There's too much focus on the "what we know" like Kreb's cycle, which is easily examinable. The focus should actually be "how we found out", something like what the book A Brief History of Everything traces out. Things like "we used isotopes with different masses to figure out this thing about phosphorous in DNA".
In general, the "what" makes no sense without the history. Why were we searching for DNA in the mid 20th century? What did we already know? Retracing science as an investigation would be much more beneficial to kids than making them remember the conclusions. It's much more portable as a skill to understand the path of investigation than some facts about organelles that they aren't likely to use.
But the real reason I dropped biology when the choice came (and why did it come, dear IB organisation?) is that biology is not seen as the smart kid subject, when compared to physics and chemistry. Part if this is that you can grind your way through memorizing the biochemical cycles, probably easier for most than learning calculus that you need for physics. But part of it is simply reputation, and it's not reasonable.
I have a friend who is a postdoc stats guy in the biology field. There's actually a deep need for numeracy in biology, people just don't seem to know it when they're in school.
As a safety inspector, I find to be more successful in teaching safety when I explain why some rules are in place. If not explained explicitly, people will figure an explanation on their own, and then sometimes they will be wrong - e.g. I'm safe to enter the hazardous zone, as it's a break time so no one works above = no risk of things falling down - except some things could be poorly secured and still fall down, or there could be a radiographic testing pending, or there could be holes in the floor… Knowing the reasons for a rule also make it easier to remember the rule.
I wish more people understood your thinking. Two instructions you get at a doctor’s office before having a surgical procedure:
- Wear comfortable clothes.
- Don’t eat anything before surgery.
The first is so you don’t have tight clothes rubbing your achy body on the ride home. The second is so that you don’t vomit up your eggs Benedict, inhale it, and die an awful death. They’re both in the same size print in the same bullet list.
That stuff should be explained beforehand but I rarely hear it said that concretely. I’ve wondered if rephrasing that like:
- Don’t eat anything before surgery, because it might make you die.
> I’ve wondered if rephrasing that like: ... would save lives
It would make people more scared of surgeries since the wording is stronger, fear of surgeries causes a lot of issues as well including people dying since they refuse to get a surgery.
Fair. Maybe they could be in separate sections like “For your comfort” and “Critical safety instructions”. The broader idea is that people should know the gist of why they’re being told not to do a thing, and that it’s for their own good. In this case the instruction isn’t to avoid them puking so that a janitor doesn’t have to clean it up (along the same lines of “no black rubber soles on the gym floor”), but so it doesn’t put them in intensive care.
Humans spent the last 40,000 years not having explanations for rules because there were no (known) explanations for rules. Not an easy habit to shake, I think.
I work in train and aviation operational systems. We do safety training by taking teams to depots or sites of accidents where there are ruined systems.
Seeing the remains of an aircraft fuselage, or what a burned out diesel locomotive looks like -- and in the case of the train, smells like; it was being repaired -- really drives the point home.
A couple more slides on case studies and how they happened -- shout out of Admiral Cloudberg for doing a great job with that stuff; use their articles a lot -- and it's easy to convince people. Make it visceral, and they sure as hell will remember.
Presumably it's the same with a lot of science education as well. Physics and math for the sake of math is just rote memorization, but make them calculate rocket trajectories, then build a few model rockets and shoot them off, and those kids will be way more engaged. Like, I got really into biology when I started making basement hooch in college...
Tremendous comments in this thread that exemplify something I enjoy about HN, generative consumption. That's a fancy way of saying certain posts and comments get my mental wheels spinning, which I can transfer to whatever else I'm doing for the day.
Five minutes here for the blog, your comments, this reply, then I'm out and likely more productive than I was 6 minutes ago.
I had this same experience being taught physics and maths. Just a bunch of what feel like pretty dull experiments which ends with a gold leaf moving...
But the STORY of physics is fascinating. Why each experiment was done, by who, to prove what etc etc. All the sciences are like a soap opera of personalities and disagreements that make them much more interesting - and memorable - if you know the back story.
That 'thin deep slice' comment really sums it up. No context, just a thing to memorise.
I think physics students should be give The Fabric of the Cosmos my Brian Greene to read before they start doing any actual learning. I bet there's a biology equivalent of a book that is a 'what we know so far and what we don't understand' - if you know of one please let me know.
> I had this same experience being taught physics and maths. Just a bunch of what feel like pretty dull experiments which ends with a gold leaf moving...
> But the STORY of physics is fascinating.
There’s a college some of my kids have been considering that takes a similar approach to their math (and sciences) curricula, starting math out with Euclid and progressing through Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler (maybe Leibniz / Newton? Not sure), at each point motivating the development of astronomy and mathematics by showing how each person developed our understanding of the natural universe.
In comparison, in my college math courses, which were oriented towards engineering majors, I felt at the time like concepts were coming out of nowhere without justification, with no sense of how they fit in with anything else, other than the certainty that I had to keep up or I would be lost a week later.
I took gp's use of "opera" to describe an inclusive, wide range of genres that feature human relationships, like space operas. There's definitely mass appeal (think of Star Wars alone.)
If you took star wars and removed the action and acting and it was just a bunch of philosophical arguments written in a book then not many would like it. We know since there are many such books and they aren't very popular compared to the star wars movie.
When I crammed virology before taking a computational biology role, the "how we know" was the most fascinating part for me. I suddenly understood science and realised I'd spent 20 years of my life learning facts, called "science", but not actually understanding science at all.
A great example is the Hershey-Chase experiment[0]. What I realised is science isn't about learning and memorising facts, it's a creative process of prodding the universe in just the right way to learn something about it. I realised scientists have more in common with artists than engineers and that I am definitely more of an engineer.
This is why history resonated so well with me back in school. Instead of just blindly learning historical facts our teachers requested us to explain what were the grounds and cause of historical events.
I still use this when learning new concepts. I try to Llearn what existed before and why the change made sense.
While the motivation is correct, I would have to take this with a huge boulder of salt due to the inability to accurately obtain and analyze all the information around the historic event.
Knowing some of the potential whys and using them to try to explain the following event is a lot more than just memorizing someone else's theory, it's learning to piece together an understanding from information. Even if you don't ultimately agree with "someone else's theory" (say, the common take) you should be able to understand why others think it then add in your arguments of what you think. Any of this is better than wrote memorization.
> you should be able to understand why others think it then add in your arguments of what you think
This isn't what you have to do on the tests however, the tests just wants you to repeat the theory from the book, or the theory from your teacher. Many seem to just adopt others theories as their own in such scenarios so people who do that might like it, but anyone who thinks for themselves will hate that since you quickly realize this is just another "memorize this thing" situation but you have to write it as if you buy into the theory.
Rote memorization isn't "any time you remember a fact" it's when you solely use repeated memorization to learn something. Discussing the why's and forming an explanation with the content and other things at the time is active/meaningful/associative learning (those are 3 different types of learning from rote memorization, not an ad hoc description).
I'd agree this isn't what you do on a normal test. It didn't sound like GP was arguing these points in a normal test, nor does a normal test match 95% of my APUSH experience either even though that ended in a standardized test.
Sure, you can find some worst case of student and worst case of teacher where this can devolve into being no better than raw memorization. Hopefully you can at least imagine other scenarios are possible too.
You do realize the books already talks a lot about why? All subjects already include so many whys that students just filters it out, people just fondly remember the few subjects where they didn't filter out all the interesting parts.
The result is that students just memorize the whys, sure you can always go beyond that and have fun in every class but that has very little to do with the teacher bringing it up, because the teachers brings that up in almost every class or at least the books does. So, that they focused on why is still rote memorization just like the focus on facts, sure facts do tell an interesting tale but if people ignore that and just memorize the facts then they aren't any fun. It is the same way with looking at "why", it is just a bunch of facts in the end and most students makes that boring.
> Sure, you can find some worst case of student and worst case of teacher where this can devolve into being no better than raw memorization
No, that is the normal case, almost everyone here did this which is why they have so horrible memories from school. You too probably did this, memorized stuff when the teacher desperately tried to get you to engage with it in more interesting ways, otherwise you wouldn't have thought it is so rare for such teaching to fail, because if you really saw all the teachers that tried you couldn't have had that opinion since you'd see all your classmates zone out and be bored and ask for rote memorization details.
I've never ever seen a schoolbook that was just a list of facts, it just isn't a thing, students still doesn't engage.
Books often give some of the "why" but that's different from a method which engages with the why. The main change is in going from passively interacting with the material "In the book it says... in my notes it says... in class it was said... on the test it wanted me to recall..." to actively interacting with the material "the book had these why's... the teacher/we discussed these why's... i need to be able to defend the argument of why... I also think... on the test I argued why the fact occurred". Even personally bored while doing it or not it's a better way to learn the material.
You do memorize why's but part of arguing the why's, either to the teacher or in groups, is to add interaction with the details. It may or may not be a barrel of fun but it is, by definition, more engaging. Whether or not that's a personal case is going to be subjective but yes, most people really do like learning via more than rote memorization alone all the time in lieu of mixing it up and engaging on average.
I've definitely had classes where the teacher wasn't able to make the content interesting/engaging - it sucked either way in that case. I'm not as sure the teaching "fails" as much as is "not as good". That students zone out is no measure of a method being universally bad, that the method is single approached and almost all students zone out is a good indicator though and that's what you get with constant memorization only.
>There's too much focus on the "what we know" like Kreb's cycle, which is easily examinable. The focus should actually be "how we found out"
I read Asimov's Guide To Science about 10 years ago, and came to the same realization that, for most people, understanding why we know what we know is probably more important than what we know. It's better than thinking that science is a series of facts about the world, rather than a process. It treats the current state of understanding (as of the book's writing) in several subjects as a series of developments, each raising new questions and problems, which are studied further.
There's a limit to what a prof. can pack in, if the development of understanding needs to be covered too. And for a student focused on efficiently learning the subject matter it's a digression.
As a separate class though, it'd be good, and enlightening.
> There's too much focus on the "what we know" like Kreb's cycle, which is easily examinable. The focus should actually be "how we found out", something like what the book A Brief History of Everything traces out.
The problem is that in school there is far too little time to teach this all. There is already too little time to teach the curriculum material. Thus, if you are interested in such topics, simply go to a decent (university) library.
I think we could reduce the scope of today's curricula to accommodate this kind of teaching. If students spent a few more months understanding the how of scientific discovery instead of the what, I think it would be a worthwhile trade-off.
> I have a friend who is a postdoc stats guy in the biology field. There's actually a deep need for numeracy in biology, people just don't seem to know it when they're in school.
I was always amazed about a past acquaintance whose PhD thesis included game theory applications, as she was studying the breeding and feeding behaviors of some random bird.
In general, the "what" makes no sense without the history. Why were we searching for DNA in the mid 20th century? What did we already know? Retracing science as an investigation would be much more beneficial to kids than making them remember the conclusions. It's much more portable as a skill to understand the path of investigation than some facts about organelles that they aren't likely to use.
But the real reason I dropped biology when the choice came (and why did it come, dear IB organisation?) is that biology is not seen as the smart kid subject, when compared to physics and chemistry. Part if this is that you can grind your way through memorizing the biochemical cycles, probably easier for most than learning calculus that you need for physics. But part of it is simply reputation, and it's not reasonable.
I have a friend who is a postdoc stats guy in the biology field. There's actually a deep need for numeracy in biology, people just don't seem to know it when they're in school.