Science class

[fabrisse]

I 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?

Comments

[eanja]

I think perhaps I fall in the middle of the two previous views. I’m not sure most children would necessarily grasp the connection between scientific causality and causality in their lives, especially as so many people (young and old) tend to think of things scientific as not really related to their everyday lives. On the other hand, having to learn scientific method forces you to learn to how to think logically, how to sort out what the variables are and how each one might affect things, and how to look for explanations for unexpected things- in short, how to problem solve and not just judge things completely emotionally or based on surface appearance. Knowing how to do that isn’t going to instill morality, but it at least gives a person a framework on how to figure a problem out, whether it’s ethical or practical, and if done properly, might give them confidence about their ability to figure things out. Even if it doesn’t, it’s a desperately important tool for coping with life, and one that children absolutely need to learn.

I don’t really think that the school system can pick up the slack, if kids aren’t learning some basic morality at home (and by morality, I mean things like why it is wrong to take advantage of people, or cheat or steal or such, more than getting pregnant or doing drugs, as from a teenage perspective, those last two are probably bad judgement issues more than fundamental moral ones.) I am not at all an expert on how juveniles think, but I have heard at least a few suggestions from people who work w/ teenagers that a lot of them simply don’t have the ability to maturely judge high-risk activities or to accept that cause and effect apply to them.

I probably learned most of my morality from my parents, but I’ve also convinced that a lot of it came straight out of books. If you read classic children’s literature, you can’t help but end up with pretty solid notions of what constitutes an admirable person. Of course, for all children to read avidly and without prompting, we’d have to live in a world where half the current school problems didn’t exist to begin with.

I think there are ways to teach kids that they can affect the world, but most of what comes to mind is more suitable for high school than for younger kids. And such things would tend to involve volunteer work or vaguely politically related things, and what do you cut out of the curriculum to make room for showing kids how they can get involved in their community or world at large? Still I think that things like recycling drives, or sponsoring children and such, that a fair number of school do, can’t hurt, even if they don’t make a huge difference.

Your 12-year old sounds interesting, and also very bright, from your book and music comments. I do hope the two of end up getting along well. As to the science teacher comments, my reaction depends very much on the bigger picture. Does he consistently want them not to bother doing the experiments (in which case, boo, hiss), or was this a specific incidence? If the latter, was it because they were saving the lab time to do something more complicated? Or could this have been a thought exercise? I can remember having to do exercises where you had to come up w/ all the variables and possibly problems before doing the experiment itself - having to do so purely mentally is a perfectly reasonable (and probably useful, I’d think) lesson, as long as it’s an adjunct to actual experimentation and not a replacement.

Since I’m rather musically ignorant, what is noveau punk? Is that just current music w/ a similar sound and/or ethos to the original punk of 70s/80s, or some sort of completely new movement? (Or is the change in the ethos behind the sound over time part of the debate?)