Kids in Astronomy

I was invited by a friend recently to hold an astronomy night for some kids. Now, I've never been known as a creative person, so where education types and elder sisters would be going nuts with tubes of glitter and marshmallows, I draw a blank. I know the things that make me excited about space, but the idea of that row of prematurely-jaded faces gives me the heebie-jeebies. I didn't understand those kids when I was their age; I understand them even less now.

So, I think about how I was when I was a pre-teen. The thing I wanted most was to have my intellect be considered the equal of any adult's. Just because I was in a pint-sized body, I reasoned, didn't mean that I couldn't grasp the concepts of quantum entanglement or multiple dimensions. One memory is particularly distinct. I was sitting on my bed, surrounded by my intro-level astronomy books. They were basically glorified picture-books, all bright colours and little text. I had a sheet of paper, with childish scrawling trying to piece together bits on black holes from each book. I was so frustrated. How could these authors introduce topics like singularities, and then just move on without explaining how they work, what we've seen, what we've calculated? It would be like killing Scheherazade on the 50th night. What's the point?

The bottom line is simple: children aren't stupid, they are untaught. A plethora of studies have shown that in so many topics, kids command flexibility and insight of mind that adults spend the rest of their lives trying to recreate. If anyone should be being fed our most complicated problems, it should be them. They have curiosity, intelligence, and imagination, and are unfettered by preconceptions about the so-called "laws" of the Universe.

So what am I going to tell these kids? I'm going to think of the "big concepts" that are supposed to be too much for their minds, and explain as much information as I can about them. I'm going to respect their brains, treat them as capable thinkers instead of cutesy factoid ingesters. Then I'm going to let them talk about it, stew in it, come up with solutions I bet would widen the eyes of any physicist. If we want to rehabilitate our nation's science education, this is how we need to start.

Science Writing

This post is born out of frustration with writing lab reports. I was sitting staring at my most recent physics lab the other day, trying to organize my analysis section in my report and mentally teasing out what elements made it different from my other sections. A professor later that day brought up the theme of science writing in a more general sense, so I decided to write this post. Here's my radical idea:

All science departments should require their students to take a short class on writing methods *for science* in their freshman year.

In science circles, the jokes about humanities being "non-scientific" and subjective never seem to get old. The grain of truth? Science writing is fundamentally different from humanities writing and the kinds of argumentative papers that kids are used to writing in school. The systems have a very basic splitting point: in history, say, you look at the causes for a war in one country, and write a paper stating that these causes could have been factors in other wars in other places. You quote other sources liberally throughout the paper, weave various themes in and out of your structure, have a position that you're defending, and write a conclusion that expands your main idea to a wider application.

In science, a paper structured like that would be considered a mess, if not downright fraudulent. Science writing is more similar to technical writing in many ways. You have specific sections for literature review, methodology, data, results, and conclusions, which -- like food on an OCD person's plate -- aren't allowed to overlap. If you extrapolate your results too far, show a bias, or use overly definitive terminology, your professional integrity goes out the window.

Granted, some students seem to pick up the format intuitively; most don't. With their future graduates' credibility on the line, you'd think that schools would include these building blocks of scientific communication formally somewhere. Almost every science textbook begins with a discussion of the scientific method; why not start classes with a discussion of what makes science writing...scientific?

I can't be the first person to think about this. Surely the devoted science schools of the world teach some sort of Science Writing 101, something to introduce the syntax and structure of scientific academia. So I ran a basic, university-specific web search of undergraduate catalogues for required classes on science writing.

All that came up were optional courses for journalism students looking to focus on science reporting.

I think this is a serious shortcoming. If I were the queen of the Universe, or at least a department head, this is how I would do it: a mandatory 1 credit, 4- or 6-week class in freshman year. Teach the students acceptable and unacceptable terminology, the basic structure of a scientific paper, the sections where you can repeat your data, the sections where you expand it, etc. I'd wrap up the class by having them read one short, well-written scientific journal article to illustrate the way it should be done. Then, turn them out into the world with a little better idea of what they're reading and writing.

Am I crazy? I'd love to know if anyone else out there has the same frustrations, or actually has such a class at their school.