Science education

I am a female scientist-in-training.  I plan to have a career in science and education, even knowing that if I do go the academic research route I’m not making the most sound economic or career decision possible.

I really don’t care.  I love science.  I love finding out about the properties that make this world work on a fundamental level.  I’m fascinated by the fact that light is made up of electric and magnetic waves traveling perpendicular to each other. That we can use isotopes of hydrogen to probe the importance of atomic vibrations in friction.  How the lack of certain peaks in NMR spectra are just as important as the peaks that are there.

I don’t know where my love of science comes from, but it’s there.  And with it comes the desire to help other people see the beauty in the world through science.  This is why I plan to teach high school science, at least for a little while.  It’s why I want to see a revolution in how we approach science and math education on all levels.

Too often we force the minutia of science of math and science on our students.  Don’t get me wrong, the minutia does play an important role in teaching our students.  But it’s not the only tool we have in our arsenal.  Science is exciting, beautiful, scary, and always changing.  Why do we not show our students this more often?  Too often we get stuck in rigid thought patterns.  We are constantly failing our students when we fail to acknowledge, or sometimes are completely unaware of, the fact that when we introduce new concepts, like the conservation of mass or multiplication, that they’re not getting the whole story.  That if they continue to study chemistry, they can come back to me some day and tell me I got it wrong.

I think a lot of the problem here stems from how we view science and math as a culture.   It’s hard, it’s for the nerds.  Why would I need to know calculus?  Well, besides giving you another way to look at how the world works? Look at the technology that surrounds us.  Just being able to read this post is the culmination of biology, chemistry, math, and physics.  Yet how many people can even explain how a battery works from a very basic chemical or physical standpoint?  I mean this is a device that has a profound impact on our lives.  But there’s a cultural of intellectual apathy when it comes to almost any subject, but especially math and science.

So when I encountered the article How Our Culture Keeps Children Out of Science by Peter Woods in the Chronicle of Higher Education I thought that I’d be reading a piece that points out the problems we face with things like ID, how kids are constantly bombarded with the message that science is for losers, that teaching for test scores is a waste of energy.  What I got instead was an initially coherent piece that turned to garbage.

About 2/3 of the way through we get this oh so lovely quote:

The science "problems" we now ask students to think about aren’t really science problems at all. Instead we have the National Science Foundation vexed about the need for more women and minorities in the sciences.

And let’s not forget poor Larry Summers:

President Lawrence H. Summers was pushed out of Harvard University for speculating (in league with a great deal of neurological evidence) that innate difference might have something to do with the disparity in numbers of men and women at the highest levels of those field.

Translation:  It’s all the fault of those damn bitches and uppity minorities that American science education is so poor, and that a great man like Larry Summers was fired for just telling it as it is.

When I decided to look into this guy, I went to the National Association of Scholars on found this.

We uphold the principle of individual merit and oppose racial, gender, and other group preferences.

Translation: Only us white males are good enough for the rigor and intellectual integrity necessary to make it in the world of academia.

This type of bullshit is part of the entire cultural problem surrounding math and science education, and society in general.  This type of thinking is predicated on the belief that women and minorities aren’t important.  That it’s alright to ignore the needs and potential of large portions of the population. Because when we do acknowledge them, we’re forcing many of the people who hold these beliefs to confront the fact that their position is based on hundreds of years of white, male privilege.

Science education can be vastly improved when we reach out to all our students, and especially the students that are not being .  We can motivate so many people to want to pursue an education or career in science and technology by giving our students a wide variety of mentors and role models.  And the infusion of ideas and culture of learning that can come when you bring together people with different backgrounds and experiences is simply amazing.

And the only reason to be "concerned" with such attempts is quite simply a belief that "everyone else" isn’t good enough.