Home Schooling the Science Fiction Way

February 7th, 2009

I wrote a short post about homeschooling last year that criticized one specific opinion held by one particular homeschooler, and while it was a good criticism, it got in the way of the positive potential homeschooling has.   I said then, and I will say again, that I have no love for homeschooling done for wrong or destructive reasons like religious indoctrination (obviously a problem when there have to be publications with names like Secular Homeschooling, and their reviews of science books catering to homeschoolers have to flag the non-science/non-sense in them, especially concerning evolution).   But I also don’t have a lot of love for traditional K-12 schooling.

Various people have argued that public schools are as good as private schools, or drops in SATs actually reflect new tests or a broader demographic going to college taking the tests.   I am also aware of the issue that the U.S. looks worse than many other countries because we don’t track students the same way.   But really, the basic system was formulated with a bunch of flaws and was not intelligently designed at all.

I mean, why do we have summers off?   To give everyone time to forget what they learned through disuse?   To work the fields?   To force families to spend extra money on daycare or camps?

Why are schools one size fits all?   Because everyone learns at the same pace?   Because there is only one pace and one order to learn subjects, and it was found through a laborious search?

Why aren’t all teachers well versed in their subjects?   Why do we as a society hold school teacher to be a low-prestige position and why don’t we pay them better and attract the top people with an interest in teaching?

Why are languages taught so late in school, usually when they are more difficult to learn and when it is impossible to avoid having an accent?

Why do we have a handful of school boards, usually at the state level, sometimes voted in on the basis of politics or anti-educational special interests (e.g., creationism), decide on a small number of mediocre textbooks that everyone will use?

As an experimental scientist, I want to see more innovation more places and the best systems identified and replicated.   I want to use what we now understand about education, what tools we now have available, to revolutionize education.   I want science fiction to be happening not just in laboratories and in the gadget drawers of the rich and powerful, but in schools.   I see the internet being integrated into schools, and then I see students getting lazier about their research rather than more insightful.

I mean, I used to have to go to the library and sift through several books an encyclopedias, a slow process, when I heard about someone or something I wanted to learn more about.   Now with the internet that time is reduced to seconds.   That should leave more time to think, and to learn.   It seems to result in quick cut and pastes, or quick paraphrasing, and a return to texting their friends or playing video games.

Education in science fiction shows up once in a while.   We have the “Teacher” from what I consider the worst episode of original Star Trek ever:

Here in the condensed episode of “Spock’s Brain,” skip ahead to 2:30 for the teacher.

Much better and more interesting, minus the camp value, is Michael Burstein’s short story “Tele-Absence.” Sorry, not available for free.   Worth the reading, I think.

Now, I’m a believer in using science fiction as an educational tool for all sorts of things, especially science, but let’s turn this around.

I think we need to use emerging technology to tell stories, answer questions on the fly, help students to visualize everything.   Some form of virtual reality, I think, so that textbooks come alive, and information is provided on the spot as required.   Online courses, whether traditional or those that will make use of new technology, can compete and be shared.   Future teachers will really need to be on the ball to make sure the information is good, to be able to lead students through interactive environments, address individual interests and needs, and to inspire.

Learning shouldn’t be hard.   Learning shouldn’t be slow.   Learning shouldn’t be a bore.

Essentially everything that is taught in a K-12 curriculum is very interesting or important.   Why can’t it be presented as such?   I mean, the dreaded word problem was presumably designed to bring some real-world relevance to math, but man do I not remember a single interesting one.   Trains and airplanes and apples and John and Mary with different amounts of change in their pockets.   I mean, my god, I am getting dumber just trying to remember some of these.   I remember one from college physics about a man walking along the shore and a turtle walking along a canoe…!!!   WTF?!   The one I remember with “Mister Spook and Captain Quirk” wasn’t much better.   I do give one in intro astronomy about how much easier it would be for a Predator to see Kirk than Spock because of the differences in their body temperature — only about ten percent — but we could speculate about evolutionary pressure on Vulcan compared with Earth in light of infrared-seeing hunters.

(An aside: I remember thinking in college that there was a need for a book like “101 Extremely Violent Physics Problems” that involved cars skidding off cliffs, the speed of bodies hitting pavement, and the force of bullets on impact.   That would have been fun, a lot of fun, at a particular age.   Probably wouldn’t have gotten more girls into physics, but the field hasn’t done a good job of that anyway, and the girls going into physics anyway would be more interesting than average with these kind of textbooks.)

I’m digressing, I fear.   There is fun stuff here, interesting stuff here.   I remember so many times that if I could just see something, play around with it, I could figure it out.   It isn’t so easy to visualize or play around with abstract descriptions in textbooks.   Think about the usually awful job movies do with math…you get a montage with equations flying around but rarely any content, and the audience feels like they get it better than when you have an info dump given in lecture form.

One of Einstein’s most powerful memories from childhood that guided him into and through his science career was seeing a magnet in a compass align with north, mysterious and invisible forces in action that were nonetheless understandable.

I’m going to quit for now and come back to this another day.   I don’t think I’ve thought about it enough yet or done enough research to be concrete.   I do know that students in a planetarium or looking through a telescope are about a hundred times more motivated than reading a textbook or sitting in a traditional lecture, and technology is making those sorts of experiences more readily available.

Anyone know some really good examples of education in science fiction novels/stories, movies, or TV?   I was really not that impressed with the adventure game in Ender’s Game, by the way, so let’s skip that one.   I can’t help but feel my mind has gone blank for examples, or maybe it is just not a topic that comes up much.   Le Guin’s The Dispossessed has some interesting ideas, but they’re not very developed.   Ah well…

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