“This book taught me whether machine guns could be used as a jetpack (for a squirrel, absolutely), who the loneliest humans ever might have been, and what is probably very wrong with our schools. That last part isn’t so much from a question in the book as a question that happened in my brain.
This book is written by Randall Munroe, who internet-teers will know as the creator of the comic xkcd. Which I knew mostly as the comic that I always mistook for Cyanide and Happiness because that comic is prurient and I understand it better. xkcd is kind of over my head a lot of the time, although I consider that a personal failing, not one of the comic itself, which is pretty great on the occasions I do understand it and also has a way of never feeling dumbed down, yet also never feeling like it’s being smart in an obnoxious way.
It’s real good, I mean.
What hit me while I read this book is how cool science is. I mean, it’s pretty cool. When you think about stuff. Did you know that a spacecraft WE made landed on Titan, Saturn’s moon, and took a picture? Did you know there were serious plans regarding launching spaceships by placing a huge bomb underneath each one and rocketing it into space? Did you know, according to some serious calculations, that it would be cheaper to move all of London over to the United States than it would be to build a car-supporting Lego bridge across the ocean?
This is my nerd side, but it makes me endlessly happy that the Voyager I spacecraft has gone further from Earth than anything else we’ve ever made. It has made the longest journey on record. The longest intentional journey, no doubt. And it’s still going! And you can see how far away it is at any moment! And the science is such that the distance away from the Earth sometimes goes down because the Earth moves more quickly in its orbit than Voyager travels through space!
19.3 BILLION Kilometers, at the moment (http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/). If there’s any sort of putting this in perspective, if you could run an infinite number of 20-minute 5K’s, it would take you just shy of 150,000 years to go as far as Voyager I has gone right now. Although you’d never catch it because it moves at a speed of 17 kilometers per second. That’s 11 miles per second in American stuff.
Okay, so I like things, and I like the scale of things. This puts me in the category of most people.
I also didn’t have what I would call a stellar education. I would say that I didn’t avail myself of all the opportunities because, honestly, I think I was too scared of failing and demonstrating that I wasn’t smart.
Now I’m an adult, and I can’t blame my education for the fact that I feel very dumb sometimes. Because while my education didn’t teach me everything I need, I think I have the skills to go out and learn just about anything I want to at this point. It’s up to me, as a grown-up, to make the decision, and I’m accountable to only myself in carrying that out.
This book, however, highlighted the true failure of the public school system, in my case.
Basically, it was boring.
Do you think we ever discussed machine gun jetpacks? Or machine guns at all? Do you think we talked about any of the hundreds of weird parasitic organisms who do some truly fucked up and weird stuff? No. You know why? Because we had a lot of stuff to memorize. Is kingdom bigger than phylum? What do the symbols on the periodic table mean? What’s the quadratic equation. Memorize that shit. Don’t put it on a business card in your wallet. MEMORIZE it.
I spend a lot of time here saying “I’m no X.” I’m no doctor. I’m no Spider-Man. I’m not a lot of things. And this time, I’m no teacher. Nor am I really interested in discussing the politics right at this moment.
I’m no teacher, but I was a student. Like most of you, I was a student for over 20 years. And I can tell you, I learned stuff, but I don’t know what half of it means.
What I’m saying is, I know that certain chemicals would burn if they got in your eye during chemistry class. But I didn’t know why. I still don’t. I learned all about protons and electrons, I learned about kingdoms and phylum in biology class, but I don’t know what happens, chemically, that dumping Tabasco in my eye hurts. Hurts like hell.
We learned all this building blocks shit, but where we were let down, we didn’t learn anything exciting.
Do you have to know about the history of the telescope in order to enjoy looking through one? Well, let me ask you this: Did you see The Avengers? Did you enjoy it? If you were tasked with re-creating the special effects, would you have the slightest idea on how to do that?
The thing is, we put aside all the big, fun stuff because you won’t understand it until you’re further along in your education. As I read this book, I sure as hell didn’t understand everything, but I enjoyed the hell out of the parts I did understand, and at this point I can choose to pursue what interests me or not. I still learned a bunch of shit, even if I didn’t get it all.
Science is a very cool subject that’s based on some very boring stuff. One method of teaching is progressive, start with the most basic concept, then move to the next.
The problem with that is you don’t get to anything cool for a very long time. And the other problem, when learning is a linear progression, a student who gets stuck can’t ever move on. That student is, to put it scientifically, totes boned.
I know a lot of people would argue with me on this. But seriously. You don’t need to understand the principles behind a screwdriver in order to use a screwdriver, and using a screwdriver to take something apart and see how it works is way more interesting than a picture of a screwdriver with terms for memorization underneath.
And it doesn’t end with science. Jesus fucking christ, in my elementary school music class, they showed us a PICTURE of a saxaphone. And a trombone and a guitar. They taught us little songs to memorize the notes (E G B D F, E G B D F, Names of the lines on the treble clef). What does that mean? I have no fucking idea.
Here’s what I’m saying, in my new campaign for Boss of Education (formerly known as Secretary of Education, but I am no one’s secretary of shit):
1. Try some experiential learning.
2. Try doing some things that are over the kids’ heads once in a while.
3. Send the message that if you don’t 100% understand something right off the bat, that’s good. That means you’re in the right class. If you get it all right off, you’re not really learning anything.
4. Don’t undervalue entertainment.
If I may, I hear an interview with famed astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and when he’s asked what sent him down the astronomy path, he talks about a visit to the planetarium. He talks about how comfortable the chair was.
All these years later, he remembers the moment he was inspired, and he remembers how comfortable the chair was.
Holy shit, if that chair had been hard as a rock, would we have a Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Whoever upholstered those chairs, and whoever ordered those for the planetarium, those folks deserve some sort of award.
Okay, there was a lot more than a comfy chair. Tyson had his mind blown by all of the everything that’s out there. And then he wanted to know more. He wanted to know everything.
A young mind can be taught. But it needs to be inspired too. It can’t be 7 hours a day of learning facts, hoping that the kid will find something she loves, something that lights his fires.
Let me say it another way.
We tried your dumb way for a long-ass time. Let’s try something else because, at worst, it’ll be shitty, which is where we are already.”