“The sun is so bright when it is high in the sky that it will permanently wreck your vision – please don’t look directly at the sun! – so it’s hard to give it a color label, but let’s say it looks ‘white’. Notice that the sky absorbs some of the light coming from the sun to us, changing the apparent color depending on how much sky we are looking through, so when the sun is very close to the horizon and we are looking through a whole lot of sky to see it, it looks orange. In between it looks like various yellows.”
Coming up with well-defined named color categories that will work for both surface colors and an emissive source as bright as the sun is hard to begin with. Talking about color in a precise way with 5-year-olds is even tougher.
"The ball is white." So often in education, the most significant bit is neglected.
For example, atoms are tiny little balls, sticky little balls that jiggle (insanely fast)... and yet, not thinking of them as real physical objects, something you can teach pre-K, is a failure mode teaching stoichiometry in high-school, and in some intro college chemistry.
NASA has done entire museum exhibits about the Sun, bereft of a single ball, or a single true-color image. Imagine a museum exhibit about elephants, without a single model, and only false-color images. Images of elephant surface temperature, of skin parasite density, of average mud thickness, etc. But not a single gray elephant in the room. Would you not then be, "WTF were they thinking?"?
I'd skip the distinction between "really is white" vs "appears white because eye has been saturated by brightness, or is monochrome from dimness". And also the issue of color accommodation. Because the Sun really is white. As can be demoed by sunlight through a gap (window, leaves, pinhole camera) on a white surface, or through a neutral filter.
I like the emphasis on media. "The white ball... (Not) seen from underground, or from a closet, or from deep in the ocean, appears black. :) Seen from underwater, through tens of meters of water, appears blueish. Seen from under the atmosphere, low in the sky through lots of atmosphere, appears redish. Seen higher in the sky through not much atmosphere, appears white." Years ago I saw a NATO full-sky survey, which had Sun chromaticity as white, even through clouds, until quite low in the sky (in rural Spain I think?, so not much dust or smog). I wish I could be more specific with that "redish" and "atmosphere", but I've not seen real data. If one wants to clearly and correctly explain something to a 5-year old... expect to spend a lot of time with scihub.
> Coming up with well-defined named color categories that will work for both surface colors and an emissive source as bright as the sun is hard to begin with. Talking about color in a precise way with 5-year-olds is even tougher.
Might this be a misunderstanding of color? Light has a spectrum, and thus a color, regardless of where the light came from. And can be so bright as to appear to the eye white, or so dim as to appear dark gray (rods vs cones), also regardless.
> Talking about color in a precise way with 5-year-olds is even tougher.
Here's a fun cautionary tale. There's a genre of science education research ph.d theses that basically goes "We tried to teach science topic X to grade G. <Implict: We didn't really understand the subject, and taught it the-usual badly, often facepalm shockingly badly.> We were surprised and disappointed that this didn't work. We draw the obvious conclusion... Students in grade G are developmentally incapable of understanding topic X." :) I've come to think of "you can't explain <subject> to <age>" as analogous to a code smell.
Drifting off topic, but a random thought... if you watch even best-practices classroom video, say around estimation, it often seems like the teacher is coaching students on how to pretend to understand the material. Pretend well enough for the teacher to nod and move on. So for instance, the use of an only-locally-equivalent alternative to actually understanding will be encouraged, not debugged. So perhaps there's a mismatch between a nominal goal of "learn science", and an actual goal of "learn to pretend to have learned science". And one might get better results by abandoning one or the other, in favor of consistency and transparency. Random thought.
> Might this be a misunderstanding of color? Light has a spectrum, and thus a color, regardless of where the light came from. And can be so bright as to appear to the eye white, or so dim as to appear dark gray (rods vs cones), also regardless.
“Color” is by definition a perceptual response, something that happens inside the brain. It depends on the observer, their eyes’ current level of adaptation, other stimuli which provide context, etc. If you move an object from a light background to a dark background, the color it evokes changes. If you take an object into a dim room and allow the eyes to adapt, the color it evokes changes.
Objects don’t inherently have a color. Light sources don’t inherently have a color. Light rays don’t inherently have a color. The same spectral power distribution can evoke (sometimes quite dramatically) different colors in different circumstances.
Of course, if you talk to philosophers or physicists instead of color scientists, you might get alternative definitions.
> bright as to appear to the eye white, or so dim as to appear dark gray (rods vs cones)
This is a bit confusing/confused. The retina has two types of detectors, rods and cones. In bright conditions, the rods are overstimulated and so provide no useful signal (and are therefore ignored in favor of the signal from the cones). When the eye is adapted to very dim conditions (e.g. starlight) and looking at a dim stimulus, the cones don’t respond vigorously enough to get much signal from them (and are therefore ignored in favor of the signal from the rods). In some dim-but-not-too-dim situations, signals from both rods and cones are integrated.
You can have both light gray and dark gray colors in any kind of context, but which specific stimuli will look light or dark depends on context.
* * *
> I've come to think of "you can't explain <subject> to <age>" as analogous to a code smell.
I have a 2.5 year old, and there are many topics which have too many prerequisites to adequately explain to him, or which are not relevant enough to keep his interest.
But he is learning a lot every day. Ask me again in a few years what he can learn at age 5.
> often seems like the teacher is coaching students on how to pretend to understand the material
Trying to teach a classroom with >10 students is extremely difficult in my opinion. I find that lecturing can’t truly teach most ideas; students have to grapple with them independently while working problems or projects or doing their own introspection. A lot of 1:1 attention from an expert mentor/tutor who can suggest problems or projects, ask a lot of questions, provide patient guidance, gently nudge a student back on track, stop the process from time to time and prompt some introspection, etc. is generally the most efficient way to learn. But this doesn’t easily scale to a classroom setting, and 1:1 tutorial isn’t considered economical for widespread adoption.
> goal of "learn science"
I think to “learn science” students need to be spending at least some time on all stages of the process: coming up with research questions, proposing hypotheses, designing experiments to test them, evaluating the experiments, etc.
(And it helps if they have some context for that scientific investigation, e.g. a bunch of experience observing bugs in the forest or trying to make mechanical devices out of meccano or learning to cook or ....)
In a similar way, to “learn journalism” students would need to go out and do a whole bunch of interviews and then write stories and publish them.
But this kind of learning is hard to achieve in a classroom setting.
Of course, “learn how to solve exercises in a typical introductory physics textbook” (or whatever) also has some value, so long as everyone is clear on how it relates to the world.
> “Color” is by definition a perceptual response [...] Objects don’t inherently have a color.
"Dad, what color is my shirt?" "Well son, it’s hard to give it a color label, but let’s say it looks ‘white’. Objects don’t inherently have a color. Under differently circumstances, lit differently, or seen through filters, or by people with different eye genetics, they can look quite different. Illuminated by a red flashlight, your shirt would look red!" :) Ok, sure.
But for me, that doesn't quite make "yellow" (or "red" or "it doesn't have a color" or "it's rainbow color") into nicely reasonable answers for a 5-year old's "What color is my <white> shirt?" Nor for their "What color is my <white> Sun?" Especially not for the Sun, given the local unavailability of similarly-scaled red flashlights.
And once you have a spectra, you have chromaticity, however crufty Color Matching Functions are. And thus at least one reasonable definition of color.
> Of course, if you talk to philosophers or physicists instead of color scientists, you might get alternative definitions.
Yeah, that's an issue. So while I start with a strong agreement with "People are starting with too many misconceptions and gaps in foundational knowledge.", getting to actionable "you have to start with at least the basics" implies an ability to successfully execute that approach.
My experience is that it requires vastly greater effort, and domain expertise, than is currently considered non-insane, just for the associated content creation. To craft usefully-correct and accessible stories about the physical world.
So I while I think (some value of) "teach [from the] basics" could be a transformative improvement in science education, and consider it a profound failure of current science education research that the opportunity doesn't get more work, I wonder if it's currently a viable approach for teaching?
I've a one-liner that goes "Consider a best case. An MIT professor, with a strong background in education, trying to teach their own kid, 1-on-1, with lots of time available (we're getting very counterfactual), about their own area of expertise, indeed their own research focus... the science education content doesn't exist to allow them to succeed". Which may not be useful without additional context, but basically, any non-trivial topic will extend to require someone _else's_ research-level expertise to craft good content, at which point the hypothetical MIT professor hits the pervasive lack of existing technosocial mechanisms to obtain that, and thus is back to crappy content, and thus fails.
> [sensor clamping] This is a bit confusing/confused.
Sorry I was unclear. I was targeting a misconception that the Sun is itself yellow, and only appears white because it's brightness causes cone saturation. And being puzzled by "Coming up with [...] named color [for a bright source] is hard"... but punt.
> A lot of 1:1 attention from an expert mentor/tutor [...] isn’t considered economical for widespread adoption
One nifty possibility is hybrid computer-human systems providing this via AR/VR avatars. Extreme personalized learning. Just having eye tracking data gives a lot of insight into attention and interest.
> “learn how to solve exercises in a typical introductory physics textbook”
There's a story of a long-existing end-of-chapter problem, in a popular physics textbook. A problem that survived multiple new-edition reviews, and presumably some use. And one question it raises is, should we consider all the physics professors, graduate students, and students, who plug-and-chugged the problem to the in-the-answer-book "correct" result, should we consider those a successful understanding and application of the ideal gas law? Or should we reserve "success" to describe the presumably rare recognition, that the numbers described solid Argon?
If the former, is our objective then a variant of Indian-style "memorize and regurgitate without understanding"? Just with plug-and-chug added? And might we be better off not pretending otherwise?
If the latter, there would seem a misalignment between that objective and our current effort allocation and testing.
> so long as everyone is clear on how it relates to the world.
And that's the question which prompted my thought. One perspective is "transferable understanding is our educational goal, and we're abjectly failing at it, and worse, we're so dysfunctional, we're not even really trying". An alternative is, "we've an ecology of goals, of which actually understanding the physical world turns out to be a very low priority... we're just often less than transparent about reporting our actual collective goals". And so I wondered... What if everyone was clear on how our science education content doesn't relate to understanding the physical world? Might that clarity yield additional points of leverage for change?
> Light has a spectrum, and thus a color, regardless of where the light came from. And can be so bright as to appear to the eye white, or so dim as to appear dark gray (rods vs cones), also regardless.
was no longer the conversation with the 5-year-old. I would call those two sentences ‘confused’ for pretty much any audience, but obviously a conversation with a 5-year-old isn’t going to get too deep into the weeds about definitions.
* * *
> getting to actionable "you have to start with at least the basics" implies an ability to successfully execute that approach.
Fair enough. But someone who doesn’t have the background to more or less properly explain the basics should expect some criticism when they completely ignore them.
> My experience is that it requires vastly greater effort, and domain expertise, than is currently considered non-insane, just for the associated content creation.
There are plenty of people with a solid basic understanding of whatever subject you might point to. The problem is more that folks making materials for beginners are (often) not part of that group, and in many cases should be leaving the job to someone with more expertise.
I don’t think someone has to be a cutting edge researcher (or tenured professor) in order to do a good job explaining the basics about scientific topics. They should at least read the introductory material aimed at scientists though.
> [1:1 instruction] via AR/VR avatars
I am not holding my breath. I expect videos, readings, interactive diagrams, better programming environments, ... will more likely be helpful than future-VR-Clippy.
But it’s hard to substitute for human interaction with someone competent.
> we're just often less than transparent about reporting our actual collective goals
Well the first goal is more or less babysitting so that parents can go to work. But this doesn’t sound too inspiring.
“The sun is so bright when it is high in the sky that it will permanently wreck your vision – please don’t look directly at the sun! – so it’s hard to give it a color label, but let’s say it looks ‘white’. Notice that the sky absorbs some of the light coming from the sun to us, changing the apparent color depending on how much sky we are looking through, so when the sun is very close to the horizon and we are looking through a whole lot of sky to see it, it looks orange. In between it looks like various yellows.”
Coming up with well-defined named color categories that will work for both surface colors and an emissive source as bright as the sun is hard to begin with. Talking about color in a precise way with 5-year-olds is even tougher.