Richard Feynman is definitely one role models when it comes to being a scientist. Feynman was legendary for being able to intuitively understand even the most complex topics, but what made him the most famous was just how brilliant of a teacher he was. Throughout Feynman's entire career, he was constantly given praise for his ability to clearly and simply explain things to his peers. Even today, a series of physics textbooks titled The Feynman Lectures, originally written by Feynman himself, is widely popular for being a wonderful introduction to undergraduate physics that gives great, intuitive explanations without sacrificing depth.
In the above video, Feynman describes what I think separates a true scientist from someone who just thinks they're smart because they know a few fancy words. To give a short summary: Feynman recalls a time from his childhood when his friend made fun of him for failing to identify a bird as a Brown-Throated Thrush. Feynman's response was that he in fact knew the names of the bird in several different languages, but his point is that even after learning all these different names for the bird, he and his friend knew nothing about the bird itself! Science is not simply a process of categorizing everything and giving them extremely long-winded names so that scientists can sound smart when they talk to each other. It's the process by which we come to understand the mechanisms that govern the world around us. When a particular object or idea seems to be especially important or interesting, it's only fitting that we give it a special name.
As a part-time job, I sometimes work as a science teacher for 5th graders. On a handful of days every week, I'll visit their classroom for an hour or so to give a science lesson. The lesson material is prepared and sometimes even scripted beforehand, the only preparation I need to do is to familiarize myself with the material and how to set up whatever lab we happen to be doing. One of my more recent labs involved cell biology where the kids made little models of cells out of candy. Now, I think this lab would be perfectly fine if the kids had learned about cells beforehand, but when we got to naming the different parts of the cell, almost none of the kids raised their hand and most had never even heard of things like the cell nucleus, let alone structures with more complicated names like the Golgi apparatus or the smooth endoplasmic reticulum. My first thought when looking over the lab was that if these kids weren't already familiar with these things, they're going to forget everything I'll have said the minute I leave the classroom! On top of that, most of the lesson time was intended to be devoted to building the cell models, with only a bit of time at the beginning being set a side to simply have them copy down a few key terms! Since the models were made out of candy, I could tell the kids didn't really care about the science at all.
For me, that's exactly NOT the way science should be taught. I felt like I was doing nothing but leaving my students with a large vocabulary (assuming they remember it at all) full of words that they don't understand. Their knowledge can barely even be called superficial. The candy was nothing but a way to draw the kids' attention. The problem is that their attention wasn't being directed at the science, just the candy! Of course, I'm not just ranting about this particular lesson plan, since I've definitely felt the same way about some my own science classes in grade school. There are a lot of science classes that present science like it's some kind of grab-bag full of facts that we should just know because, you know, it's science! I think we should be teaching science the way we teach literature or history, by telling a story. That's how you get people to remember what you said. That's how show people how everything you're talking about fits together. In other words, it's how you get people to understand.
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