Why we hate science, 2

Leslie and I walked along the edge of the Atlantic this afternoon, arguing just what that meant. She believes the edge is ephemeral, abstract, and I drew a line at the highest point of the last wave. It was a pointless discussion, and done in play, but it gets back to the words thing. So many words approximate what we think we know.

If we knew what we were talking about, we wouldn't be so chatty.

From Fishing Destin Guide

I saw a sand flea on its side. I picked it up to look at it, and it kicked its legs a bit. I dug a hole at the edge of the ocean to give it a chance to survive, and accidentally uncovered another one. I dug another hole, disturbed yet another one. Thousands upon thousands of sand fleas lay under our feet, betrayed by the dying one lolling upside down in the tiny trench washed by the surf.

I buried it an inch or two, said a prayer, and walked on.

There is far more to this universe than we'll ever know. 

***

To reject expertise, to reject scientists, is not the same as to reject science, but the distinction can be fuzzy. Science research can be (and is) dictated by powerful folks who drive our economic engines. Scientists can be (and are) influenced by money, by rewards, by fame--everybody wants to be a rock star.

Science itself, though, can be practiced by anyone with a reasonably intact brain and a decent command of written language (a scarce commodity), anyone willing to follow where the natural world takes you.

I might say the same for democracy, substituting "rational thought" for "natural world"--and this similarity drives my passion for teaching in a Title 1 public school system. I'm not worried about the children in private schools, nor those in the elite suburban public schools. Our culture has their backs.

Democracy wasn't promoted by our British aristocratic roots--the first man killed in the Boston Massacre was once an American slave, a dockworker of both African and Wampanoag descent. If we ever remember our own history, we might avoid our habit of electing Tories.

***

The problem with science is that it tells the truth, at least as far as the natural world goes. You do this, you get that. We don't always understand the "that," and much of the creative joy in science is creating models of the "that" that can explain all this stuff outside our brains in a way we can understand.

• Our current dominant economic system requires "growth"--it does not recognize natural limits.
• Our current dominant political system depends on raw emotions--it does not recognize rational thought.
• Our current dominant culture requires magical thinking and deference to humans--it does not recognize the mystery around us.

I am part of the bourgeoisie, a Christian when it's convenient, a social liberal who walks by the homeless, and I still get teary-eyed with a good rendition of our national anthem. I thrive in our human community, though many of my students do not.

Then I pick up a "dead" sand flea, and its feeble kicks tickle the palm of my hand, reminding me I know nothing, then dig up several others while trying, foolishly, to save the one.

***

The push for STEM education comes about for all the wrong reasons, and will fail for the same. We need to kick China's ass, we need to fix the economy, we need to kick Russia's ass, we need to provide workers for our multinational corporations, we need to kick India's ass, we need to get more energy, we need to kick Europe's ass....

Science, real science, starts with the first time a child's simple observation of the natural world conflicts with what she knows, the first time she realizes that the world most of us live in, as comforting as it may seem day to day, is made of mirrors. She has a choice to make, a huge choice that will push her into a new world that will separate her from her culture.

I have known a few real scientists in my classrooms, and most of them do not thrive in our building. The life of a scientist requires hard work, and may pay less than the high school science teacher who pushes them into a field he himself could not master.

You can no more make professional scientists by pushing high school science child than you can by eliminate obesity by requiring every child to take physical education.

We do it anyway.

What do you remember from high school science?

Sand flea by Fishing Destin Guide, permission pending

The STEM chart from New Voices for Research

Approximation to adequacy: why we hate science

The individual concepts of children, and the individual concepts of most persons who live and die in this world, are exceedingly vague, crude, and obscure. That is, they are vague, crude, and obscure in comparison with any approximation to adequacy.

Francis W. Parker, "Observation," Talks on Pedagogics, 1894

Leslie and I startled a black duck-like critter as we stepped over to the other side of a jetty. It scrabbled its way back to the water, its legs flailing against the sand. It had a bright orange-red beak, and it swam a lot better than it ran.

What was it? Not sure. We'll find out eventually by putting together its shape, color, location, season--all things recorded by others, things I can look up. Right now I suspect it was a black scoter. A few minutes on the internet, and I'll figure it out.

***

Science requires observation, of course, but it also requires a way to record those observations. Humans (and other mammals) when left on their own will see what they need to see. Context matters.

Writing things down matters more than we realize--we give life to words, because words make moments permanent. We can compare a moment we had two years ago with the one we have now. It turns out our words are less fallible malleable than our memories. Before the written word, our stories were certain and true.

Words make our stories more certain, and over time, less true. We trust the book (in whatever form) over our elders now, no small reason we have formalized our warehousing of the old. We no longer need the old folks for their collective memory, and books don't soil their beds.

***

Science works because the natural world follows consistent rules, and because those who practice science trust their written words over their intuitions. It still upsets me that an American dime (2.3 grams) falls as fast as the  CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (almost 3500 grams) when I drop both from about 8 feet on the first day of class.

They both hit the floor at the same time, every time.

I know that they will, but I still don't believe it.  Cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance hurts, a lot, and for good reason. A mammal who hesitates, who is confused by competing interpretations of its environment, may soon end up in pieces, torn by the talons and teeth of a critter a bit more focused.

If my students aren't grabbing their brains complaining that all this science stuff hurts, then I'm not teaching science, I'm teaching trivia. I teach a lot of trivia.

Ripping away the comfort of cultural reality creeps people out. On a rare day, I'll see a glimpse of fear in a child's eye as she feels the floor drop under her feet. I won't push this, but I will acknowledge it--"the world is bigger than any of us can know" or maybe "welcome to science."

What I won't do is pretend it's not terrifying, this cognitive dissonance, bucking hundreds of millions of years of evolution that taught us to fear the shadows, fear the dissonance.

I'm sure a English Language Arts teacher sees the same when a child grasps that Gilgamesh shares his fears of death in a poem written almost 3,000 years ago. An art teacher sees the joy on a child's face as she recognizes the power of her hands and her imagination, so rarely expressed in a classroom.

None of us see it during review for the state tests.

Yes, I am working my way to this...
Thanks, Kate Tabor, for the book!

Distracted

I lost a friend this week, a strong woman who once jumped out of airplanes to fight forest fires, and lost her fight with some vagrant cells after a long, long battle.

None of us are permanent, of course, a flippant statement when one is healthy.

She's dead, I'm still here.

That won't always be true for me. Nor you. Nor our students.

***

I took a walk today and saw gannets crashing headfirst into the bay. Their wings fluoresced against the gray March sky. Some folks believe that gannets go blind from their forceful foraging. I used to believe this, too.

I am easily confused by words, and trust them far more than the trust they earn. Most literate folks do.

The edge of the sea defies words, and will continue to defy words, and so long as words are mere symbols (which is all they'll ever be), this will be true. The edge of the sea defies recorded images, recorded sounds. I walk along its edge several times a week, and every time it surprises me.

Our problem is not so much our inability to train our lambs to manipulate the abstract, though that is a necessary skill for anyone landless who wants to survive in our culture. Our problem is that we forget that the abstract is dependent on the world.

Global is abstract. Core standards is abstract. God is abstract. Country is abstract.

A mudflat in March, the aroma of dead critters mixed with the milt marking those who will replace them, cannot be captured by our imagination, never mind our words. What's real exceeds what we know.

The abstract matters, of course, but is utterly dependent on the real. Death does us a favor by reminding us of this. Every time I lose a friend I briefly become a better teacher.

Then I forget.

Bye, Christine

Thank you Steve Dembo and Discovery!

I had the rare and wonderful opportunity to hang with some edu-gliterati folks at Discovery Education's Beyond the Textbook last week. It was fun hanging with the circuit crowd, listening to them talk of gigs, comparing notes and frequent flyer miles. Many had an aura about them, and I chased most of them down for autographs. I felt like a kid in the candy store.

I know a few were surprised to see me there, none as surprised as me. I've never written a book, never started a WikiEduSomething or a #EduSomethingElse. I don't speak particularly well, though happy I can speak at all (I'm pretty durn deaf), and I'm not photogenic. I have no advanced education degrees, never wrote a piece for The Huffington Post, and I'd rather clam than tweet.


I was born lucky, though (ask anyone who knows me), so there I was, and I enjoyed every moment. Thank you, Steve!

Full disclosure: my expenses were paid by Discovery and I got a Kari Byron (from Mythbusters) bobblehead talking doll--which now belongs to B362.

John Spencer on data

As a result, I am known as the guy who "doesn't believe in data." And they're right. It's not a belief. It's a rejection or acceptance. I hold research at a high enough standard that I don't easily accept the counterfeits.

John T. Spencer, a mensch

A couple of hours ago, an old man new to fishing hooked a large smooth dogfish. Its emerald eyes stared at me in its last few moments as I helped him and his buddy hoist the yard-long fish over the jetty rocks.

There is no word to describe the intensity of green of the dying critter's eyes. I suggested that they bleed the fish (which they did), and that they knock it out before they do (which they didn't). Dogfish bleed the same bright red that we do, and it struggled just a moment after the artery was cut.

I don't have data for the suffering of a fish slapping its tail on a jetty wall while it bleeds into unconsciousness, but I knock them out anyway.

***

Measuring anything that involves humans can be messy, and measuring the progress of our human larvae in public schools is particularly difficult, complicated by our lack of consensus on just what we're trying to accomplish.

There is a concerted effort to discredit public spaces in general, and public schools in particular, in this fine land of ours. Those of us in education are not helping by clinging to magical beliefs that education is immune to old-fashioned research, leaving us prone to silver-haired, silver-tongued devils.

John Spencer's simplicity gets to the heart of the matter--don't easily accept the counterfeits. We'll get fooled now and again, even the beset researcher in science do, but let's not make it easy.

The Piltdown Man fooled the science community for 40 years, but eventually his fraudulent conception unraveled, only because of a consistent application of logic. The Piltdown Man did not fit in with the rest of the story.

Who among the edu-glitterati push the Piltdown Man?

How many of us in the education community have the tools needed to recognize fraud?

Full disclosure: I love John T. Spencer's blog, and I've appeared in one of his books.

The dogfish photo was from the Oregon Coast Aquarium

Action pseudo-research

 
My district's recent incursions into action research have been interesting. I have the extreme fortune of sharing my prep room with a retired bench research scientist, published in multiple peer-reviewed science journals. We are tackling a specific method of inquiry, but quickly realized getting any reasonable data will require far bigger numbers than we will likely generate in our classes.

Our administration responded reasonably, explaining that the process of looking at data generated in our classrooms will encourage teachers to look critically at specific classroom practices. No one is pretending that will will develop statistically significant findings (p <0.05).

In education, a field where Marzano's and Gardner's "research" cause real (and possibly destructive) changes in the classroom, the lack of concern for the validity of the studies used to measure effective outcomes scares the crap out of me. Charismatic personalities trample over available evidence.

On Twitter I stumbled onto a group of ed folks setting up an action research project. At least one university professor was involved, someone I've met, so I figured I'd jump in on the open invitation.

I wondered aloud about how we might generate statistical significance from our work; to be fair I wasn't clear if that was even the goal. I was told that my medical background imposed a biased logical positivistic view, one too narrow for endeavors such as this one, and that I need consider other ways of viewing the world, including "intentional observation," which is, ironically, exactly how science works.

Experiment is in fact intelligent and intentional observation.

Robert Boyle, Epoch Men, 1868

(I also happened to major in philosophy, leaving Michigan with a B.S. in philosophy back in 1982--logical positivism was declared dead back in the 1970's. *sigh*)

***

Medicine and education have scary parallels. Medicine only recently advanced beyond the snake oil stage, with doctors kicking and screaming every step of the way.

Docs like to treat things. Patients like to be treated. Docs like to get paid. Patients are not quite as happy to pay. Our motto is primum non nocere--"Above all, do no harm"--which is a whole lot different than "Make them better!"

Snake oil is (mostly) harmless for self-limited illnesses, it makes patients feel like they're getting something, and docs make money. You don't need antibiotics for the vast majority of cases of sinusitis. Most docs will prescribe it anyway.

Medicine started looking at itself back in the 1970s, around the same time logical positivism was declared dead by professional philosophers. I was in medical school when evidence-based medicine starting taking a hold, and it was both liberating and frightening--most of what we did we did because, well, that's the way it's always been done. Sound familiar?

Education also finds snake oil useful--and it is for those selling it. Lots of folks make lots of money selling snake oil.

But in education, snake oil is harmful. A child's education is not a self-limited illness.We need to pay more attention to what we know through our research than we know "in our hearts." We need to pay particular attention to the folks who hide behind pseudo-research, tossing out fluorescent graphs, cooked numbers, and charismatic smiles.

I'd be glad to participate in some research. Medicine abandoned leeches not so long ago. It's time we pushed some leeches out of education.

Yes, I know leeches are making a come back....

Photo of leeches from LiveScience

Spring!

 Yes, it's last year's, but I liked it then, and I still do. Seemed like the right day for this.

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

Yeats' Crazy Jane makes sense mid-March. This is a hard time of year for mainstream churches. Words fall flat when the earth erupts again.

Today is the kind of day you count the old men in the neighborhood after a long winter. Still missing one, but he may be recovering from St. Patrick's Day. I will wander by his stoop again in a bit.

The cherry blossom buds are tumescent, ready to spew their sperm on our streets, our cars, our heads. Life is, again, for the living.

The big old moon reared up on its hind legs this evening. The clams are in trouble. I could feel the moon pull me along with the sea water. It seems unfair, raking clams when the moon sneaks up so close. The moonlight will dance on their siphons just past midnight tonight, and maybe a clam or two will share in the dance. They need not fear my rake tomorrow.

The crocuses have tossed off any sense of decorum, popping up pretty much anywhere they please.

The sun has returned, and with it, life. The old men left shuffle past and mutter hello, in shoes impossibly thick and black. They know, they know, what we all pretend to ignore.

Grace comes, again, unearned. None of us leave this life intact. Drink the wine, the sun, the pollen, the life.

I have spent too many of last week's hours indoors--I'm tossing this out there and taking a walk....