Keep Your Eyes Open - Modeling Curiosity

Quick disclaimer.  I am a nerd.  I've been a nerd for as long as I can remember.  When I was in school, and people called me a nerd, I didn't feel insulted - just identified.  Since the popularity of the new Dr. Who, Big Bang Theory, and the IT Crowd, nerd culture has become a thing.  I'm not sure that it has made people nerds in the pure sense, but it's a place to start because people don't mind being called nerdy.

In the purest sense, a nerd is a person who loves learning.  They like studying.  They are self-directed learners; you might find them reading Wikipedia on their own.  They haven't let the adults in their lives convince them that they only need to learn things that will benefit their careers. (Yes, adults cause this problem, and they should stop.  You aren't helping anyone.  Then, you are shocked when your child isn't motivated at school.  Just quit it.) 

Teachers, one of the best things we can do for our students is to stoke the curiosity of nerds.  When someone asks a strange question, say, "That's interesting.  Let's think about it.  Let's look it up.  I'm so glad you asked that because now I want to know that too."  I know I've talked about this a ton on this blog, but it is because I believe it is so important.  Preventing kids from having a utilitarian view of the world will ensure that at least some of them will go into adulthood with the ability to innovate.  Curious people solve problems.  Curious people invent things.  Curious people become entrepreneurs.  Curious people make a difference in the world.  Utilitarians do not.  

By the way, curious people also enjoy life more.  They don't get bored; well, they do, but they know how to fix it in positive ways rather than causing problems.  They don't believe themselves to be cooler than the moment; so they tend not to have FOMO because they enjoy learning whatever they can.  

The people who push personality tests on us make us believe that we are static, but it is not true.  Teachers, we have the power to turn our kids into nerds.  We can turn a utilitarian into a curious person (Frighteningly, we can also send them the other way if we aren't careful).  One of the best ways is by modeling your own curiosity.  Some of those moments are planned; every year, during the chapter on light, I teach a lesson on why the sky is red in the morning and evening but blue during the day.  Then I tell them about something I genuinely wonder about - why is it never green?  They are so used to our teaching methods that they assume I know the answer and am trying to get them to answer, but I genuinely don't know the answer and enjoy wondering about it.  I want them to see the joy in wondering about things and speculating about answers, even if you never arrive at one.  I work that one in every year because it is one of the opportunities my curriculum provides.  But, it doesn't have to be planned.  You can also just keep your eyes open for unusual things and take advantage of teachable moments.  When you hear a bird on the roof, you can say, "How can you tell it's a bird and not a squirrel?"  You can respond to a spilled water bottle by speculating about why some paper towels are more absorbent than others while cleaning up the spill.  You can say, "You know what I saw on the way home last night?  There was an interesting pattern when the raindrops were falling in a puddle.  I wonder what caused that."  

I'm not suggesting that you replace your curriculum with an inquiry model.  If you have read this blog before, you know that isn't me.  But, I also think there are moments of opportunity that you don't want to miss.  Three days ago,  a student asked a question about time travel.  (I don't even know how it came up, but middle school students like to ask about it.)   As I was thinking out loud about the answer, I said, "Here's a thought that's never occurred to me; it would take time to travel.  Would that mean that I would not go back as far or that I would go farther forward?  I don't know."  I pondered it for a few seconds and moved on with class.  There's not an answer, so I'm not going to take a lot of time classtime trying to get to one, but I think it is worth a few moments to model the joy of having an unanswered question.  When a student asks a great question, sacrifice a few moments of your class time.  Of course, you will have to get back to your objective at some point, so make a note to keep thinking about it or look things up.  Then, make sure to tell them.  If only one student seemed interested, you can email them with your findings.  If other students were interested, you can bring it back up at the beginning of the next day's class.  It's a great lesson to show them that you continued to be curious about it after class and that you valued their question.

The great philosopher Ferris Bueller warned us. - "Live moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around, you could miss it."  Keep your eyes open.  Ask big questions.  Model it for your students.  We don't want to miss it, and we don't want them to miss it either.

Shaken Soda Bottle

I was in Walgreens during the fall of 2019, waiting for my flu shot.  I had been sitting in a chair for a few minutes when I became aware of the tears on my face.  I'm not afraid of needles.  Medical procedures do not cause me concern.  I was crying because, in February of that year, I had lost a student to complications of the flu.  This has happened every year since, so I would call getting the flu shot an emotional trigger for me.

Much political hay has been made of the idea of trigger warnings in recent years.  In spite of the fact that they have been around for my entire life.  We didn't call it that before the 2000s, but news anchors have always said things like "the following footage may be upsetting to some viewers."  In the 80s, sitcoms would put up "viewer discretion advised" cards before some of their very special episodes.  It only became a political issue when college professors started doing it in class and calling them trigger warnings because, as conservatives, we can't miss our chance to call people snowflakes and accuse liberals of engaging in a plot to weaken our kids.  If we could pull ourselves away from our political tribal thinking for a moment and have a normal human conversation, we might recognize that it is kind to give people a few seconds to prepare themselves for discussions about sensitive issues, especially if it might be of particular sensitivity to them.  It doesn't mean we don't teach the difficult issues (in the same way that I don't stop getting my flu shot); it means we give them a moment to steady themselves.

Let me clear that I am not suggesting we get "trauma-informed" training.  The trauma-informed movement in education has done more harm than good in spite of excellent intentions.  There isn't room to address that here, so I'll write about it some other time.  What I am suggesting is that you are sensitive to the needs of your students.  If you know you are approaching the anniversary of a student's family member's death, it would be wise for you to handle them more gently than usual.  If your curriculum involves teaching about seizures, and you have a student with a history of epilepsy, a quick email home to inform the parent that this is coming up would be appreciated.  They may ask that the student be allowed to sit out the lesson, or they may just want to have a conversation with their child to prepare them.  It doesn't have to be a major traumatic event for you to exercise some sensitivity.  If you teach seniors, and college acceptance/rejections have just been issued, the next day might not be the best day for the most difficult topic in your curriculum.  You can teach that thing in a couple of days.  Just recognizing the humanity of the people in front of you may go a long way.

In her Learning and the Brain Keynote speech at the 2022 Fall Learning and the Brain conference, Dr. Jessica Minihan compared kids to soda bottles.  Here's how she put it.  If you walk into a room and there are two bottles of soda, you will not be able to tell if one of them has been shaken.  If you open them both, and one erupts, you know that something has happened to one of them before you got there.  You did the same thing with both bottles, and it was a completely normal thing to do, but one of them had a history you did not know.  If you had known, you would have changed your approach, either waiting longer to open it or opening it more slowly (or with that quick open the close quickly move).  You prevent a problem by handling it differently.  

The same may be the case with students.  If you do something quite normal, but it evokes a dramatic reaction, it is likely not about you.  It may just be that you have encountered a shaken soda bottle.

You Keep On Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

This blog is usually about education, but this post is only going to touch on that tangentially.  It's just something I've noticed a lot lately.  It's about a word we use often, but we almost always use it incorrectly.  That word is "theory."

When I teach my 8th graders about Kinetic Theory, the notion that everything is made of atoms, they ask why it hasn't been proven yet after all these years.  It has, of course, but they believe theory means unproven.  And they aren't the only ones.  People use the word theory frequently when they mean speculation or hypothesis.  They say things like "My theory is . . ." and then guess about the cause of a situation.  When someone talks about something that could but has not yet happened, they'll say, "It is theoretically possible to . . . "  

This is not what theory means, y'all.  This may be the fault of elementary school science textbooks.  For some reason, when we teach young children the scientific method, we teach them that we start with a hypothesis and that after some experimental support, it becomes a theory.  Then, after lots and lots of proving, a theory may grow up one day to become a law.  This is wrong, but for some reason, the authors of elementary school textbooks want to give middle and high school science teachers something to unteach.  For some readers, this may be the first time you have heard that it isn't true.

So, what is true?  What is the difference between theory and law?  A theory is an explanation of a phenomenon.  A law is a mathematical expression of a physical relationship.  There are two theories of gravity (Newton's idea of instant communication of force and Einstein's understanding of the warping of spacetime), but the law of gravity remains unchanged.

Charles' Law describes the relationship between the volume and temperature of a contained gas at constant pressure.  It is a law because it can be expressed mathematically, but when I explain to my 8th graders the changes in molecular motion during a temperature change that lead to the change in volume, I am explaining the theory behind the law.  

If you aren't a scientist, you may be wondering why this matters.  There are a number of things, after all, that don't matter when used incorrectly in everyday usage.  When you put your hand on ice and describe it as cold, you are technically wrong because there is no such thing as cold. The feeling you are describing is the flow of heat away from your hand.  While technically wrong, I don't advise students to change the way they speak in everyday language because you'll sound like a fruitcake if you go outside in the winter and say, "Brr. It's less hot out here."  The same goes for describing the suction of a vacuum cleaner.  So why does it matter with the word theory?

As a Bible-believing Christian who also teaches science, I've watched a number of debates between Creationists and Evolutionists.  There are many important ideas to be debated between these two camps, but I cringe when a Creationist says, "Well, yours is just a theory too, so you can't prove what you are saying."  It doesn't matter what valid points he makes after that sentence because he has shown his lack of understanding.  If we are going to argue in good faith, we owe it to ourselves to speak accurately.  This comes up on social media frequently as well, with people asserting "just a theory" on everything from climate to vaccines to genetics.  While it is right and good to examine the flaws in scientific methodology and examine potential bias, none of that will be taken seriously if you call something "just a theory."

If we can't be bothered to speak precisely, we should not speak at all.

An Illustration of How Inquiry Learning (Doesn't) Work

Let's start with a definition - According to Wikipedia, "Inquiry-based learning is a form of active learning that starts by posing questions, problems or scenarios."  Ten years ago, you could not attend a conference without being told it was the future of education and would help our students learn more deeply.  Having experienced an inquiry-based calculus class, I knew this wasn't true, but as a teacher of lab sciences, I am expected to think of inquiry as the end-all-be-all of instructional methods by people who have never experienced teaching that way.  Every lab experience my students have requires a lot of direct instruction both before and after the lab experience.  Otherwise, they just observe phenomena (which people had been doing for millennia before the scientific method); they do not learn from them.  Here's a recent personal example.

In December, my students review the learning of the semester with a song.  I like to give them the lyrics in the form of a booklet, but I don't really know how to make a booklet on the copy machine.  There are people in our school who make programs for events, so I had asked a few times in prior years for someone to teach me.  Kind folk that they are, they would just do it for me.  While I appreciated it, I wanted to know how.

This December, on the day I wanted to make them, the person who knows how to do it had not arrived at the building yet.  I decided I would try to figure it out myself.  For forty minutes, I tried things that proved unsuccessful.  I googled how to make booklets, but the initial results used programs and copy machines that didn't match mine.  At one point, I thought I had found it, but when I looked at my computer, I didn't have the buttons shown in the instructions.  I finally realized it was in Adobe Reader while I was in Preview (not quite the same thing).  When I got into there, I found the right buttons, but the printed result was missing two pages and, for reasons I still cannot explain, ended on the 3rd page of the original.  I kept trying things and changing settings until it finally came out right and made the 81 copies I needed.

For supporters of Inquiry Learning, you are saying, "See - you were motivated, active in your learning, used your tools, and you will remember it longer than if someone had just told you how to do it."  Here's the thing, though.  I don't.  Someone asked me last week how to make a booklet, and I could not tell them.  Here are some issues with my experience:

1. Wasted time - It would have taken someone about five minutes to explicitly teach me how to do it.  I spent over an hour "figuring it out."  My motivation was waning and would not have lasted much longer.
2. Wasted resources - The amount of paper and ink that went in the trash can during my failed attempts would make Greta Thunberg cry.  Once, it printed on 11 x 17 paper, and I don't know why.  Since the original document is 9 pages long, each failed attempt wasted that much.  By the way, had this been chemistry rather than paperwork, misuse of those resources could have also been dangerous.
3. Wasted energy - By the time I finished, I had used a lot of motivational energy.  What might I have done instead?  We'll never know.
4. No permanence - As I said earlier, this did not result in deep learning.  It did not result in permanent learning.  I still don't know how to do it.  The reason is that I never engaged in the sequence from beginning to end while I was "figuring it out."  If I tried to do it now, I might stumble my way into it again or recognize some of the buttons when I saw them again, but I would have no confidence in doing so.  Had someone walked me through it step by step, and then I did it with their feedback, I might know how to do it today.

Students need guidance in learning and the more important and/or complex the skill, the more they need us.  As novice learners, they have only surface-level questions about their observations while we want them to learn the internal structure.  Google can give them information; it cannot give them insight (and I haven't even addressed that many sources they find are unreliable).  Students need our expertise to teach them explicitly or create activities that guide them through the learning process.  They do not have the ability to do it on their own, and they certainly would not achieve the standards we have in our curriculum.  Even if inquiry learning could teach all of those things, it would be inefficient and wasteful.  

Teach your students.  Don't assume they'll learn calculus without help.