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

Tibicen here

[(Anonymous)]

Hah! I finally got a RSS aggregator, so I can get alerted when you post something.

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.

[kstanley.livejournal.com]

Hey Fabi!

I love your tutoring stories.

As far as using science experiments to illustrate the concept of cause and effect goes, I think it is a great idea. Although I think teachers would have to clearly point out that cause and effect doesn't just happen in science. Sometimes kids don't see those patterns unless they are pointed out.

[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?)

[jerminating.livejournal.com]

Her answer, "The teacher told us not to do the experiment because we could figure out what we needed from reading it."

This doesn't sound that unusual to me. A lot of teachers want students to read the prompt for an experiment to figure out what they'll need to perform the experiment and what procedures they'll need to go through in order to make the experiment work.

Like eanja, I'm not sure that learning the scientific method necessarily teaches you that your own actions have consequences. Even if it does, I'm not certain that it's necessarily applicable to a lot of decisions that we make as human beings. Science is supposed to be dispassionate, using nothing but logic in the analysis of a problem. Unfortunately, emotion tends to enter into a lot of decisions that we make.

Can you tape Alias tomorrow night at 9? On ABC. The tape I was using should be downstaits and is labeled. Thanks.