Gravity, the professor, and the Korean highway system

I had the most frustrating, infuriating and yet simultaneously revealing experiences to date in one of my first classes as an undergraduate college student. My teacher was, let’s just say, less-than-inspirational.

My teacher (a pure mathematician turned lauded researcher and college physics professor) made it quite clear to the class that a fundamental understanding of “physics 101” can only come when a student’s studying and learning conform to the rigors of the subject.

He continued by reviewing one of the basic principles that we were going to learn, and said in a sarcastic tone, “Let’s pretend that we know what we’re talking about.”

Wow. I wondered if this was what he really meant by “rigor.” What was he really saying to us?

In response to his blatant condescension, I took my frustration out on my pen, flapping it violently in my right hand.

If we don’t know what we’re talking about, what’s the point of learning? Is this what it is to learn science—a “not really, but let’s pretend”?

In light of President Obama’s massive new investment in education, I think it is important to incorporate students’ perspectives in “teaching teachers” the process of teaching science.

Some educators are misguided in thinking that their teaching methods reach all of their students. Some have used “recipes” based on previously constructed teaching machinery, spitting out methodologies as a collection of standard rules for learning with no wiggle room for creative expression. The Obama initiative would be doomed with such modes of education. Funneling money into an educational system that relies on ineffective, uninspiring teaching is not only a lost cause and a detriment to the current state of our economy, but also, of course, to the students—and, in turn, the future integrity of this country’s economy. Conversely, the economy represents the problem in the first place, for it has not provided science teachers with the resources they really need to teach.

As such, some teachers have supplied their students with far-reaching metaphors for understanding. In my experience, they sometimes provide both recipes and metaphors.

These two methodologies can be counterproductive as teaching tools and might ultimately take students nowhere in terms of comprehension of a subject.

It is easy to see how this works with recipes—it’s the classic mentality of being forced to do what your teacher or text dictates–learning in a rote way, requiring mere memorization.

A terrible cook (i.e. myself), for example, won’t be able to produce any good dish without following a written recipe to the letter. Take the recipe away, and he or she will be unable to reproduce the dish, let alone learn anything about cooking in general. In education, we need to focus less on the recipes and more on the “cooks.”

And metaphors also can be counterproductive in science education: in seeking to understand a metaphor, some students struggle to comprehend the association of the scientific principle and the subject of the metaphor rather than getting inside the theory itself and learning it perhaps through its application to real-life events.

Example. My professor was teaching my class a subject that loosely involved the concepts of gravity and time. To “help,” he cited a method used to calculate traffic flow on the Korean highway system.

Travel on the Korean highway system became a metaphor for describing the force of gravity.

This metaphor is complex and abstract, and it proves my point. It did nothing to advance my thinking.

Ultimately, the Korean highway system has nothing to do with gravity.

When science education, in my experience, has been effective, it has been so because the teachers have inspired me along with their other students to do original research—to look for relevant real-life applications and teach theoretical concepts step-by-step with clarity, not with obliqueness or with simple recipes or metaphors.

I believe that science teachers can and should act as coaches (to use a metaphor that works) to put science into the capable hands of their students. They should also fervently believe in their students.

Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D., internationally recognized expert in the study of human innovation and creativity, said in a speech in 2006 that, “My contention is that all kids have tremendous talents, and we [in education] squander them, pretty ruthlessly.”

As part of being coached, students must ask their teachers questions that they cannot ask their textbooks: i.e. the “mass-produced” and silent professors, if you will (most students, including myself, would agree that reading a textbook is like chewing on a dried leaf).

Referencing a book, listening to a lecture, or learning a concept one way is just the beginning if the student is inspired to cultivate his or her own understanding and application of the subject. Coaches know that, of course.

To be sure, teaching methods involving the techniques of recipe and metaphor learning will work with some students in a classroom (I’m not making any universal claims)—but if even one student is lost in the complexities of the subject being taught, that’s one too many.

The author is a student in the School of General Studies.