Note: I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the role of mentors in one’s educational development and remembered the following essay I wrote for the Virtual Conference in Informal Science Education, sponsored by the Society for Amateur Scientists in May, 2004. I’m reprinting it here as a way of dusting off my thinking on such things. -sg.
The writing table in my home office is has a clear plastic cover designed to provide a firm writing surface and protect the wood underneath. It is also a convenient place to insert photos and other paper momentos. One such item is an obituary clipped from my hometown newspaper and sent to me by my mother a few years ago. The subject of this obituary is Joseph “Joe” Berchtold, a local engineer who died at the age of 75. I knew him as an enthusiastic merit badge counselor who helped me through the completion of my Geology, Oceanography, and Nature Study merit badges.
One of the perks of earning the necessary merit badges to become an Eagle Scout is that you get to meet a lot of merit badge counselors. My counselors included an attorney, a forest ranger and an active Brigadier General. But I remember Joe for the pure delight he took in introducing young people to the wonders of science and the natural world. Because he was not part of my local Troop leadership, I only worked with him on the above-mentioned merit badges. I only spent a few hours working with him. But clearly, he made an impression.
In the house across the street from us lived the Lorenz family. Their son Todd was one of my boyhood buddies, but his father also held a certain fascination. Bob Lorenz built houses for a living, but his avocations included amateur radio, electronics, and photography. He had converted a basement half-bathroom into a small but well-equipped darkroom. In fact, not only the basement, but much of the outside patio was littered with pieces of electronic equipment scavenged from god-knows-where. Occasionally, late at night while I listened to my clock radio before drifting off to sleep, I would hear a staccato of morse code behind the music, and know that Mr. Lorenz was keying his greetings to some remote short-wave operator. Mr. Lorenz once offered to develop a roll of film I had taken, and together in his darkroom, I was introduced to the remarkable process of turning celluloid and silver nitrate into images.
When I was a fourth-grader at Liberty Elementary School in Salem, Oregon, my teacher that year was Mr. Earl Pearson. A navy veteran with a flat-top haircut and a private pilot, he shared his fascination with technology and nature with the rest of us. I vividly remember two monarch butterfly chrysalises he ordered through the mail and taped to the underside of a shelf near the front of the room. One of them was still viable, and we watched entranced as the insect pulled itself from the chrysalis and slowly expanded it wings. Mr. Pearson introduced us to the metric system, and to basic taxonomy, in which fourth graders had to wrap their tongues around words like “echinoderm” and “coelenterata”. Later, he set up the “Learning Center” in a disused part of the school where kids could come during free time and engage in science play, among other hands-on activities.
When other kids would skip class to go play in the woods nearby the school, I would sneak off to Mr. Pearson’s Learning Center.
However, as pleasant as my memories of these individuals may be, and as much as I enjoyed the activities we did, for the most part, they did not teach me how to be a scientist, or how to do science. But I must also point out that most of the shortfalls were due to what might be called systemic problems.
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None of these men were mentoring me in the traditional sense, nor were they expected to. They were, at best, supervising me while I worked on either a brief, finite assignment, or were just making sure I didn’t break anything or hurt anyone. There was–and remains–the bias among those who do science that science is so intrinsically compelling that after even a tiny taste in the form of doing a merit badge activity or a generic science project in class, the beauty, enjoyment, and thrill of scientific inquiry will propagate itself through a young mind like an intellectual tsunami.
As a result, my understanding of science was strongly colored by the notion that it was some kind of game. The intensity, tenacity, direction, and know-how required to do scientific work were completely left out.
What Was Missing?
Obviously, these well-meaning and public-spirited men would have benefited greatly from having a program that recognized several important scientific values, and sought to teach these values on a sustained basis. After some thought and reading, I have isolated what I consider to be the values most often left out of science education.
- Studying problems that matter
- Honesty with respect to your evidence
- Tenacity
- Moderating undisciplined accumulation of facts
- Teaching science as a process
In his masterful little volume, Advice to a Young Scientist, Nobel Prize Winner Peter Medawar discusses how one selects those subjects that are best suited to research. He cites a fictitious example coined by Lord Zuckerman about the young researcher who is trying to find out why only 39% of sea urchin eggs have a spot on them, which is of no interest to anyone except maybe the one researcher who is trying to figure out why 61% of sea urchin eggs do not have spots.
You will notice that I did not include “curiosity” in my list of things left out of science education. This is because in normal people curiosity is a function of perceived relevance. For example, I am not the least bit curious about who will be America’s next “top model”, who was most recently “voted off the island”, nor which gospel/hiphop-style vocalist will be canonized as the next American Idol. To some, this would make me seem very incurious indeed. But I do not perceive these things as relevant to my life. They do not matter to me.
Things that matter generate their own curiosity. People are naturally curious (in every sense of the word), but not everyone can muster curiosity about something for its own sake. There needs to be a compelling, interesting problem to be solved. Just as one’s own execution on the morrow tends to focus the mind, so some problem that is exciting or compelling for whatever reason is needed as a growth medium for a sustained interest in science to develop.
We all know the problem of getting the “right” answer, i.e., the one in the answer book, versus finding out the “truth”. The problem is compounded by curricula that insist on solving the problem in only one way. Richard Feynman’s delightful story of how he suggested several ways to measure the height of a building using a sensitive barometer as answers to a test question highlight how being bound to a fixed set of answers and procedures can inhibit developing minds. In the classroom there is so much pressure to come up with the “right” answer that fudging the data to conform with expectations becomes a survival skill. I remember vividly how in our Jr. High Physical Science course, some of the less conscientious students modified their results because they feared losing points if they didn’t conform to the expected curve. Perhaps they would have, which only makes the problem worse. There aren’t many deadly sins in science, but “adjusting” or fabricating data ranks among the worst.
Nature doesn’t care what is written in the answer section. In fact, the seeds of a new discovery are often imbedded within a set of anomalous results. By the same token, the teaching process as practiced in our schools has no patience for the student who drills a “dry well”. Trial and error, that important but maligned method of discovery, is not given its due. Only through a relatively long process of working with the data, checking and rechecking, repeating the experiments and correcting mistakes under the watchful eye of a wiser and more experienced practitioner of science will the lesson of respect for evidence come clear.
This also leads me to the value of tenacity. Einstein once remarked that it was his tenacity that was largely responsible for his scientific successes. There is truth in this. Thomas Edison is remembered, rightly, for his tenacity that compensated for his less remarkable ability to reason through a problem. Sticking with a problem and intelligently grappling with its vagaries until it finally gives way is an important value in the conduct of science, as well as a crucial life skill.
The general consensus is that most young people do not have the drive or discipline to stick with one problem for a long time. And yet these same young people can spend hundreds of hours, research deeply into the relevant literature, and risk repetitive stress injuries all in order to master a particularly cunning video game. Again, it is a matter of finding the right problem.
Young people with active minds can become voracious readers. In the early years this is a wonderful and important habit. But at some point book learning must be supplemented with what is observed in nature or found by experimentation. A good mentor can be an invaluable guide to helping young scientists by steering their reading in fruitful directions. I know that most of the best books I have ever read, whether fiction or nonfiction, were books I read because someone else recommended them. Very seldom have I discovered a truly excellent book on my own.
Another trap a young science enthusiast is likely to fall into without the help of a more experienced mentor is believing that science is merely the accumulation of facts. Mentally, it can be very heady to have learned and even memorized all sorts of details about the natural world. You can feel positively brilliant, but these “facts” can become a liability if one has not learned the process by which scientists winnow fact from fancy.
Every student of science has heard the term “scientific method” and perhaps can even give a rough definition of it. Science textbooks drone on about a “hypothesis”, doing an experiment designed to test the hypothesis, comparing the results to the hypothesis, and then revising the hypothesis based on the results. But the scientific method and the methods of scientists are not necessarily the same. The truth is, most real scientists don’t do it quite that way. A better definition of the scientific method is, as Shawn has told me repeatedly, “finding answers to questions while taking care that you’re not fooling yourself”.
Much of what scientists do involves looking at the world and asking questions. “How does that work?” “How did it get that way?” “Why did this happen?” Many discoveries happen when a scientist is working along and notices something that looks a little odd. Upon taking a closer look, they realize that they’ve discovered something new. It’s a sort of “hey, try doing this” kind of approach. Sometimes this is seen in the popular imagination as a kind of adult play, and perhaps it is. But it is play with a purpose, and the best scientists do not do this randomly or whimsically as a child might. It takes time to develop this knack. My feeling is that it is not easy to explain or reduce to a rigid set of procedures.
Conclusion
The more I learned about science as an adult, the more I realized that I had only the most superficial idea of what science is and how it is done. Considering that my early education in science took place in the halcyon days following Sputnik, when military-sized quantities of money were directed at the education system specifically to turn out more scientists and engineers, apparently I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand.
The three men I profiled at the beginning of this essay came the closest to really teaching me what science was about, but still fell short for reasons already stated. An important lesson to be learned–besides the stated values that are integral to a sound scientific education–is that the process of teaching science well is not necessarily obvious, even to those who practice it.