Trumped up pedagogy

"No, no, no, I am not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed." 

January 14, 2018

President Trump gets under my skin; if you're here, he probably gets under yours, too.

Many teachers mumble to themselves, and occasionally to each other, how gullible "those" people must be to support him. How can anyone believe what the man says when the evidence screams otherwise?

And then we shuffle off to our classrooms, arms full of papers and books, pockets full of markers, and do what we do. We teach using the best, the very best research education has to offer. And we do it wrong.

We cater to learning styles, we worship the learning pyramid, we tell kids to go figure out this world on their own.

All of it nonsense, but belief (or pretending to believe) is part of the American cult of pedagogy.

Every week or so I immerse myself in the Trump radio universe--I listen to the hosts, I listen to the callers, listen to the myths and the closed loops of reasoning, and it starts to generate an internal rhythm that makes sense. Throw the sense of community in it (and make no mistake, the nationalist/racist movement deep in our bowels depends on this) and this stuff is like cocaine to caged rats.

We do the same thing in education.

A little self awareness goes a long way.

Of course he's a racist....but you might be, too.

Teaching, not preaching, science

Here are things I wish teachers would stop doing:

• Telling kids the world is round (when it is obviously flat).
• Telling kids that spontaneous generation is a myth (when every child paying attention can see life develop in a cup of water in just a few weeks).
• Telling kids that the Earth spins completely around in just a few hours every day (when it's clear that it is the sun inches its way across the sky).
• Telling the kids that the universe was an incomprehensibly small point an incomprehensibly long time ago (when every child paying attention knows you can only crush stuff so far before it becomes impossible to smush anymore).

We teach science as catechism, then wonder why our children are so gullible. so fearful to question, 

We give children less evidence to believe "science" than we did when we bullied them into believing in Santa Claus with half-eaten cookies and bribes of toys,

Kids believe what the adults around them tell them. If you want a child to know science, you're going to have to accept their models of the world until you can show them why the "adult" models work better.

And if you do not know why the science models you thrust upon children work better than models that work well enough for children (and for the rest of us, too), you're preaching, not teaching.

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!

On misconceptions

The deeper I dig into how much a child understands a particular idea, the more I  realize persistent misconceptions can be.

We have plenty of places for magical thinking in our culture: horoscopes, good luck charms, religious incantations, and the stock market take up a good chunk of our time. So long as your magic does little harm, and horoscopes and talismans fall into that category, blessed be.

Alas, much of our magical thinking has disastrous consequences. Each morning I grab my wand and recite incantations, hoping to teach science. Before I teach science, I have to unteach the magic.

If you teach young children, and you do not quite grasp something, do not preach it as Gospel. I can teach a child who knows nothing a whole lot more than I can teach a child that knows everything.

We are starting cell energetics this week, the soul of biology. After a few years of doing this, I now know what I must have them "unknow":

• Plants make food from sunlight.
• The "stuff" of plants mostly comes from the ground.
• Plants have no need to respire.

Pretty much all of science gets down to the Conservation of MassEnergy, and in high school biology, where a Newtonian view of the universe is usually sufficient, it gets down to this:

Stuff (matter) is stuff, and energy is energy,
and never the twain shall meet.

These misconceptions run deep, deeper than I realized until the past couple of years. I've gotten better at working through them, but misconceptions are tenacious, and, I think, comforting--children want to grasp the world, and a science teacher running through a laundry list of vocabulary words and biochemical cycles cannot replace the comfort of knowing, even if the knowing is wrong.

This week I'll grab my propane torch, as I have done multiple times, and again show children that water comes from combustion. I'll blow into bromothymol blue solution and again give evidence that CO₂ leaves us with each breath.

My stories have to be better than the ones they heard before. My stories have to make as much sense to them as the ones they already believe. My stories must be more true than the ones that define their universe.

My stories need to become their stories, or I've taught them nothing.

Grab David Rudel's books on science myths. Should be mandatory reading for any teacher at any grade that teaches science.

On spreading myths

"The lenses o' his eyes, wi' so much divin' intae the water, get hardened, an' he loses his sight" said John Turner MacCrindle.

from The Gannet (Bryan Nelson), via Bookworm on the Net

I spent yesterday's gray afternoon with an old and a new friend, both Real Life Scientists®, wandering around Sandy Hook, climbing bunkers, skipping stones, and sharing stories. A couple of ospreys eyed us from their new nest. Once you get past the debris that floats over from the Staten Island landfills, the Hook is stunningly beautiful.

Offshore dozens of gannets were diving, their white wings reflecting light, seemingly fluorescent against the gray skies. Gannets crash into water headfirst when feeding, sending up plumes of spray.

I shared some local shore lore--gannets eventually go blind from diving, which, of course, kills them.

It makes for a great story. Turns out it's plain wrong.

***

Myths define us, more than most realize. Not so long ago, we survived by our senses, and by our wits. Oral language swirls as our perception of truth swirls. Stories got passed down through our clans, back when stars still mattered, when rivers were still filled with fish, forests with trees. We needed each other, but we needed the Earth's grace more.

Just a few thousand years ago, long after we became human, we developed the written word. Language, already powerful,  now had  the power of permanence. Oral language reflects truth, and waivers, imperceptibly, through generations.

We worship the written word, granting it powers far beyond the first vague firing of neurons that generated the thought that preceded (and transcends) the word.

I saw it in a book...I read it somewhere...it's published science...you can look it up.....

The strength of our belief in the written word has fueled beliefs in the the inerrancy of the Bible or of the Qur'an or, no doubt, of other religious texts. These beliefs are not universal, of course, even among followers, and at least one major religion (Judaism) cherishes oral tradition.


I am not a religious scholar, nor do I care to engage in a discussion of inerrancy or infallibility except to mention that huge swaths of modern culture will bend perceptions of the natural world to fit a fixed ideology, with often disastrous results.

Less extreme examples of word fixation may be harming us as much as the obvious religious ones. I let my gannet myth blind me to the more likely truth. I probably do this several times a day, without awareness.

***

Much, maybe most, of what I do is pierce through the misconceptions of our students--only after I kill this worship of "I know it as a fact" can I hope to teach children to think. If you cannot accept the possibility  of error, you cannot make rational choices. 

Public education is in the dogfight of its life, getting peppered with myth after myth, most blatantly (and certifiably) false stories accepted as truth.

So here are some words to ponder:

• NCLB does not work--we have a decade of evidence showing such.
• Poverty matters, above and beyond whatever happens in the classroom--we have decades of evidence showing such.
• "Zip code is not destiny" makes for a catchy slogan, aimed at the mantra that poverty matters, but solves nothing--it's a contrived (and ugly) attempt to deflect the fact that poverty matters.
• Our current republic faces a huge threat within our borders, and it's not some caricature of a bomb-wielding Bedouin, or Mother Earth LiberAL, or Willie Horton, or Che Guevara, or the Latin Kings, or yet another child snatcher hiding in your bushes--it's the deliberate shifting of monies and power from public spaces to the private, from the "bottom" 90% to the political (and, sadly, cultural) elite.

It hardly matters if anyone says it aloud, so few folks bother to wrestle with the incongruities between reality and words.

Matters to me--it's why I teach. I want to teach kids how to think. Who knows where that might lead?

 ***

Bryan Nelson himself, despite the myth, knows his gannets. In a letter to the The Observer he gently corrects Richard Dawkins: "I have concrete evidence from marked individuals that gannets can survive more than 30 years with perfect eyesight. The blindness myth probably arose because gannets and boobies have an opaque 'third eyelid' which they can draw across the eye to protect it from the impact of diving."

Where does our blindness come from? Who controls your opaque 'third eyelid'?

Hah! Four scientists mentioned in one post about myths.

I am not anti-religion, not by any stretch. I am anti-anti-thinking.

The 3rd picture is of one of yesterday's scientists, Joseph Mastroianni, 
taken by the other, Kristan Hutchinson,while in Antarctica--it's NSF, so I figure it's PD.