Toad in the Hole

Communicating Science: A Low-Key Rant

I put something in the reply string over at a Pharyngula post, and I’ll put it here too. I think I’ll want to talk about this subject more soon.

I’m trying to sift out the responses to the Ktroll who’s here humping PZ’s leg again and get to more interesting stuff, and Jack in #203 had one that struck me:

But in my short experience teaching (high school math), and longer experience married to an elementary school teacher, I found that the passion among elementary school teachers was for the kids. Many, many of them subscribe to “I am not in this profession to teach math or science or any other specific subject. I teach children.”

It’s unusual to have those passions--and talents--intersect in the same person, I guess, and there are plenty of malign or just crushingly-inert filters out there to further reduce the pool. Grade-school teachers, high-school teachers: they have to teach looking over their shoulders in a lot of schools, and that is exhausting. Class size, facilities, resources, surrounding microcultures, crazy school boards, insulting salaries, just plain social lunacies combine in various ways to wear teachers out. Having to worry about losing one’s job over assorted kinds of nonsense--how can they keep from being completely paralyzed, let alone be inspiring?

I’ve been lucky to have had some really talented teachers in my life, and IME they’ve combined teaching talent, a habit of actually looking at the people they teach (seriously, that bit of attentive, personal communication is a sort of exchange of trust that opens the learning mind), the freedom to teach as they wanted, and a passion for the subject. They don’t even have to be experts in the subject; they just have to know something I don’t and be excited about it.

“Teach children” isn’t quite a complete transitive-verb sentence. If you diagram it (hah) with the real world in mind you find an elided preposition, “to,” before “children.” So you still need an object, something to teach them. Something you yourself take visible pleasure in knowing.

I got a chance to co-teach a class in environmental journalism some years back, and found I had a couple of basic things to tell the youngsters there.
One: take science courses. Doesn’t much matter which; any subject there will give you a clue on how to research, and more important a sense of what’s likely and what isn’t, so you won’t be falling for the cranks.

Two, as I’d been telling aspiring writers for years before I made money at it myself: Yes, get your writing chops and keep practicing. But look around the great big world and find something you love more than you love writing or words. That’s what you write about.

Seems to me there’s something like that to apply to teaching. The example of joy and passion, that’s a great big deal. It doesn’t matter if your favorite thing isn’t something any particular student will glom onto; different things reach different people and seeing that it’s a pleasure to get into your subject is just as important as getting them past some standardized test. (More so, of course, but those damned tests, ugh, another bad filter.)

I’m creeping up on 60 and have lately met rather a lot of hot seniors. One of the first things you learn in the field when birding is to attach yourself like a limpet to the various heads of white hair you encounter; same applies to gardening, a passion Joe and I came to via birding and what we write about for most of our income now. What I find common to the most knowledgeable people, the people who find out new things for all of us, is passion.

Intelligence, IME, is not so much capability as it is appetite.

Communicating that appetite, now isn’t that an interesting problem we have to play with?

Posted by Ron Sullivan | 6 comments already...

High Point of the Day

for some of us was getting bitten by Ruth Bancroft’s chihuahua.

That “some” would be Joe.

Hey, it’s a honor not everyone can claim. 

Posted by Ron Sullivan | 2 comments already...

Ow.

I saw salmon at $23.99/lb today at the Berkeley Bowl market.

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Nobody Believes Me: #5

It’s really easier to find all you need in California.

Posted by Ron Sullivan | 5 comments already...

Busy Busy Busy

The last two days have been more fun than the previous week-plus, partly because (knock wood) I seem to have got the best of the shingles, but mostly for social reasons. Plus: sunshine!

Last night we got to meet and drink beer and attempt to converse with P.Z. Myers and a bunch of local pharyngulizers in a very-loud pub. P.Z. is pretty much what I expected: low-key, direct, funny, nimble, warm, and deeply courteous. I enjoyed the whole thing more than I had any right to expect, given that I’d just barely decided I had the moxie to walk over to Shattuck Avenue and stay upright for something that started at 9PM.

This was in the middle of spending two days covering a conference up at UC Davis, driving both ways both days, a bit over an hour each way depending on the day’s distribution of Highway Patrol radar cars on I-80. The conference was about climate change and horticulture, and a Davis person was kind enough to comp us as press; we couldn’t have afforded it otherwise. (Smart move: we have all manner of good things to say about the Davis Arboretum and its latest project, and I’ll do some of that right here real soon now.)

The other social joy happened in the middle of the second day of that, when Pica and Numenius took us out for a picnic lunch under a shadetree in the Arboretum. They’d picked up food from the Farmers’ Market and the Coop, and picked us up from the conference, and it was all good enough that we didn’t regret the nice lunch offered to conferees. Conferrers? (Anyway, let me insert my culinary kudos to the UC Davis student catering service.) Good chow, great company: every day should be this good.

It was interesting how parts of the days’ topics overlap, or maybe it’s just in my brain. P.Z. had just given the closing remarks at an evo-devo conference, and he said he’d carried on about how scientists should be more militant. When we got to talk a bit outside the pub, he said one other thing he’d leaned on in that talk was that scientists don’t talk enough about how much fun science is. Yeah!

After the Davis meet, I’m thinking that gardeners and our ilk (I’ve always wanted to have an ilk of my own. Haven’t you?) ought to be more militant too. And maybe, some of us, a bit embarrassed. (Invasive exotics, fertilizer runoff, that sort of thing at least.) I’ll dilate on that soon too, but I perked up my ears when the Arboretum director made a point, from the audience, about “willful ignorance.” People are being as ignorant as is convenient to them about climate change: whether it’s happening, whether it’s human-caused, whether humans can affect it, whether it’s too late, or too complicated, or “political” (and why), or just a myth. Speakers talked about “climate change skeptics” but it’s way too late for skepticism; it’s been shown pretty clearly. The phrase is “denialist.”

With all that implies.

Posted by Ron Sullivan | 7 comments already...