Category: Culture

How to teach science

Posted on by Suki

We love San Francisco’s Exploratorium. For kids who love science, or just love to mess around, the Exploratorium has it all. You’ve got fun stuff, and weird stuff, and gross stuff, and fascinating stuff. You’ve got physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and other disciplines I can’t think of right now. You’ve got fog and noisemakers and lightning and beetles eating dead things.

What else could you want?

Well, one thing you can want from any museum is depth. The Exploratorium achieves this in a few ways. First of all, there are exhibits that can take you in deeper. These are largely the ones where you actually get in and interact. The ones where a large number of kids can walk up and interrupt are less conducive to real experimentation. Secondly, the Exploratorium offers classes that allow real interaction with scientists and with the scientific process. Third, some of the exhibits actually have the ability to teach concepts in a hard science sort of way.

Another thing you want from a museum is enough variety for repeat visits. Yes, we’ve all been tourists and enjoyed a visit to a museum in another town, but tourists should not be the focus of a museum like the Exploratorium. In its present incarnation, I’m sure tourists can have fun, but locals love it, too, over and over. The last time I went to the Exploratorium I discovered a whole area I hadn’t ventured into yet, and was enticed into an interactive exhibit run by a young museum employee who was doing a great job of teaching kids just a little bit about the cells in their bodies.

So if fun and attraction (see paragraph 1!), depth, and variety are the marks of a good museum, the Exploratorium is doing great.

But there are clouds on the horizon. As you may have heard, the Exploratorium has to move. The Palace of Fine Arts is perhaps the weirdest and coolest place they could have started, but the building is unsafe and can’t easily be retrofitted. Also, tourists have a hell of a time getting to it. So they’re off to Pier 15. You got it: soon to be neighbors of Fisherman’s Wharf, overpriced snow globes, and the best place in San Francisco to have your wallet stolen.

Here’s the vision they present on their website:

Learning will happen everywhere. With room inside and out, Pier 15 doubles the exhibition space, doubles the number of classrooms and triples the Exploratorium’s capacity for teacher development. The Learning Commons, Learning Studio and theater provide additional places for the general community and educational professionals to gather and learn. Today, two out of three teachers are turned away from the Exploratorium’s nationally recognized Teacher Institute — considered one of the premier professional training opportunities for K-12 science and math teachers in the Bay Area and beyond. The new Exploratorium will almost triple the number of teachers who come to learn.

Here’s my fear: Yet another overpriced, overdesigned museum where they treasure the air space more highly than the space between your ears. Yet another place where they try to please everyone and fail to please anyone.

On my last visit to the Exploratorium, an employee nabbed me and asked if I’d take part in a little research they were doing. She had me play with an exhibit and then asked me questions. The exhibit in question had no signs, no symbols, nothing that would tell me what to do or what it was about. It was moderately fun to play with, but I wasn’t sure of the science behind what was happening enough to be able to answer my daughter’s questions.

After the employee had asked me her questions, I posed mine:

Why doesn’t this exhibit have any explanations of the science behind it?

“We’re trying to move away from explicit telling people facts and toward allowing them to intuitively explore scientific principles.”

Aha.

What would you expect me to get from this? There wasn’t even an arrow to tell me how to use the darn thing.

“Well, we want people to use their intuition.”

And if intuition fails me?

Americans are presently the deer in the headlights of scientific advancement. We see that science is the key to the future, and we’re wondering, are we going to miss this train? So frantically, our politicians, educators, and museum curators are trying to figure it out. How can we teach a reluctant population to value science?

The thing is: Americans in general never did much value science, except as it increased the speed of their automobiles or improved the taste of their sodas. Our scientists have always been outsiders: losers, weirdos, outcasts, immigrants. Think I’m exaggerating? Read a little bit about Ben Franklin. Meet my scientist friends. Some of them didn’t come from families that valued science, but they were drawn in because they wanted to get in and get their hands dirty, not because they wanted to be entertained.

A museum that tries to attract the tourist crowd is going to succeed in entertainment, another easily digestible stop before you’re off to the next sight. But it will fail in inspiration and teaching and hard work. And that’s what we need.

I have a deep fear that when the new Exploratorium opens, we’ll see the Academy of Sciences all over again. Ooh, ah, look at that amazing building! Hey, look, they have this great curriculum on their website. Then you go to the amazing building, you ooh and ah about all the space and light, and then find out that science, like natural history, is being taught as either received wisdom or something not worth putting into words.

Sorry, folks. If you want kids to learn science they’re just going to have to read. They’re going to have to write. They’re going to have to (gasp) deal with numbers. Yes, it might be nice to reach them through intuition, but you can’t stop there. You have to impress upon them the fact that they will have to use their brains. And it will hurt. And it will be complicated. And it will be frustrating.

And it will be worth it. That’s how to teach science. But if you design a museum to entertain all, it will enlighten no one.

Going green, going cheap

Posted on by Suki

A friend and I were talking about how all this emphasis on “going green” was getting her down. Her family is presently in reduced economic circumstances, and she said, “I feel like we can’t afford to be green!”

So we started to talk about all the ways in which her family is actually living a “green” lifestyle. There are plenty of ways to live a lifestyle that has less impact on our Earth and also save money. Here are a few we came up with:

1. Reduce the number of vehicles you use, and/or use public transportation or good old-fashioned muscle power

My friend’s family made a conscious decision years ago to only have one car. For a family, this is a big decision. I know a few families who have done this, and it has had a great impact on their lives. On one hand, they lose convenience and the ability to make spur-of-the-moment decisions like “Hey, let’s go to Monterey today!” On the green side, they are forced to make conscious decisions about how they use their vehicle and whether it’s worth the trouble. One spouse usually rides his bike, which saves us from that much more pollution. (Even if you don’t believe in global warming, you can agree that this is a net benefit. Not to mention the fact that he’s probably a lot healthier and will thus take up fewer health care dollars as he ages.) And if they both need to get somewhere in a vehicle, one takes public transportation or finds a carpool. These days, most families with kids don’t even bother to carpool. If you’re forced to consider it, you end up getting used to doing it and saving gas even when you don’t need to. And on the upside, you get to chat with your friends all the way to Monterey!

2. Fix rather than buy new

My friend’s family has fixed their dishwasher twice when in the past they would probably have bought a new one. That’s saving the landfill from another fixable dishwasher. My husband is great at trying to get new parts when something breaks. I have to admit I’m not so great at it. But amazingly, he has nursed along the Cuisinart I bought in the late 1980’s by buying a new insert for it (even more amazing: they keep manufacturing that same bowl), he updated our mini-Cuisinart (which we use more often) three times before they stopped making the parts, he’s fixed our bread machine (which we use heavily to make dough) more times than I can count, and he got our rice maker at least ten more years of life by buying new parts. Each time he does this, it doesn’t necessarily save us a lot of money. But it does save us enough to make it worth it, and it saves the earth lots in terms of things not thrown away.

3. Reuse rather than recycle

Recycling is great. We recycle everything we can. However, not everything can be recycled. And things that can be recycled often can be reused a number of times before you give up on them. My friend is a teacher and goes to the wonderful RAFT in San Jose, where they take in all manner of refuse from Silicon Valley companies (stickers, backpacks with event names stamped on them, CD-ROMs of obsolete software, coasters with event names stamped on them, resources such as glue that are a little past their prime, carpet samples from the revamping of the headquarters of some high-flying start-up, the spools that all those CD-ROMs came on…). RAFT then takes this… garbage… and turns it into teaching materials, teacher supplies, and enormous bins of what-have-you that teachers might be able to use. Teachers go in there and shop away. They come out with a year’s worth of supplies — plus that new computer backpack they needed — for $50. Not only is this a great deal for one of our more beleaguered groups of professionals, but it saves all this stuff from going to the landfill. For my part, I got sick of trying to find new uses for more and more plastic yogurt containers, and I started to make my own yogurt. Yes, there are trade-offs (gas to go to the store vs. energy to run the yogurt maker), but the net benefit is that I reuse my yogurt containers over and over, and seldom put one into the recycling bin.

4.Grow and process your own food

My friend spent a few weeks this last autumn offering her friends an apple count. “So far,” she’d announce on a Monday, “I have made 6 gallons of apple cider.” And then, “this weekend I dried ten pounds of apple slices.” I see her kids still munching on those apple slices months later, so I know that they are not going to waste. If you think my friend is a farmer and making some special effort, well, you couldn’t be further off. They live in the city. Their apple trees need little care. They sit on the edge of their small property and give the fruits of their labor yearly and freely. It takes little thought to plant a fruit tree in a spot where you want some shade, or to fill your flower beds with cabbage or snow peas. If you’re going to use the water anyway, why not bear fruit with it? When I was a child, we grew huge amounts of stuff on our 5 acres. I have such fond memories of canning days. I’m sure my mother doesn’t, but these days, even she is relenting. She mentioned to me just the other day that she was so astounded by how much she’d just paid for a jar of something, “I’d better get back into canning.” My parents have a farm, and we try to be good, but we end up throwing away embarrassing amounts of rotten food. We do get some of it to Second Harvest, and much of it appears on our friends’ doorsteps, but the rest really should get itself into cans and the freezer so that we can store away the little bits of energy and water that went into the harvest.

5. Be conscious of your choices, but not draconian

I can name one very conscious choice I have made in our food habits: I no longer buy something that’s wildly out of season here that has been shipped in from the other side of the world. In my case, this boils down to one particular thing: I love asparagus. But frankly, the asparagus I wait for in California is so much sweeter because of its absence the rest of the year. I see the asparagus from Chile available in September, and I remember that if I bide my time, local asparagus will be all that much sweeter. But on the other hand, I have to admit that I don’t deny my family an occasional mango. The ability to get a mango far from the tropics is one of the benefits of our modern life. I don’t go overboard, but since I can’t wait for mango season to come to Northern California, I’m happy to bend the rules a bit to bring that sweetness into our lives.

Let’s be serious here: few of us are going to go back to Little House on the Prairie for our lifestyle. You, dear readers, may be vegan locavores or back to simple self-sustainers, but the rest of us are here in this modern life. We’re not going to be perfect. But that doesn’t mean that our little choices are meaningless.

So today, my message is that you can make a small difference, and it’s not worthless. Go ahead: buy the cabbage instead of the asparagus. Go ahead and feel good about it. I’m giving you permission. Save a little money, and save a little bit of our future.

How [not] to teach science

Posted on by Suki

I was thrilled to be able to go to the San Francisco Academy of Sciences homeschool day. It promised both a reduced price and fewer crowds.

We had been to the Academy one time since it opened. The crowds were so thick we couldn’t see the exhibits. Downstairs in the aquarium, we were in a standing-room-only crowd — literally. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other adults, while miserable children squirmed in between us.

This time, I was looking forward to actually seeing what we were supposed to see last time! In two ways, my expectations were fulfilled: We paid a fraction of the usual price, and the attendance was sparse. We actually got to walk into the rainforest exhibit, which usually has long lines, with approximately 25 other awestruck people. It was really gorgeous, a marvel of modern engineering and an experience worth having.

Then we visited the rest of the museum.

I’ll start with this disclaimer: I love modern museum architecture! I love the air and the light, and I think the buildings themselves are marvels. Not only do they push the envelope on aesthetics, but they also show what sort of engineering is possible for other, more modest buildings. The Academy building is lovely. Its living roof is inspiring.

However, there is one thing that designers of modern, airy museums seem to forget: All that air displaces content. Not outdated, old-school museum content that we were happy to do away with, but real, solid content that inspires, teaches, and excites us. The Academy suffers terribly from this “displacement by air.”

We have been studying evolution and Charles Darwin in our homeschool, so I went to the Academy website and found some curriculum on the evolution of Galapagos tortoises that tied in with their evolution exhibit. It looked great. Supposedly at a middle school level, the teacher was expected to introduce evolution to the students beforehand, then have them study the tortoises at the exhibit and postulate the reason for their different body structures. My children and I, after a satisfying lunch at the cafe with friends, went and applied ourselves to the task.

Luckily, the way we entered the exhibit, we got to the tortoises last. We enjoyed looking at the array of finch specimens in jars. We had read about how important the study of finches was to Darwin’s theory, and it was cool to see them there side-by-side. We watched a video in its entirety — it was about the history that the Academy has with the Galapagos Islands, from rapacious Victorians grabbing specimens at will to modern conservationists working with others to save this place for future generations of study.

My 8-year-old got caught by the video game where you use a virtual net to catch as many insect varieties as you can. I suppose something was learned there — by me. I honed my skills at getting an 8-year-old away from an “educational” video game!

Then the tortoises: In case you don’t know, here is what science is supposed to be. You observe, experiment, record, and then form theories. You test your theory through more observation, experimentation, and by publishing your work for others to debate and prove or disprove on their own.

Science at the Academy, however, goes like this: Ask the students a question, have them ponder it with no access to data or experience on which to form a theory, then tell them the answer. Science at the Academy is simply received wisdom.

We did what we were told: My kids recorded their observations about the models of tortoises up on the walls. They recorded the island each one was pointing to as its island of origin. Then we read a plaque that explained why the tortoises differ in their body structures, though they all share a common ancestor and live so near each other. The plaque offered us received wisdom, with no data, nothing to observe, nothing to argue against. This isn’t science, and it certainly doesn’t ask middle-school students to flex their analytical abilities. My 8-year-old looked at the plaque, read it, and shrugged. “Well, duh,” seemed to be her reaction. “That’s it?” was mine.

A friend of mine who was very fond of the old Academy of Sciences remembers that they had a great collection of minerals that the kids could really interact with. No more. However, there was a docent out on the floor as we were leaving, and by chance, she had a display of minerals. I pointed out my friend’s lament and she responded with enthusiasm. “I know!” she said. “We docents have been telling them that they have to put the collections back out. But there’s no room.” She glanced around the enormous, light, airy space around her.

It seemed sort of funny. But it’s not. Our science has become their easily digestible tourist trap. Our homely building full of wonder and experience has been turned into a must-see-once destination for people who educate their children elsewhere. Or perhaps it’s for people who don’t care about education at all. “Maybe it should be called, ‘The Lobotomy of Sciences,'” joked one of my correspondents.

One concern about homeschooling that educated people often express is, “How are they going to learn science without a laboratory?”

We can do more science in our house with kitchen chemicals, rocks picked up in random locations, and the forest in our backyard than they can do with $500,000,000. Sad.

To be continued: My hopes and fears for the new Exploratorium.

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I am a Cat Mother

Posted on by Suki

At first, I didn’t really want to believe it. I tried to ignore it, but it didn’t go away.

I suspected it had something to do with Tom’s visits. He comes by occasionally when I have an itch that needs scratching. Sometimes he just comes for companionship, which to him means arguing over the end of a can of tuna.

It figured he would be the cause of this.

I wasn’t one of those expectant mamas who do everything for their kittens: I didn’t get plenty of exercise and fresh vegetables. For me, it was lollygagging and munching on putrid mouse meat the whole way through.

But when they were born… Ah, that was something I didn’t expect. There they were, two little sticky, stinky warm bundles squirming and nosing at me.

I fell in love.

Who wouldn’t? Flesh of my flesh, right? I’d known some cat mamas who loved that smell so much they ate them, but I resisted the temptation. I knew that you can’t have your chopped liver and eat it, too.

I did what any good mother does: I groomed them and fed them and loved them more than I’d thought possible.

As they grew, they became more fun. I’d playfully bat them off me when they climbed on my back, and join in when they were having a tussle.

It would have been idyllic if it hadn’t been for our next door neighbors, the Tigers.

Tiger Mom had two girls of her own, and every time I saw them, I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty. The little Tigers had piano lessons, tap dancing lessons, and school every day. Tiger Mom groomed them perfectly so there never was a whisker out of place. She had perfect little kittens, but how she complained about them!

Of course, as soon as the kittens came, Tom scatted off to greener pastures. Who could blame him? Raising kittens took a lot of energy, and cut into his sun-bathing time. I was OK with being a single mom, but the site of Mr. Tiger returning home every evening from his gainful employment rankled me. I felt like his very presence was accusing me of being a bad mother.

Oh, I have to admit not everything made me jealous. I would never make my little rascals wear those restrictive bell collars. I wanted them to grow up free and beautiful, to enjoy their kittenhood as kittens, not as little, stressed-out adult cats, always searching for the best hunting-grounds.

I also really liked my kittens. Little Tom was just a perfect little version of his daddy, but without the confusing stripes. Mittens was not some simpering girl-kitten. I knew she’d always be able to hold her own. When we were alone, living our homeschooling lifestyle, everything seemed just fine.

But when they invited me over, oh, it was hard. Mrs. Tiger would always tell her girls to perform for us. The piano, the tapping, the perfect mouse pies. Even if they were bought at the pet food store, they were just perfect. My kittens? Well, I can say this. They are happy. Tiger girl #1 would play the piano; Tom would dance on it.  Tiger girl #2 would tap-dance. Mittens would play with her toes and trip her. Mrs. Tiger was never happy with her girls, but I thought mine were just about all right.

Mrs. Tiger always wanted to know my opinion about schools, as if I knew anything about that. “We homeschool,” I’d remind her, and she’d look at me with those crossed eyes like she was about to pass out, and not from bliss. She’d ask me, “But what about their future? How will they get into college? How will they get to the top of their profession?”

I told her I figured that Mittens would do OK. Her mom (a.k.a. me) could teach her everything she needed to know about living off the land (a.k.a. hunting for our food, as the Great Cat in the Sky intended us to do). I told her that I figured Tom would be a scoundrel like his father, but if I loved his father, well, I guess I could love him, too.

Then Mrs. Tiger pulled out her best argument: “What about retirement?”

I swear I probably must have gone cross-eyed myself then. Retirement? Since when did Mr. and Mrs. Tiger know anything about retirement? I have to say that my lifestyle of lying in the dappled sunshine under a bush made me better-prepared for that eventuality.

“Well, Mrs. Tiger,” I said, not wanting any bad blood between me and my neighbor. “I figure I’ll depend on the old cat’s maxim: Wherever you go, that’s where you are.”

Mrs. Tiger looked fit to bust her belly flap. (Not that she had a belly flap; cats like her never do.)

“I guess this is why housecats will never dominate the new economy,” she sniffed.

Then she turned and yowled at her girls, who had joined mine in playing the piano by dancing on the keys. Her girls immediately jumped to the floor, sat, and folded their tails neatly around their front paws. My two continued to make their joyful noise.

Good parenting is all in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

Whatever you do, make sure not to have fun!

Posted on by Suki

My kids attend a public school homeschool program. Though homeschoolers have a variety of choices (including homeschooling independently or joining a public charter program), I have been very happy with our hybrid choice. I don’t have anything against public schools as a concept. I think they used to be a fundamental part of the community and a place where people from different parts of the community came together.

These days, though, things are changing. Do you know that many public schools have “closed” campuses? No public meetings, no parents or kids who attend other schools. In fact, some campuses are even closed to the parents of the kids who do attend that school. Things have gotten a little crazy out there.

The craziness that has had our homeschool program buzzing this school year is the new set of playground rules issued from on high. Our program, in which kids attend a few hours a week for classes, enrichment, and community events, shares the playground with traditional public schools. So we share a playground with schools that, shall we say, have a rather different view of childhood than homeschoolers generally have.

Think back to your playground years, and remember what you found most fun. Keep that image in your mind, because chances are it’s gone now.

Did you like playing tag? No running on the playground now. Yes, that’s right, No Running.

Did you like (as I did) climbing up the slide the wrong way? Forget about it. Antisocial behavior that may cause bodily harm.

Did you like mixing with other kids you didn’t see in your regular classroom? Verboten. Our kids have scheduled times on the playground.

Did your school’s playground function as a community playground during the summer and weekends? Very likely it doesn’t anymore. Ours has chain link fence around it.

I will grant that all of the outlawed activities can sometimes cause problems. Sometimes there are conflicts. Sometimes there are even broken bones. But in my view, the playground was a place where real learning took place. Outside of the regimented classroom, kids could really learn how to negotiate the world. They had to deal with bigger kids. They had to deal with the annoying kid who thought it was funny to go up the slide backwards. Yes, it is a bit of a hassle for adults to have to deal with kids having problems, but isn’t that what we signed up for?

I think it all comes down to our culture wanting to assert complete control. And I understand the impetus. Many of us (myself included) grew up with the problems that stemmed from unmonitored playgrounds and rough play. We grew up, had kids, and wanted to make sure that the bad things that happened to us never happened to our kids.

But I think we’ve gone a little too far. According to NPR, the research says we have gone too far.  As the New York Times profiled recently, some parents are starting to rebel by simply letting their kids play.

I’m seeing this sort of parental rebellion happening more and more. Though the overprotective parents still have their kids dancing to Wii, the rest of us are fomenting revolution. We’ll sheepishly admit to each other that we’re the only parents on the block who let our kids go outside when we are inside. We have climbing structures without regulation padding underneath. We let our children climb trees! We have them make dolls rather than buying the latest commercial tie-in toy.

It’s refreshing. It may, of course, result in some skinned knees, arguments, and maybe a broken bone. But the kids are learning and they’re happy.

Life: It’s not without its hazards!

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