Me, I Watched A Lot of Mr. Wizard
Irradiated by LabRat
Because my ego is easily stroked and because I believe I can comment on it in the time I have available to write tonight, a post by Jenny at Call To Wings about education and the lust to learn calls us out indirectly.
The post overall is an argument that Jenny acquired intellectual curiosity and a well-developed knowledge base despite rather than because of our public schooling system, and it’s one I agree with. Although truly great teachers (who are often swimming against the system) can help a lot, I believe it’s mostly up to both parents and the children themselves to install and develop that spark to know and discover that forms the real core of human intelligence; you can lead a horse to water, and so forth. My own parents were well-off enough and urbanly located enough that I never stepped foot in a public school and instead went to a rather good private school for most of my education, but I would still say I learned more on my own lookout than I did there. (What I DID learn from an expensive private education was how to do things properly when I would otherwise have been too lazy or disinterested to, like how to build an argument out of brick and mortar rather than a thinner skein of opinion and unsupported assertion.)
In speculating about how she would build a proper education for children of her own, she says:
But broad strokes version - complete elimination of “self esteem” BS, drastic reorganizing of “Language Arts” away from the fashion I had of contemporary pop-lit works to allow room to restore at least the rudiments of Latin and Greek (you know, making grammar school grammar school again), much more emphasis on Classical history.** Math and logic concepts certainly should have been introduced earlier in a form like Travis describes - the sciences I confess I’m still not experienced with on my own to offer a legitimate discussion on. I’d love to hear what the Nerds would have to say on that.
As I argued many moons ago, when building an education, you really can’t skip dry fact because it provides the library of facts and concepts that you must have in order to relate one to another and start seeing larger patterns and understanding things on a systematic level. So there’s no getting around serving a child regular large helpings of sometimes-dry fact when it comes to imparting a science education.
What you can and should do, however, is begin exercises in developing those skills as soon as you’ve got enough facts on a particular subject to begin doing this process.
If you have a family dog, you have all the laboratory animal you need for an entire unit on how learning works and the basic principles of conditioning. (Bonus points for the child if he or she can correctly identify how you have been applying these principles to them.) If you have family members about to have a child or feral cats breeding in your neighborhood, this is a fun way to apply simple Punnett squares as a game once you have gone over the most basic and simple of genetics.
If you’re doing evolution and have already covered anatomy at the thigh-bone’s-connected-to-the-knee-bone level, you can make a game out of looking at pictures of skeletons of animals that do roughly the same thing but have totally different skeletal structures depending on how they evolved; a bat versus a bird versus a pterodactyl, or a fish versus a dolphin. It’s a simple way to show an important principle- evolution has to work with the structure it has right then, but it can do lots of different things with them.
If you’re covering states of matter in chemistry, that’s the time to make up a batch of Oobleck to play with. You can demonstrate the ideal gas law and the reality of pressure with a piece of dry ice and a pop bottle- though you probably want to accompany that with a firm warning about what will happen if said child ever gets to screwing around with this on his or her own.
Play with concepts; actually compare apples and oranges as an exercise. The facts learned in the process (like the classification of types of fruit based on their development) may never be useful, but the habit of automatic questioning and analysis is as valuable as those bases of logic and math proficiency.
Given the overall result of the rest of the education system, journalists provide a rich source for exercising powers of logic, analysis, and premise-questioning. When you see stupid in print, this is a good exercise for the nuts and bolts of dissecting the nonsensical. As a side bonus, this also provides healthy development in reasonably questioning authority- though as efficient learning machines as children are, this skill will probably be applied to you at some point.
November 17th, 2010 at 7:11 pm
Oobleck link is broken. It leads to Punnet squares.
I’m sad, because I want to know what Oobleck is…
November 17th, 2010 at 9:09 pm
Fixed.
November 18th, 2010 at 4:54 am
Absolutely, wholeheartedly and 110% agree with all of the above.
The main thing that a child needs to benefit from the above methods, though, is a sense of curiosity. The more insatiable, the better. If that curiosity is part of the child’s personality, wonderful. If not, it can be encouraged by example and enthusiasm on the part of the parents.
I was interested in all things scientific, but especially nature, for as long as I can remember. Neither of my parents had any higher academic training, but they gave me every resource and encouragement possible.
To me, true scientific curiosity goes beyond, “Look at the cool critter”, to , “What did he just do?”, and most importantly, “Why did he just do that?”.
If a child can be encouraged to observe and question the world around them, then they will not only develop the foundation for a better education (even if self-directed), but will be positioned to truly enjoy the experience of life.
November 18th, 2010 at 7:43 am
I have long stated that the number one beneficial thing to teach a child is to teach them how to learn. This may be different for different students. Some students learn better from the written word, others visually. The student should be aware of what works best for them and their teachers/parents/mentors should help encourage them to learn in that way.
If this can be standard practice for public education, then schools would shift from being places where students are taught to being places where students learn. To those that were taught, these likely appear to be the same thing. To those that ‘learned’ this distinction is significant. This would be the revolution in education that we need.
November 18th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
If ya want to teach hands-on genetics, get a small aquarium.
My 4th grade science project was dealing with the guppy aquarium.
The other kids thought I was horrible. I put a pair of Angelfish in to kill the fry that were too slow and stupid to hide in the artificial floating weeds I had provided. Any adult that I felt had undesirable traits ( bent back females, and males with uninteresting tail plumage ) were removed. I was going to just flush them, but the weenies talked the teacher into allowing them to survive in the fifth grade class tank.
At the end of the year I had a stunning and very healthy tank full of guppies, and a pair of very large and now breeding Angelfish.
The fifth grade tank looked like the guppy equivalent of a leper ward.
November 18th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
I grew up in a poor, uneducated, dysfunctional family that moved a lot. A new school almost every year.
There must be a genetic component because, like Rick, I think I was born loving science and nature and I knew by the time I was six that I’d grow up to be a scientist.
Maybe being a dorky outsider helped. I spent most of my time reading or exploring the fields, woods, desert, lakes and/or mountains where I lived at various times. To paraphrase a friend “I thought everyone grew up with a field guide in their pocket” (and a potentially lethal chemistry set in their bedroom!)
November 18th, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Good post as usual… And yeah, we blew a LOT of stuff up, sometimes even intentionally…
November 18th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
“Never let your education get in the way of your learning.” - Mark Twain
November 18th, 2010 at 6:31 pm
Jake: Similar quote:
“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
-Albert Einstein
That is from several sources. Not sure if it was also Twain.
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.” -Albert Einstein
November 18th, 2010 at 8:29 pm
My kids always had a free ride to the library, where we spent a LOT of our time. And from whence we carted off stacks of books, usually non-fiction when they were little. And thank heavens for the internet, since I suck at explaining things.
November 18th, 2010 at 9:21 pm
I went to a pretty dubious private hippy high school, but it worked pretty well since, unlike the public schools, they weren’t actively thwarting my education. But I rather lacked teachers to challenge me towards improvement, to build those brick-and-mortar arguments. Good enough was good enough, and I now wished I’d been pushed to be better.
I also look back fondly on the well-stocked bookshelves I grew up with. Specifically, we had a big set of used Time-Life science and geography books. Not the most impressive works ever, but they were great stuff for a bored latchkey kid to spend idle hours flipping through, absorbing all sorts of facts and “common knowledge” that I never heard about in school. An education needs to be a sea you swim through, to the point where you don’t notice the water. If learning is treated as something that only happens in designated hours, it becomes at best a tool to be used for a specific task and then set aside. That might get you through a lot of life, but you’d never know what you might be missing.