During any given week, at least one science article appearing in the New York Times is bound to provoke my contempt. This week it's an interview with a Harvard physicist, Eric Mazur, who seems rather taken with his own remarkable ambitions and accomplishments. The headline reads, Using the ‘Beauties of Physics’ to Conquer Science Illiteracy, but there's not really much about beauty in the discussion, which has to do with Mazur's revision of the pedagogy of undergraduate physics. In short, he notes, “We’re way too focused on facts and rote memorization and not on learning the process of doing science.”
I wouldn't know, never having taken introductory physics in college—although I did have a high school counterpart, in which the teacher took great delight demonstrating to his students how he would construct a fallout shelter out of six-packs of beer. He calculated the time it would take him to drink his way out of the shelter to assure the ambient radiation level in the post-nuclear blast world would decline to levels in which his family might survive. This, I think, may have been an early instance of what Mazur means when he urges, “It’s important to mentally engage students in what you’re teaching." Maybe he is correct that there's too much fact gleaning going on in the typical college science classroom, not enough attention to "process," and that students accordingly strive merely to retain and "regurgitate" the facts, but fail to see the conceptual big picture.
The shift in attention to process—which, I am assuming, is the vehicle of beauty implied in the headline—promises not only a richer understanding, but "serendipitous" discovery and a "knowledge of physics forces in daily life." By this point in the interview, I'm catching an unpleasant whiff. So the path to an understanding of the fundamentals of physics courses through happenstance and the ordinary? How Newtonian! This is silly mythologizing. Confirming my growing skepticism, Mazur makes a ridiculous analogy:
I used to get in front of my students and do all the science for them. I should have been showing them how to do it themselves. If they were studying the piano, I wouldn’t have gone, “sit down, I’ll play the piano for you.”
Of course, he's not teaching them how to play the piano.
I suppose it's a good thing that high-horsepower physicists are not just willing but eager to explore alternative avenues to instruction. Mazur, as the article notes, "is driven by a passion"—an attribution, by the way, that is just way too frequently dished out these days. But "passion" carries connotations of suffering, love, sexual frisson, and beauty, and a story merely describing a professor of science who dutifully and excellently performs his work simply because "it’s part of my job description" (that's Mazur, too) would more suitably have appeared in The Onion.
There you go again, Dean! Actually, Mazur is right and so is the Onion. Science is hard (as is science teaching) and scientific progress is also about serendipity, sometimes at least - the right mind at the right place when the "mythical" apple hits you on the head.
The successful pedagogical method in science is a fine balance of disseminating hard facts and connecting them to real life. A bit of performative elan on the podium too is not unwelcome. I think high school and undergraduate science education suffer precisely because very few teachers have the time or the ability to tell a story and to train the students to tell one. And unless a teacher can get students excited about science OR there is a financial pot of gold at the end of the tedious rainbow of science education (as there is in India & China, but NOT in the US), students will choose to study more "enjoyable" (and easy) subjects in college. And we will continue to issue platitudes about promoting science and technology while at the same time we fret about all those senior scientists and post docs with funny accents populating US research labs.
I will soon have a post up "gently" refuting your skepticism about "passion,beauty and serendipity" in science.
Posted by: Ruchira Paul | July 17, 2007 at 06:28 PM