“It is a miracle that
curiosity survives formal education.” –Albert Einstein
Children have a natural curiosity about almost
everything. Creating scientifically
literate and intellectually stimulated citizens starts by nurturing that
curiosity and creativity rather than ignoring or belittling it. My favorite question when I was about three
years old was “how do they make roads?”.
I was lucky enough to have parents who had researched the road-making
process after the first time I asked this question and patiently explained it
to me every single time I asked (which was almost every time I was in the
car). My parents also supported my
intellectual development by sending me outside to play. Once I could explore on my own, I spent much
of my childhood outside: exploring woods and swamp behind our house, pushing my
sister into the mud, and involving myself in scholarly pursuits such as trying
to breed a new species of aquatic monster in a bucket. Luckily, I had limited results. What I think these few anecdotes offer is
that children are living, breathing, hypothesis-testing machines. As children, we explore our environment, act
on it, and learn from the results. In
effect, you could say that all children are tiny scientists, exploring the vast
uncharted lands of the backyard, testing to see if Mom gets upset when they
drop their spaghetti on the floor, or burying herself up to the waist in soil
and waiting to see if she will grow roots like a tree (I’ll give you one guess
which experiment I attempted at age four, with very muddy results). Preschool and childhood is a time of exploration,
informal hypothesis testing, and frenzied, fascinated devotion to topics which
we find interesting. In early childhood,
we often have the opportunity follow our own agendas to investigate the world
and this freedom encourages us to keep pursing new knowledge.
Unfortunately, when we start our formal education,
science becomes less of a “want to” and more of a “have to”. The imposition of a structured curriculum
with a set of rules and grades takes science from an instinctual, exciting
pastime to a regimented, restricted routine that may very well turn some
students off of science entirely. In
childhood free play and exploration, there may not be an authority figure
telling children explicitly that they must investigate this specific phenomenon,
or they may not dilly-dally investigating what makes the rocks in the classroom’s
potted plants that irresistible red color. This restriction to defined science curriculum
can take the fun out of investigation and make it into just another part of the
school day. Additionally, attaching
value judgments (specifically, grades) to children’s scientific curiosity takes
much of the intrinsic motivation away.
When children learn what forms of empirical investigation are valued
within a classroom, their motivation to achieve the desired grade reward may
trump their desire to perform extra (perhaps in their minds, now “unnecessary”)
investigation.
It follows that just as there are ways to decrease young
students’ interest in science, there are great ways to increase student
investment in science as well. As I was
considering my early years in school, two “great moments in science” stand out
for me. The first moment happened in my
fourth grade science class, when we were introduced to circuits and were given
some D-batteries, wire, and a tiny light bulb.
Mr. Fudge told us to make a circuit, and to show him how the system
worked. After we made the circuit and
explained our design, we were allowed to test different hypotheses with the
batteries and circuits. My attempt to
create a “superbattery” from an obscene number of D-batteries was not
discouraged, and I can still remember getting a tiny shock from the wire when I
accidentally held the copper instead of the plastic coating. The important
lesson from his moment is to encourage students to explore as much as humanly
(or, in our current educational climate “curricularly”) possible. Pushing
students to investigate further is the key. In that place between the known and
the unknown, perhaps with the seal of a small electrical burn, a lifelong love
of science can be forged.
The second important moment took place in my first grade
classroom, where my teacher, the first feminist I ever knew (with crinkly eyes,
salt and pepper hair, and a dry sense of humor that we seemed to appreciate
even then), took my class outside to collect falling snowflakes on pieces of
green cellophane. She then preserved
them with hairspray and brought us inside to form an orderly line and wait for
our turn to learn to use the single class microscope that sat on the
counter. I remember feeling the
anticipation as I got closer and closer to the front of the line, to the
contraption that I had often seen used on NOVA but had yet to use in real
life. I remember stepping up on the
purple plastic stool and hearing Ms. Tillet tell me how to focus the lens. And I remember that moment of utterly
incalculable joy when I saw a single snowflake magnified just for me. It was like being a member of a secret club,
and to this day, thinking of that moment makes me feel as though I could do
anything. Reflecting on these early empowering
experiences kept me going in high school when I would pound the table and say
“but I haaate physics! When am I
going to have to use this?” Thinking of
those moments reminded me that there is discovery and joy everywhere. If every student, every citizen, had
experiences like these in their back pocket for a “science hatred emergency”,
scientific enthusiasm would not be a problem.
When reflecting on the problem of a public that loses its
enthusiasm for science before the middle school years, I think it is a science
writer’s highest calling to remind individuals why they loved science in
childhood. I would give my left pinky to be able to feel that rush of discovery
at the microscope for the first time again, but I think that creating that
feeling for another person would be just as special. There is absolutely no
doubt in my mind that an enthusiastic, accessible, and well-written science
article can capture the public’s imagination and encourage them to pursue their
rekindled interest in science further. I
think that the most important component of a science article that “rekindles
the flame” between the reader and science is the enthusiasm. Readers need to feel that this piece of
writing is a “want to read” and not a “have to read”. Reading our writing needs to be a pursuit,
not a duty. Sucking the enthusiasm and
captivating details out of an article puts the reader right back into their
first grade classroom, where they might not have been allowed to touch the
science table or were told that their method of testing their hypothesis was
not the same as the one outlined on the worksheet.
In Ideas into Words,
Elise Hancock gives some of the most saliently simple advice that I’ve ever
read: “Whatever interests you, big or small, will interest a reader. Count on it” (30). She then goes on to state the caveat: make
sure that you’re open to being enthused.
Hancock’s advice is outstanding.
She encourages us to bring our curiosity to the story. To dig.
To schlep through swamps, to interview a virologist in her lab, to go
where our curiosity takes us; then our responsibility is to take the reader
there with an intuitively-written and captivating account of our journey. As writers, when we experience the thrill of
discovery, we can take our readers there with our writing. The important part of crafting this type of
engaging piece is to make the reader want to find out what happens next, to
build the world into which they can step and explore (whether it’s a sterile
neurosurgery operating suite or a canoe speeding through the murky waters of
the Amazon), and to convey your point of view in an elegant but approachable
way. It is important to include this kind
of narrative structure, employ imagery and rich description, and make the
science accessible to the average reader without “dumbing it down”. It’s a delicate balance to strike, but if a
writer is able to produce that piece, it would be like looking through a microscope
for the first time…
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