A feeling of power

Kimberly Swygert comments on a couple of articles she read.

The first one calls for science teachers to stop faking their knowledge. There's a series of books which aims to teach the fundamentals of science so teachers can teach science from a position of understanding and therefore authority.

In one writing panel I attended at Loscon, the topic was researching your novel. One of the hard facts about researching a novel is that you'll probably never put more than 10% of what you learn in the book. (And if you do, you researched too shallowly.) If you have done proper research, the 10% of your knowledge which you present in your book will be supported by the 90% you don't. The reader will feel the presence of that 90%, even if he never actually sees it.

Likewise, if a teacher understands where these facts and rules in the science book come from, he'll be much better able to deal with smart ass kids who ask questions from left field.

I'm reminded of the scene in Heinlein's Farmer in the Sky where the kids onboard the ship en route to Ganymede are in a science course being taught by the Chief Engineer. One of them asks, if it's impossible to go above the speed of light, what would happen if you took this ship up to 99.9% of the speed of light, and then ramped the drive up to 6 gravities and held it there?

The Engineer, being an engineer and not a physicist, was stumped.

(The answer is, of course, from the perspective of someone on board the ship, time dilation increases the closer you get to the speed of light. You never have time to reach the speed of light. From the point of view of someone at rest near the ship, the ship appears to get increasingly massive, so the force exerted by the drive produces an increasingly smaller change in velocity.)

The second article deals with the introduction of Intelligent Design/Intelligent Origin Theory (ID/IOT) in science classes.

You've probably guessed that I don't think very highly of it. The reason is that ID/IOT isn't science. There are no unifying principles in or around ID/IOT. It pulls together no disparate pieces into any kind of workable pattern. All the explanations offered within the structure of ID/IOT are ad hoc explanations – each addressing one single point and only that one single point.

ID/IOT and Creationism get as far as they do only because teachers don't understand real science. What they know of science is what they read out of the textbook, and what they teach is limited to what they can absorb long enough to regurgitate. If you changed one of the equations in one of the books and left everything else the same, their "bullshit detectors" would issue not one peep. They'd be clueless.

Clayton Cramer frequently voices his concern that evolution is taught as Revealed Dogma. As I point out on a regular basis, evolution is far from unique in this respect. Pretty much all grade school science is taught this way. It's nice that some educators have noticed this, and have written books to address the problem. Now, here's hoping some teachers will read them.