> Comer is also known for her dogged insistence that students solve their own problems. Too often, said Vice Principal Elizabeth Leebens, students “get the history of science rather than getting an opportunity to do it for themselves.”
I wholeheartedly agree!
It is amazing how long young students can spend in science classes before they do any science themselves. The class should serve two purposes: learning about how nature works and (perhaps more importantly!) learning to learn how nature works. The first is over emphasized in early education (which may include up to the end of highschool).
Most children at least go through a phase where they are fascinated with how things work and ask so many why questions. Science is the best technique to answer many of those questions. Kids can learn that it is possible to discover the answers to questions themselves and do not have to look up the answer in a book.
The process of discovering knowledge for one's self is so radically different from looking up a known answer. You make mistakes, you doubt your ability, you question if you have the right answer and even in the end you cannot be sure if you have come to the correct conclusion. This process is scary if you are not accustomed to it! Hell, it can be scary even when you are used to it. If you are not practiced at it, you will think that you are not smart enough. You may believe that the original people who discovered the fundamental facts of science were some kinds of gods; they were not, they instead went thought the same process of many many mistakes and errors and only after much failure did they arrive at the canonical result you see in textbooks today.
"Comer is also known for her dogged insistence that students solve their own problems."
Setting up sensible accessible problems that are vaguely interesting to students, and that lead to the development of skills is the tricky bit. It is definitely a Csíkszentmihályi situation (too hard and students give up, too 'drill like' and their eyes glaze over, too abstract and its like fat off a non-stick frying pan, and to make it more fun each student in a class has a different set of thresholds).
Some examples from Maths in UK with sample student work and analysis...
Try to teach special relativity as Michelson Morley and de Sitter to a student that you are tutoring. Present the paradox, if he is not one of the .1% gifted enough to come to the paradox themselves.
It's very rewarding to work in parallel to the historical version of events.
No, it's rewarding to work in parallel with a narrativized and sanitized version of history, one which strips out all of the dead-ends by working backwards from where we are now.
I wholeheartedly agree!
It is amazing how long young students can spend in science classes before they do any science themselves. The class should serve two purposes: learning about how nature works and (perhaps more importantly!) learning to learn how nature works. The first is over emphasized in early education (which may include up to the end of highschool).
Most children at least go through a phase where they are fascinated with how things work and ask so many why questions. Science is the best technique to answer many of those questions. Kids can learn that it is possible to discover the answers to questions themselves and do not have to look up the answer in a book.
The process of discovering knowledge for one's self is so radically different from looking up a known answer. You make mistakes, you doubt your ability, you question if you have the right answer and even in the end you cannot be sure if you have come to the correct conclusion. This process is scary if you are not accustomed to it! Hell, it can be scary even when you are used to it. If you are not practiced at it, you will think that you are not smart enough. You may believe that the original people who discovered the fundamental facts of science were some kinds of gods; they were not, they instead went thought the same process of many many mistakes and errors and only after much failure did they arrive at the canonical result you see in textbooks today.