NOVEL ATTEMPTS by ashraya gupta

As with all things forgotten, let’s start with what I remember.

We moved to the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio when I was about to enter 2nd grade. I spent that first year at Maple Dale Elementary. The next year, we moved across the street to a different townhouse complex and managed to cross a township line. Same school district, different elementary school. I found myself at Symmes Elementary. Right down the road from the elementary school was the local library. Whenever my parents would pick me up from school (usually from my various short-lived extracurricular stints: Girl Scouts, the basketball team), a stop at the library was inevitable.

The Symmes Library, part of the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, was a circular, neo-classical building. It never quite managed to be imposing and mostly looked weirdly out of place amidst the suburban lawns surrounding it. Come to think of it, it was sort of like Butler Library. The same Greek greats inscribed along the exterior. Unlike Butler, however, it was not open 24 hours a day and did not destroy the souls of many.

I still have a map in my mind of the children’s section—the corner in the very back was where I found The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Standing there, at my left was a shelf containing Wren to the Rescue. To the right, all the Zilpha Keatley Snyder I could ever hope to find.

I realize now that my childhood taste in books was largely determined by my predilection for nooks and other comfortable spaces for small people. I must have spent a good six months reading only authors whose last names began with S.

I’m not entirely sure how I branched out to G, but at some point, I must have, because I happened upon Top Secret, a book by John Reynolds Gardiner. Admittedly, it was a little bit below my reading level, but saved by the fact that it was awesome.

And I mean that. How can you go wrong with a book about human photosynthesis? A young boy wants to study it for a science project. His teacher ridicules him and assigns him a new project: lipstick. Thoroughly disgruntled, he decides to pursue photosynthesis anyway. The kid starts turning green and craving sunshine, his parents don’t believe him, the Feds get involved.

It’s everything a kid’s book ought to be: funny, fast-paced, secretly educational.

I wonder, though—why do we feel such a need to hide from children the fact that we’re teaching them something?

My father always complains about what he calls the apologetic way in which science is taught in American public schools. He says it prevents kids from finding joy in science for itself. He thought science fairs were generally silly and found most of our “science projects” useless. Still, he did enjoy taking over those projects whenever I would ask him for a little help. Once, I asked him to help me print out a forest background for a shoe-box diorama about dinosaurs. Soon enough, he was doing all the work. Collecting pine needles and twigs, cutting out the pictures he printed from the internet—I was lucky if I could get my hands on a glue-stick. It did, however, turn out way cooler looking than the one pictured below.

For a long time, I argued with Papa about his opinion of American education. I had to. How else could I justify bothering to do any of the work? As I grew older, I started to see his point. Shoe-box dioramas are great for elementary school kids, but when I reached 8th grade biology and was still making dichotomous keys (of wacky creatures, mind you) or coloring in pictures of mitochondria, I started to wonder why I spent so much of my time in science classes making things look pretty.

High school started the next year. Earth Science with Mr. Vorwald. He really did try to make us find some kind of joy in science (and even wrote a book! a lab manual, really), but the fact that we learned applied sciences before pure sciences once again seemed like a kind of apology. We studied star spectra and learned about the doppler effect at a time when we knew next to nothing about optics. The wave theory of light? Did we talk about that in 7th grade physics—all I could really remember was F = ma.

The New York State Regents curriculum suggested that students had to be convinced that there was some kind of purpose to physics or chemistry before they could start learning it. Of course, most of us didn’t see any purpose in interpreting star spectra anyway. It wouldn’t have anything to do with our lives unless we became astronomers and who did that anymore? Or thought about it at the age of 14?

This brings me to an op-ed by Brian Greene, linked by Lucy Tang, but also mentioned to me by my mother (not my father, you’ll notice). Greene’s point is different from my father’s. He doesn’t accuse American science curricula of being apologetic, but rather, he finds it dated. He argues that it bears no connection to our everyday lives, which are rife with all kinds of technology of which most of us have little understanding.

He also speaks of science as an art, writing that, as with literature or music, “a life without science is bereft of something that gives experience a rich and otherwise inaccessible dimension.” He’s right, or at least inspirational. He makes me want to embrace science in the way I embrace music or words.

Greene goes on to critique the “firm belief in the vertical nature of science”—the notion that science education must follow a step-wise template. And here’s where I’m not so sure I agree with him. It’s all very well to shoot for the wow-factor of quantum physics or the fact that physicists are currently recreating the conditions of the big bang, but isn’t there a wow-factor to the simplest of science that we constantly fail to convey?

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty amazing that Newton invented calculus (well, mostly) in order to fully understand motion. I think there’s something really wondrous about how Mendeleev predicted the properties of elements yet to be discovered—the periodic table itself still kind of floors me. Can the universe really be that beautifully ordered? OK, maybe not.

So my grand proposal for science education? Teach it like history. Teach it when we’re young. Make the great discoveries seem and sound as great as they really were. Don’t undercut the beauty of science by reducing it to looking up “dinosaurs” in Google image search. I can (and do) do that on my own time.

Once we’ve reached middle school and treat everything with disdain, accept that we won’t be impressed by Mendeleev or Newton. But know that any 7th grader can handle a lot more than F = ma. If we’re learning algebra and reading “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (even if it is a terribly edited abridged version), we can take on optics and circuits and magnetism. And don’t try to impress us by lighting a light bulb with a potato—I am never going to light a light bulb with a potato. Impress us by taking apart a socket or a toaster (or an iPod) and showing us how everything works, in everyday life.

Then, just maybe, I won’t ask, “When are we ever going to use this stuff?”

Tags:   America · Books · Brian Greene · Cincinnati · Education · Forgotten · John Reynolds Gardiner · Libraries · Mr. Vorwald · Papa · Science · Top SecretNo Comments