Science class
Oct. 10th, 2003 02:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fabrisseI have a new student. She’s 12 years old, has read (and loved) 1984, and is learning to play vibraharp. We’re still trying to get a handle on each other -- we had a long discussion about whether nouveau punk could be considered a musical rebellion. I think though, that we'll eventually be a good fit.
Because my dad's a big fan of jazz, and I know he has the complete Lionel Hampton on record, I called him last night to ask for some tapes and advice. The tapes will probably be done while I'm visiting them at Thanksgiving. He also recommended a vibes player that I'd never heard of called Red Norvo. I've added a couple of his CDs to my Amazon wish list.
While working with her on science vocabulary (No, dear, an hypothesis isn't just an educated guess), I asked her why such an obviously bright girl wasn't able to figure out the different types of variables from performing the experiment. Her answer, "The teacher told us not to do the experiment because we could figure out what we needed from reading it."
Obviously, I have to take this revelation with a grain of salt. I've only known her two weeks. It's possible that she was exaggerating or even lying (though, I don't think so -- she seemed very angry that the teacher wasn't taking their education seriously). I'd like to point out that she tested into one of the top public schools in the country. This is not a problem of inadequate funding to a poor neighborhood.
In talking to my dad, I mentioned that incident, the fact that heroin is, according to yesterday's Boston Globe, so cheap, pure, and plentiful that it's being sold near playgrounds for snorting, and the difficulties in enforcing the rules in a crowded Boys and Girls Club.
All these little things came together in one of those blinding moments of revelation that we all get from time to time. So many people are complaining that 'kids today' lack any type of moral education -- that they don't understand responsibility or that consequences have actions.
Drug education, sex education, and mental health education are all trying to teach these basics and impart self respect and a core sense of values. But how can any of these programs work if the kids aren't being taught the scientific method?
It sounds silly, maybe a little simplistic, but it's a serious question. If people want preteens and teenagers to see that actions have consequences, how better than by setting up experiments and showing them. A ball-bearing dropped into water is going to make a splash. The size of the splash and the depth the ball falls are going to increase as the height of the drop increases. Cause and effect are immediate and visible. Maybe in the poorer schools, they can't get enough equipment to do the experiments in pairs or small groups, but once in front of the whole class is still helpful.
The people who are worried about secular humanism and whether suspect 'theories' like evolution are being taught are often the same ones lamenting the poor moral choices their children are making. If they could see the connection between science and ethics, would our schools also improve?
Because my dad's a big fan of jazz, and I know he has the complete Lionel Hampton on record, I called him last night to ask for some tapes and advice. The tapes will probably be done while I'm visiting them at Thanksgiving. He also recommended a vibes player that I'd never heard of called Red Norvo. I've added a couple of his CDs to my Amazon wish list.
While working with her on science vocabulary (No, dear, an hypothesis isn't just an educated guess), I asked her why such an obviously bright girl wasn't able to figure out the different types of variables from performing the experiment. Her answer, "The teacher told us not to do the experiment because we could figure out what we needed from reading it."
Obviously, I have to take this revelation with a grain of salt. I've only known her two weeks. It's possible that she was exaggerating or even lying (though, I don't think so -- she seemed very angry that the teacher wasn't taking their education seriously). I'd like to point out that she tested into one of the top public schools in the country. This is not a problem of inadequate funding to a poor neighborhood.
In talking to my dad, I mentioned that incident, the fact that heroin is, according to yesterday's Boston Globe, so cheap, pure, and plentiful that it's being sold near playgrounds for snorting, and the difficulties in enforcing the rules in a crowded Boys and Girls Club.
All these little things came together in one of those blinding moments of revelation that we all get from time to time. So many people are complaining that 'kids today' lack any type of moral education -- that they don't understand responsibility or that consequences have actions.
Drug education, sex education, and mental health education are all trying to teach these basics and impart self respect and a core sense of values. But how can any of these programs work if the kids aren't being taught the scientific method?
It sounds silly, maybe a little simplistic, but it's a serious question. If people want preteens and teenagers to see that actions have consequences, how better than by setting up experiments and showing them. A ball-bearing dropped into water is going to make a splash. The size of the splash and the depth the ball falls are going to increase as the height of the drop increases. Cause and effect are immediate and visible. Maybe in the poorer schools, they can't get enough equipment to do the experiments in pairs or small groups, but once in front of the whole class is still helpful.
The people who are worried about secular humanism and whether suspect 'theories' like evolution are being taught are often the same ones lamenting the poor moral choices their children are making. If they could see the connection between science and ethics, would our schools also improve?
Tibicen here
Date: 2003-10-10 03:28 pm (UTC)First off, Speaking From My Professional Position, there is no such thing as a class too poor to do hands-on science experiments. The first thing our Masters in Sci. Ed. program does, is have the teachers learn how to do a worthwhile experiment with a glass of ice water. I once demonstrated a basic experiment with a piece of paper with lines across it, a hole in the ceiling and a modest yellow-white star that happened to be near by. Science is the study of the physical world around us. To quote a commercial "You're soaking in it". Archemedies didn't have a microscope, either.
That said, on to your actual point. I don't think what you suggest would hurt, but I'm a little dubious that that's the problem.
It is useful to make a disctinction here between implicit and explicit knowledge. While most kids don't possess much in the way of explicit knowledge of causality, their implicit knowledge of causality is as rich as can only be had by an organism growing up in a strong gravitational field: they know that when they drop things, those things fall down.
Granting the hypothesis that "kids these days" want for moral guidance, I would suggest, based on my observations and recollections, the problem is not that they don't understand that actions have consequences, but that
1) They feel powerless to do anything about those consequences one way or the other.
2) They don't care.
3) They actively want the consequences the adults around them are trying to discourage them from.
To elaborate on these: First, youths in our society are held in a prelonged childhood, bereft of meaningful responsibility. They are schooled, deeply, to be obedient, even to the point of, at an age that once would have considered adulthood, asking permission to use the bathroom. They are so schooled in passivity, many become, essentially, fatalistic. They don't believe they are *capable* of changing their fate, and wouldn't know where to begin if they wanted to. This is, btw, accedy.
Second, many people lack imagination. This is especially true of S-type youths. You can tell them all you want that sex without birth control will result in babies, but that doesn't mean they *emotionally* grasp how unpleasant their lives will be if they get pregnant. They don't comprehend what a big deal it is. They screw up not because they don't understand how screw ups happen, but because they don't anticipate what the experience will be like.
Third, adults are often claiming that kids' morality is weak because, obviously (to the adult), the actions the kids in question take lead to consequences the adult loathes. But I think in more circumstances than adults like to admit, the kids simply have a different value system. I have had some very enlightening conversations with women who had children when they were in their teens. While none of them copped to getting pregnant on purpose, these are women who did not relinquish their children to either adoption or their own families. They decided they wanted to raise their own children, even though they were teens.
I strongly suspect that, on some level, some unknown but not negligible number of the teens who get pregnant actively want a child. They may be deeply wrong in what they anticipate it will be like (or maybe not), they may have really awful reasons for wanting a child (e.g. to force a bf to marry them). But suffice it to say telling such a person "use birth control or you will get pregnant" gets an emotional response of, "You don't say! Keen!"
There are similar things which can be said about drugs and crime.
So I don't really thing that the problem is that kids lack a grasp of causality -- though I could be convinced.