses they have had, not the (e.g.,) science courses and experience they’ve had. All these poor folks know is education methodology and maybe some of what is in the textbooks they use. No wonder they don’t want to see any creativity or imaginative questions. They’re afraid of them!
    The average science teacher in the public school has half of a major in a science, probably Biology, and probably never took Calculus. And they’ve never had any real experience in science, either theory or experiment, only teaching practicums.
    I do not want to belittle the need for teachers to have some education knowledge and skills, but one of the purposes of education is to make the student better able to learn. That means that those who teach need to tailor their skills to the grade level. Those who teach the introductory grades need to teach the students how to learn while teaching them the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic (to misuse a cliche.) But by the time students get into high school, their teachers need to be less concerned with educational pedagogy and more with pushing content and experience.
    The colleges and universities are almost as bad. Faculty who only teach get half pay. Those who do research get full pay from the grants. So the best are incentivized to not teach. Universities have become severly commercialized. This is why the half pay thing exists, the grants are so important, and the curricula are dominated by rigorous and rigid requirements. Money flows based on how many seats are registered (not filled like the public schools,) how many degrees are granted, etc. Thus great care is exerted to make sure that students have little freedom to seek electives that don’t bring money into the major department or even, horrors, the school. Engineers should never take courses in art or math or science because that diverts money to those colleges.
    Are we doomed? Maybe. So long as the country is dominated by big business and big government that caters to big business, this situation will persist and worsen. Perhaps a Rennaissance, a people’s intellectual revolution, is needed. It would certainly be in the best American tradition. Einstein identified that there were two ways to do physics (and I’ll generalize to science as a whole.) There was the “professional” way where one worked in a university and did science for pay, and the “rabbinical” way where one worked at another job and did science as a hobby. (Recall that a professional is just someone who gets paid for doing their hobby.) He started out in the rabbinical mode and once he became recognized switched to the professional mode.
    Those with an interest in science can certainly assay the rabbinical mode. They can work as realty agents or programmers during the day and study and do research outside of work. Science is about discovery so discovering how to be self educating is not out of line. If we hold ourselves to that higher standard of internal discipline it has to spill over into the society around us and drag it up, by competition if no other way.

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