The Importance of Wonder in Science

There was a great op-ed in the NYTimes this past Sunday called “Put A Little Science in Your Life“. The author, Brian Greene, is a professor of physics, and he makes a compelling argument that we could be doing a little better in teaching science. Specifically, teaching it in a way that helps the students retain their natural sense of wonder at all this neat stuff, rather than boiling it all down to some really dry numbers and making sure you follow the exact proper procedure for everything. Is there really a reason that science can only be interesting during elementary school and then not again until you reach high level independent research?

Some excerpts, although of course you should go read the whole thing:

When we consider the ubiquity of cellphones, iPods, personal computers and the Internet, it’s easy to see how science (and the technology to which it leads) is woven into the fabric of our day-to-day activities. When we benefit from CT scanners, M.R.I. devices, pacemakers and arterial stents, we can immediately appreciate how science affects the quality of our lives. When we assess the state of the world, and identify looming challenges like climate change, global pandemics, security threats and diminishing resources, we don’t hesitate in turning to science to gauge the problems and find solutions.

And when we look at the wealth of opportunities hovering on the horizon — stem cells, genomic sequencing, personalized medicine, longevity research, nanoscience, brain-machine interface, quantum computers, space technology — we realize how crucial it is to cultivate a general public that can engage with scientific issues; there’s simply no other way that as a society we will be prepared to make informed decisions on a range of issues that will shape the future.

These are the standard — and enormously important — reasons many would give in explaining why science matters.

But here’s the thing. The reason science really matters runs deeper still. Science is a way of life. Science is a perspective. Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable — a transformation, for those lucky enough to experience it, that is empowering and emotional. To be able to think through and grasp explanations — for everything from why the sky is blue to how life formed on earth — not because they are declared dogma but rather because they reveal patterns confirmed by experiment and observation, is one of the most precious of human experiences.

Sleight of hand and misdirection

I keep meaning to write something substantive here, but I’ve been distracted by the conversation going on over at Mike’s academic blog, Ad Nauseam, specifically on the post “Finding the countercanon.” Originally, Mike posed his problem and request this way:

Back to my problem: as a product of my time and place I know the canon as it is espoused by my university, and I know the canon as it is espoused by my authors. (Woolf and Rushdie are graciously forthright about the books they think people should be reading.) But I don’t know, and I don’t know how to know, the canons that boom outside the walls of my little University, the list of 100 Essential Books They Won’t Teach You In College.

But then in the comments, other interesting questions related to his desire to learn about non-English-department-approved literature comes up:

So few of the students who go through intro lit classes will pick up a book after they graduate. Lit profs have only the 14 or 15 weeks it takes to satisfy a gen ed requirement to give students a map of the literary library, so that students who don’t have your natural drive for reading will at least get a sense of what’s out there, and feel that at least one author connected with them and represents something like their inner & outer lives.

This is part of why my own canoniphilia distresses me: I’m already at a demographic remove from the great majority of American students; if my syllabi are demographically identical, then I have that much less of a chance of breaking through to the infrequent or non-reader.

Revisited: Religion in the local public schools

In a strange return to one of the very first posts here at Geek Buffet (now more than a whole year ago!), I heard a startling local news blurb on my way home this afternoon. The saga of Mr. Escamilla and Enloe High School is apparently still dragging on. After his suspension from teaching, Mr. Escamilla did not have his contract renewed at Enloe, and was instead transferred to an alternative school starting in May 2007.

He also got a very poor 12-page review put into his file evaluating his teaching that year. According to the website he has set up to chronicle his interpretation of events, it was the first negative review he had ever gotten in all his years of teaching. He appealed these decisions multiple times, and seems to have raised such a furor that the school board felt the need to defend their decisions, so they released supporting evidence from his personnel record in October. In November, he sued. Yesterday, the case was finally settled.

The local newspaper report is rather vague on the details, though:

Blogroll Additions: Many, Many Grinnell Blogs

The first blogroll addition was our friend Mike S.’s grad school blog, Ad Nauseam, on which he ponders issues of grad school life and being part of the academy in general. Though he himself is a literature person, and does indeed post on literature-specific issues, he also explores things like how an almost-done PhD TA is supposed to address professors, the role of academic blogging vs. peer-reviewed article publishing, and the point of theoretical work within the context of various field, just to point to a few of his recent post topics. Academics, go forth and read!

The second blogroll addition is where the “many, many Grinnell blogs” comes in, as Geek Buffet’s intrepid poetloverrebelspy/Hilary has started a blog to compile all the other blogs by past and present Grinnellians of all sorts, Grinnell Bloggers. One of our previous blogroll updates got a comment requesting such a thing, so here ya go! It’s quite an impressive list. Thanks, Hilary!

Is it safe to teach in Japan anymore?

That was the question the mother of a son about my age asked me this weekend. Her son has been going to school and then teaching English in China for the past couple of years, but he’s thinking maybe he wants to go to Japan next. Why would his mother think it less safe to teach in Japan than China?

Because last week NOVA, one of Japan’s largest private language school franchises, shut down due to financial crisis. This made big headlines around the world because many of the company’s foreign teachers found themselves stranded in Japan, having not been paid for a month or more. Some foreign embassies wound up offering aid to stranded teachers. A quick recap of the company’s collapse:

The firm, which mainly offers English classes, has more than 800 schools and 400,000 students across Japan.

But in June, it was ordered to suspend part of its operations, after a court ruled it had misled customers in advertisements about some services.

Since then, student enrolment has fallen sharply and Nova has accumulated debts of up to JPY50bn ($437m, £213m).

Its 2,000 Japanese staff have not been paid since July and some 4,000 non-Japanese instructors have not been paid their salary for October, union officials said.

Nova has now closed all its schools, Kyodo news agency said.

Introducing Classics to the Romper Room Set

We recently received a graphic novel version of Beowulf. We’re debating which section it should go in because, well, some of the panels are pretty… graphic. The first time I picked it up, and opened it, I turned to a page of someone (I assume Beowulf himself) emerging from a pool of blood. I wasn’t surprised though, because it’s Beowulf. It’s not a story about sunshine and lollipops.

Now, graphic novelizations of the classics are nothing new–we had them back when we called them comic books. Children’s sections are filled with retellings of the classics at a child’s reading comprehension level. Personally, I don’t think any version of Beowulf worth its salt would be age-appropriate fro the under 13 crowd.

But this brings up the larger question–should we be “dumbing down” the classics at all?

Participation Points

It occurs to me that what I often do here, writing about my thoughts as inspired by reading something in a book (a la the Animals in Translation series of posts), is pretty much what my tutorial professor back in college claimed he was trying to get me to do when he gave our class what I still consider to be one of the most ineffective assignments I ever did in my entire four years of (predominantly quite satisfactory) undergraduate classes.

What he wanted us to do was a reading journal, written as we were reading through our assigned book, The Fountainhead. (The class was on Frank Lloyd Wright. The main character of the book is purportedly based on him, and we had to read something of length to “test” our academic skills in what amounted to a prep class.) We were given no real guidelines about how to keep this journal. I even remember asking if there was a length requirement, or a suggested number of entries, and being told no, we should just write when we were inspired to do so. So I did.

One thing you must understand about me is that I read very quickly when I’m reading fiction, and tend to become absorbed enough in the story that I literally do not see chapter breaks at all. (That whole “I’ll just read to the end of this chapter” self-deal thing is kind of pointless as a result, alas.) I really had to make myself think about it consciously in order to stop reading and write something down more than once every 100 pages or so. I was quite pleased with myself when I finished the assignment and had eight pages, front and back, of journal entries.

The person who turned in her journal just before me had 60.

I received a poor grade.

I was not pleased.

Title IX Anniversary

Thirty-five years ago, in June, 1972 (about the time of the Watergate break-in), Richard Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (20 U.S.C § 1681 et seq.) into law. The US Department of Justice web site still describes Title IX as “…a comprehensive federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity. The principal objective of Title IX is to avoid the use of federal money to support sexually discriminatory practices in education programs such as sexual harassment and employment discrimination, and to provide individual citizens effective protection against those practices.”

Notwithstanding the DOJ’s description, Title IX mostly is known as the law that made sports, particularly college sports, more accessible to women. Some say that Title IX achieved this goal at the expense of men’s sports. Others say that without Title IX, women’s sports would be forced back to the bad old days (i.e., the time when I was at university) when our athletic opportunities were limited to such events as the intramural field hockey tournament.

I have always considered Title IX a good thing. Never having had the capability to play big time sports (far from it!), I was just an intellectual cheerleader for girl jocks like Mia Hamm and the US Olympic women’s soccer team. In my circle of acquaintances, though, I have found that Title IX is a topic that equals abortion rights in the intensity, emotion and sometimes rage exhibited by its supporters and detractors. Over the last few months, I’ve had some serious, thoughtful discussions with people whose intelligence and ideas I admire, and from these discussions I’ve determined that there are no easy answers. In fact, I’m not sure anyone even knows what the questions are. The fight over Title IX, like the fight over a woman’s right to choose, has taken on a life of its own.

Encouraging Translingual Competence

In my last post, I talked about the Modern Language Association’s finding that language study programs in the US, particularly in universities, focus too much on literature and do not produce students with necessarily useful abilities, or a great interest in using their language skills. I agree with the MLA’s idea that programs need to have broader foci, with a better end goal of producing students who not only have a good grasp of vocabulary and grammar, but also good translingual competence, as described in the report (emphasis mine):

The Goal: Translingual and Transcultural Competence

The language major should be structured to produce a specific outcome: educated speakers who have deep translingual and transcultural competence. Advanced language training often seeks to replicate the competence of an educated native speaker, a goal that postadolescent learners rarely reach. The idea of translingual and transcultural competence, in contrast, places value on the ability to operate between languages. Students are educated to function as informed and capable interlocutors with educated native speakers in the target language. They are also trained to reflect on the world and themselves through the lens of another language and culture. They learn to comprehend speakers of the target language as members of foreign societies and to grasp themselves as Americans–that is, as members of a society that is foreign to others. They also learn to relate to fellow members of their own society who speak languages other than English.

This kind of foreign language education systematically teaches differences in meaning, mentality, and worldview as expressed in American English and in the target language. Literature, film, and other media are used to challenge students’ imaginations and to help them consider alternative ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding things. In the course of acquiring functional language abilities, students are taught critical language awareness, interpretation and translation, historical and political consciousness, social sensibility, and aesthetic perception. They acquire a basic knowledge of the history, geography, culture, and literature of the society or societies whose language they are learning; the ability to understand and interpret its radio, television, and print media; and the capacity to do research in the language using parameters specific to the target culture.

Literature Analysis Is Not the End of Language Study

The recent Report from the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages on the state of foreign language education in the US begins like this, (emphasis mine):

The United States’ inability to communicate with or comprehend other parts of the world became a prominent subject for journalists, as language failures of all kinds plagued the United States’ military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and its efforts to suppress terrorism. Initiatives in critical languages began multiplying in educational institutions all over the United States… Legislative proposals to address the deficit in language and international expertise began appearing in Congress.

Not surprisingly, “the need to understand other cultures and languages” was identified by Daniel Yankelovich as one of five imperative needs to which higher education must respond in the next ten years if it is to remain relevant. “Our whole culture,” Yankelovich says, “must become less ethnocentric, less patronizing, less ignorant of others, less Manichaean in judging other cultures, and more at home with the rest of the world.Higher education can do a lot to meet that important challenge.” In May 2005 Senator Daniel Akaka made a similar point: “Americans need to be open to the world; we need to be able to see the world through the eyes of others if we are going to understand how to resolve the complex problems we face.” In the current geopolitical moment, these statements are no longer clichés.

Right on! Absolutely! I’ve been saying that for years, as, I suspect, have most of the other people who will ever see this report. However, more than simply preaching to the choir, the report had some very interesting things to say about how current foreign language programs are failing to produce students who accomplish these goals. Part of the problem, of course, is that not enough students actually learn foreign languages, but in the excerpt below, the MLA report makes a point about why programs may be both failing to attract students, and failing to turn the students they do have into truly competent cross-cultural language users; namely, these programs focus too much on literature study: