Science, interrupted
Connor (15) came home on the second day of school and collapsed on the sofa with a defeated look I’ve come to recognize.
“Uh…good day?”
“No.” He looked up at me. “Science.”
He had enrolled for physical science and was looking forward to it, thinking it was physics. Turns out it’s actually basic mechanics and other concepts he’s already had. But it was the teacher himself who had made the biggest impression — and not a good one.
“He did this whole thing with overheads, and a bunch of it just didn’t make any sense,” he said. “This one overhead said something like…” Connor paused to remember the wording. “‘Experiments and evidence in the present can’t tell us anything about the distant past.'”
I’m not sure how much time passed as the wind-up monkey in my head banged his little cymbals. That my son’s high school science teacher was almost directly quoting the favorite trope of young earth creationist point man Ken “Were You There?” Ham was not encouraging.
“Then he goes off on this thing about ‘If no one was there to witness something, we can only guess about it. This is a big problem for the evolutionists…’ And he goes on and on about how they’ve got all these little bits of bones but how they can never really know what they mean.”
Hello.
I began to consider my options, the first of which is always “Let it go.” It’s taken me years to learn that accepting a certain base level of facepalming human malpractice is one of the keys to passing my short vivre with some degree of joie. But there are also options that involve me getting out of my chair. Just a few things to weigh first.
I’m serious about not using my kids as pawns in my personal and professional quests. I would do nothing without Connor’s permission. I also have to consider the possibility that he misunderstood somehow, or that this might have been a momentary lapse in an otherwise stellar career for this teacher.
Then there’s the question of outcomes. If I did pursue this, what would the goal be?
Well that’s easy. The goal in this case is to see that the long, patient slog of science, our astonishing attempt to see the world and ourselves more clearly, doesn’t proceed through centuries of observation and experimentation and debate, crawling uphill through the morass of our ancient fears and biases, inching toward tentative answers, finding them, testing them, discarding bad answers and reinforcing sound ones, weaving isolated facts into theory, strengthening the theory, building consensus, then finally, wearily carrying the hard-won knowledge up the steps of our schools — only to be smacked to the floor with a flyswatter, just inches from the ears of our kids, by a “science teacher” who wonders how that icky, sciency thing ever found its way into his classroom.
Let’s call him Mr. Taylor.
Becca and I talked it over at dinner, and she was much more decisive. “I’m sorry, that’s just crazy,” she said. “You have GOT to do something.”
I knew she was right. And on reflection, I found a solid reason to do something, and to do it effectively and well — my daughter Delaney (8).
Last year, Delaney’s second grade teacher shared something with me at conferences. “I asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grow up,” he said. “We went around the room, and it was football player, firefighter, teacher, the usual things. Delaney was the only one who wanted to be a scientist. But she said she isn’t sure yet whether she wants to be an astronomer or a paleontologist or a marine biologist. Isn’t that great?”
Yes it is. A year later, her heart and mind are still set on science.
If she wanted to be a mathematician and I discovered that the middle school math teachers were presenting 4 as a prime number and pi as “just a theory,” I’d do something — NOT just to spank the offenders and make myself feel big and strong and right, but to fix the problem. If she loved history and the high school history teachers were hamfistedly rewriting history to suit their political preferences, I’d dig in to correct that.
So is it really too much for Laney to expect that three years from now, when she reaches her first actual class in the subject she loves most of all, she’ll be able to learn about science, the real thing, from a science educator who is motivated not by fear, or conflict avoidance, or ignorance, or the pursuit of a religious agenda, but by a love of and respect for science itself?
So I would look into this Taylor thing, not for a quick fix, but to do some lasting good.
(Continued.)
Added: An incredible story of an inspiring Georgia science teacher
Multitudes
Like clockwork, a big Washington rally is followed by a pie fight about numbers. Let’s look at two examples, one each from the left and right.
Organizers of the Million Man March in 1995 estimated as many as two million in attendance. When the U.S. Park Police put their estimate at 400,000 — a huge success by every measure but the uh, name — Louis Farrakhan threatened to sue. As a result, the Park Police no longer provide estimates.
Glenn Beck estimated the crowd at his rally last week at 500,000+. AirPhotosLive, a company commissioned by CBS News to do the estimate from the air, put it at 87,000, plus or minus 9,000.
Farrakhan claimed racial bias. Beck claimed media bias. But in both cases, it’s interesting to note that the estimates of organizers (both subject to very human confirmation bias) come in right around five times the third party estimate. I wonder if this is a known pattern.
Not long before the Beck rally, Connor (15) and I stumbled conversationally on the story of Jesus feeding the multitudes — more about that another time — and I found myself wondering about those multitudes. IF the story is based on some actual gathering, it’s fun to wonder how the numbers, reported vs. actual, would compare.
Start with the immediate fivefold increase, add at least two generations of oral transmission before the gospels are written down (each retelling with a strong incentive to make the miracle more impressive by inflation), and it’s not hard to imagine that we started with a handful of extra mouths, and the needs of the miracle drove the numbers ever-higher. It’s how folklore (and politics) works.
Aerial photo of the Jesus rally at which seven loaves and a few fish are alleged
to have fed the multitude. Organizers estimated 4,000-5,000 in attendance;
Pharisees put the number as low as 75 and note that many brought Lunchables.
Painting: Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, Lambert Lombard, 16th c.
PBB seminar coming to Virginia
Hey secular parents in Virginia, DC, and Maryland! A Parenting Beyond Belief seminar is heading your way in October, and I’d love to see you there.
Sponsored by the Northern Virginia Ethical Society, the seminar will be held on October 2 from 1-5 pm at the Green Hedges School in Vienna VA. We’ll cover all the major issues for secular families in a religious world, including extended family, religious literacy, talking about death, and encouraging a sense of wonder.
Registration info is here.
Sleep tight
- August 31, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In fear, My kids, myths
- 4
My kids got addicted to myths early on. It’s the best way into comparative religion, which is the best way out of the clutches of any one brand.
We blew through the Greco-Romans in a few weeks, and I started reaching into dozens of other traditions. Eventually we ran out of gods, and it was time for monsters.
In the forest of eastern Paraguay, the Guarani people have a belief system with several elements that sound vaguely familiar. There’s a creator god in the sky (Tupa) who created the first couple (Rupave and Sypave). One of the first gifts of Tupa to his new creations was the knowledge of good and evil. As is usually the case, the Guarani consider themselves to be the first people created and therefore special in the eyes of the god, and they believe humanity quickly bungled this special relationship. Representing evil is a devil of sorts named Tau. Tupa, for reasons far beyond mortal understanding, decided to leave Tau on Earth to mess with humanity.
Guarani belief also has its unique features, one of which is the seven legendary monsters, each with its own domain. One is the god of caverns and fruits—I don’t understand how those go together, but I’ll bet the Guarani do. Another is the god of open fields. Others are the gods of sex, mountains, waterways, and death.
The last of the seven is Jasy Jateré [YAH-soo yah-teh-DAY]. Unlike his six siblings, who are reptiles and monsters of various kinds, Jasy is a little boy with shaggy blonde hair and blue eyes. He is lord of the siesta.
Kids raised in traditional Guarani homes may forget many things about their upbringing, but they always remember Jasy Jateré. Perhaps you’ll understand why. Jasy is said to wander villages at siesta time in search of children who are not asleep. Though invisible as he stalks his prey, he suddenly becomes visible at the bedside of a child who is awake and puts her into a trance with his magic staff. Jasy then leads a procession of hypnotized children to a cave in the forest, where he blinds them with thorns and feeds them to his brother Ao Ao, a cannibalistic sheep-man.
Nice touch.
It’s no surprise that at least one short, blond, blue-eyed visitor to eastern Paraguay reported being pelted with grapefruit by screaming children.
Now at first blush, the legend of Jasy Jateré just doesn’t make sense. There’s nothing more futile than trying to will yourself to sleep, especially during the day. Now add the self-defeating notion of terrifying a child to sleep, and the tale of Jasy Jateré begins to seem cruel and perverse.
And it would be—IF the point was really getting the child to sleep. But it isn’t. The actual intention is not to enforce the nap but to keep children from wandering out of their beds into the very real dangers of the rainforest as their parents sleep. A daily dose of psychic terror is thought to be better than the fate that awaits a child lost and alone in the forest.
It’s easy for me, sipping my latte in a North American subdivision, to say that nothing justifies immersing our children in this kind of terror. But I have to admit that I have any number of ways of keeping my kids safe while they nap, like locking our doors and living 4000 miles from the nearest wild pit viper. Our neighborhood has very few crocodiles and many, many lawyers. If my child is bitten by either one, there’s a hospital four minutes away.
I can only imagine to what lengths I would go to protect my kids from very real, very fatal risks. In the end, I think such warning legends say less about our cruelty than they do about the tendency of natural selection to favor the genes of those who will do anything and everything to protect their children.
At any rate, my kids ate Jasy Jateré up and begged for more monsters. I’ll bring them here in later posts.
Shorter, more often
I need to change my approach here. Damn good topics are piling up in my draft box. If I do my usual weekly 1K, they’ll all be stale by the time I get to them. So I’m going to more of a 400-word norm for a while, twice a week, with the odd novella.
Next time:
DALES OF OUR LIVES
7:30PM MOL-TV
“Weird Science.” The Great Karmic Wheel threatens to run Dale over. The very same day he posts about good and bad teaching in Georgia science classrooms, his son comes home with bad news about his current high school science teacher! Hilarity ensues when Dale’s usually live-and-let-live wife insists that he “do something!” He knows she’s right, but what to do? Great fun for the whole family. TV14: PARENTS STRONGLY CAUTIONED (Sex, Language, Bad Science)
A tale of two (Southern) teachers
The teacher was young, hip, and hugely popular with the kids in her Georgia public middle school, a talented teacher in many ways. Everybody wanted Miss Reynolds for seventh grade science.
“You may have noticed in your syllabus that we’re talking about evolution today,” she began one day, a few weeks in. “Now,” she said — I picture the palms out, eyes closed, head cocked, the posture of assured commiseration — “I know this is a controversial thing. But I want you to understand that this is just a theory. There are lots of other theories too. This is just one guy’s idea. M’kay?”
M’kay.
My son Connor was in the class. He was raised on the wonder of natural selection and sees the implications of it everywhere. He felt a bit betrayed to hear a teacher he really liked giving evolution the “just a theory” treatment.
It wasn’t for long. Within days, she was on to something else.
This, it turns out, is standard operating procedure in US classrooms. A NYT article written around the time of the Kitzmiller trial noted that even if evolution is in the curriculum, science teachers nationwide generally downplay, gloss over, or completely ignore it.
Dr. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Alabama recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution.
“She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she’d get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it,” he recalled. “She told me other teachers were doing the same thing.”
Dr. Gerald Wheeler, a physicist who heads the National Science Teachers Association, said many members of his organization “fly under the radar” of fundamentalists by introducing evolution as controversial, which scientifically it is not, or by noting that many people do not accept it, caveats not normally offered for other parts of the science curriculum.
It isn’t usually the beliefs of the teacher that screw things up but a desire to sidestep a firestorm from parents. And though opposition is almost entirely religious parents, not all religious parents are opposed. In fact, Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education has observed that it’s a non-issue in Catholic schools — at least since John Paul II gave the infallible okie-doke in 1996.
Last year Connor was a freshman in high school and hit Life Sciences and evolution again. Once again it was a teacher he really liked, an affable coach who taught science brilliantly as well. But once again, Connor knew the odds of a strong presentation were not good.
Sure enough, on the first day of the evolution unit, Coach Davis strode to the front of the room, cleared his throat, and said: “Today we’re starting the unit on evolution. Evolution, as you know, is just a theory.”
I can just picture my boy’s eyes, the only part of his face that betrays his feelings when he’s holding the lid on tight.
The teacher paused. “Now,” he continued, “let me tell you what the word ‘theory’ actually means.”
Booyah!
Connor described it to me with obvious relief. “He said a theory is something that explains what facts mean, and that ‘theory’ doesn’t mean something is just a guess. He said there are strong theories and weak theories, and that evolution is one of the strongest in science. He said that gravity is a theory, but it doesn’t mean we’re not sure about gravity. It was awesome.”
According to the ongoing Fordham Foundation studies of science education, it’s not strictly a North/South thing:
But even that map reflects only the quality of state science standards. What happens in the classroom is anybody’s guess. Miss Reynolds and Coach Davis are three miles apart in a state with the highest grade in science standards, yet one of them is hitting it out of the park while the other settles for a bunt. One thing is for sure — by presenting evolution intelligently and in depth, my son’s more recent Southern science teacher is doing better than many of his counterparts, even at the higher latitudes.
It’s not about the defense of the concept for Connor. It mostly just pains him to hear people he likes and respects, and who should know better, saying dumb things. I’ve seen him flash the same disappointed face at me. And half the time he’s right.
Hopefully we’ll both carry away another lesson, something Kurt Vonnegut once said. Considering what a mess of nonsense and bad wiring we are, I don’t get too depressed anymore by the dumb things we say and do. That’s normal. Instead, I’m mostly gratified that we ever get ANYTHING right.
And we do, despite ourselves. Despite the fact that evolution so decisively dethrones us, that it so deflates our mighty self-importance, we still figured it out, and we’re still passing it on. Incompletely and inelegantly, yes. But given the sorry way evolution actually threw us together, I say woohoo.