What Science Looks Like

I’m in lab in my hipster pants and snap-back cap wearing gloves and goggles and a lab coat and I know that yes, this is what science looks like.

Science is not ivory tower men with white hair and extensive vocabularies running experiments beyond our comprehension. Science is done everyday by millions of people, all who are totally normal and love normal things like Justin Bieber and Led Zeppelin and pizza and watching New Girl and constellations and corny poems.

Science is not done by the people who know it all, but by the people who want to know more, regardless of what they already know.

I have passed labs blaring music from Wicked, death metal, Mika pop (oops that was me), country music, techno, MPR (a bit too common), and 80′s love ballads.

I’m thinking about this because a student asked me today about college, and they were surprised when I told them I have done research in a lab. They were surprised because a laboratory feels like a place that is not accessible to them, just after they sat there explaining how different hormones affect the development of reproductive organs of men and females. Something is wrong.

In my most wild dreams, students don’t begin doing research as sophomores/juniors, but as high schoolers, who come into the lab to learn laboratory science alongside biochemistry, general and organic chemistry, cell biology, genetics, and everything else. In these dreams, the high schoolers start to craft experiments, and begin to realize the creative power inherent in this task, equivalent to a creative essay or love poem. In these dreams, the high schoolers are the ones who ask the wildest questions, questions that are sometimes laughed away with a quick textbook reference, but sometimes questions that silence the rest of us and act as catalysts for our cognitive thoughts, as we begin to turn these thoughts into new territory.

Making science feel accessible to students is more than just using rote examples of scientists who are not white men. Why are we still failing to realize that in so many classrooms? 

Some Things Never Change: A Reflection on The First Day of School

Today, during my run, my knees hurt too much, but that’s not important. Fall has started. I know it’s fall because when I run I smell the concoction of sweat, harvest sunset, the arid musk of decaying leaves, and synthetic fibers. It calls to mind the hundreds upon hundreds of soccer practices by the lake. That smell is my culture.

Last night, I didn’t sleep. I’m not sure why this is. School doesn’t cause me a lot of excitement or anxiety, but I tend to not sleep well the first night before a new semester starts. I was fine though–I think this was the first time in college when I didn’t sleep in class during the first day (although it was probably warranted. I can’t decide whether it’s good or bad that as a senior, I’m still being introduced to how science works?).

People are irresponsible with their bikes. These bikers who refuse to wear a helmet and poke vicariously out through intersections. It gives me anxiety because I know they’re giving drivers anxiety, and the way any driver reacts to an irresponsible biker is unpredictable. I like biking because of the consistency, the loss of self as you become one with the bike around corners and through underpasses. When bikers are stupid, I can’t lose myself like that. Please start playing safe. More complaining: too many bikes on the sidewalk. Stop being assholes, guys, and walk your wheels.

The campus connector. I’m pleased to report I can still dance the Campus Connector Dance–the careful multistepped ballet, whereas you are given only a half square foot of space to stand while the bus wheels around corners.

More on the Campus Connector: girls with too much makeup. Preps talking too loud about welcome week and their roommates. People with huge backpacks and no knowledge of WHERE THEIR BACKPACK IS PLEASE STEP BACK YOU’RE IN MY SPACE AND IT’S NOT VERY LARGE. People who read stupid books. Frat boys who listen to Wicked (all of them). People on their cell phones. (I’m not judgmental.)

More professors complaining about how they don’t know why the scientist who “invented” pH decided that low pH corresponds to high [H+]. We all learned what pH is in high school, you don’t have to be apologetic about it. The science works, stop being sorry.

There are 10x more runners on the river roads. 90% of them are tall shirtless attractive men with very long strides. This is not helpful.

Students in the front row who gives awkward answers to every awkward question the professor asks. “What else did this video say about diffusion?” “Size matters!”. Okay, if you need a video to give primary instruction, stop teaching. If you think you need to teach diffusion to a class of upperclassmen, stop teaching. And stop making penis jokes.

Oh, I forgot. No homework at night. Happy first week of school!

Will you DO school differently?

I mean, what if English teachers had to be scientifically literate, and science teachers had to be able to hold a discussion on the overarching symbolism of The Great Gatsby? We should be making critical thinkers in “artsy” classes and artists in science classes.

When a kid walks into a science classroom, you want to teach them a lot. You want them to be fascinated by transcription–how do you do that? You let them dream, you show them how to dream. You want them to think critically, but why should they care? Because they have dreams. We do science because we love it, because we love humanity, because we love knowledge for its own sake. That concept is really in line with liberal arts. Culture is important, and so relevant to the science classroom.

When we embrace knowledge for its own sake, we embrace everything that knowledge can do. We embrace the future and not just the baseline expectations of today.

Will you test your kids without paper? Multiple choice only teaches kids to have an elementary understanding of material and a knack at deduction.

A track runner can excel at sprinting events and long distance, but when she attempts medium length events (like the 800m) she struggles to complete the race and experiences severe muscle aches. What might be wrong with her?

The Florida Keys are currently experienced an onset of dengue, a disease spread by the mosquito. The local government has been utilizing the use of heavy insecticide use, while it is currently considering the use of mutant mosquitos produced by a genetic engineering company. These mosquitoes are all male, and when a female mates with one, it will fail to produce offspring. Male mosquitoes do not bite, do not travel far, and do not live long. However, the community is worried about the introduction of a mutant into their ecosystem. Which of these methods is best? Propose a unique biological strategy for dealing dengue. (What do you know? What do you need to know? How can you find these things out? Do not worry about feasibility.)

Biologists do not work in a vacuum. Consider the problem of world hunger. The famous plant pathologist Norman Borlaug is credited with saving over 1 billion people worldwide thanks to his work developing strains of crops that are high-yield and disease resistant. He did this through traditional planting methods, without the aid of modern molecular biology. What are things to consider when thinking about world hunger (culture, economics, human health, etc), and propose a novel solution.

Pick a species to domesticate. Develop a strategy for domestication. Which traits do you select for?

What classes would you eliminate from the high school education you had? What would you replace them with?

I Sing The Body Political

[Youtube link refuses to embed! Argh. Foiled.]

I was quoted in the Daily. Oops.

So there’s a lot of noise about this marriage amendment. As there has been. And as there will be, even after the vote is tallied. And my exhaustion will carry on with it.

Honestly, I have an enormous amount of respect for every activist who has been fighting, battle after battle, lawsuit after lawsuit, vote after vote. At the same time, I have to blame them as well for my exhaustion with this issue.

And it is because my body is political. It is not even a choice!

I am gay, and therefore the conservative right deems me damnable.

I am gay, and therefore the liberal left expects me to be an activist. An activist for marriage equality! The rallying banner of the gay world!

I have about as much interest in getting legally married as I do in the stock market. I hope to do it one day, and my life will probably be better off for it, but I know I’ll likely be just fine as I am. I am exhausted of making the marriage argument, and I am exhausted of being expected to parrot it!

I’m sorry for not being sorry. Kids are being harassed in the schools and some of them are dying. And we are forced to spend millions of hours and dollars fighting an amendment that will change very little! If the amendment doesn’t pass, my life goes on as normal. If it does, it makes the future a little bleaker. Kids are still dying.

And no, I won’t buy the nonsense that marriage is a stepping stone, and that bullying will come later. Who the hell decided marriage is a more important stepping stone? Frankly, if we were to better address attitudes towards queer communities, we’d probably lower the numbers of kids being harassed and we’d likely get more votes for marriage equality.

But I mean, I get it. Marriage equality is something you can fight for, something you can write down in the law and see the courts and government dole out your privileges. Tackling the issues of homophobia and transphobia are hard and abstract. And frankly, I’m enormously skeptical that marriage equality will help much. Sure, we may win some over in the fight, but we’re probably digging the trenches between us and them even deeper.

Spending my childhood growing up being incubated with the gross reasonings of why gay people deserve to be a second class of citizens, and then being classed in scientific and critical thinking, has brought me to be even more passionate about wanting to be a teacher and wanting to teach critical thinking to our youth. The freedom that we find when we are rightfully given the tools to search for knowledge is as sweet a drink as we may ever find. For some reason, our schools and our parents have been failing to teach our children that harassment and marginalization of people hardly different from themselves actually drags society down. That these are actually immoral things to do. Perhaps it is because we are too busy telling children to play nice, instead of showing them why.

Voltaire once said “Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.” We need to start reminding people that neglect is just as painful as any other form of abuse. It does no good if you point the finger and say “that’s wrong” while some kid gets his face punched in.

So, when it comes to you, what will you do? Will you do you part and point your finger, vote “no” on the amendment, and move along your way? Or will you go beyond just voting no?

Spread the word. Smile at all. Make a new friend each day.  Step up.

How NOT to talk about students

Overheard on the university bus today:

1: Yeah, I mean, so many of these kids just don’t have the support they need.

2: How old are they?

1:They’re in like, 2nd grade. I mean, most of them are so ghetto. It’s like they get zero love from their parents.

2: Oh my gosh. That’s so pathetic, and like, sad.

For the record, I don’t like confronting people on the bus. It can almost never go well, regardless of how flippant, convincing, nice, angry, or confident you can be.

What’s remarkable is just how much privilege and bias these two exhibited in so few words. What was even remarkable was that I recognized one of the students as being in the same teaching class as me last semester. It’s like our cultural awareness discussions never happened. Let’s do a quick run-down

• You cannot label kids as ghetto. You cannot label anyone as ghetto. To do so shows first and foremost implicit racism, and it’s also making an enormous amount of assumptions about where they live, how they live, how they were raised. It’s a veritable ocean-load of cultural and lifestyle assumptions, and outside of that, you’re labeling that whole collection as definitively negative. To label a kid as ghetto is to label them as someone who probably won’t succeed. That is so egregious it should be a crime. It is effectively abuse by neglect. Our children deserve better than that.
• You cannot assume that because a kid might be “ghetto” (however you think that’s defined), that their parents are lazy and neglectful. Probably because you have no idea what the actual situation is. Parents die sometimes. Sometimes each parent works 2 jobs to feed their kids and keep them under a roof. Some kids are homeless. If you’re too busy working up an image of busy you won’t have time to give them your attention and love.

A full disclaimer: I am not an expert in muliculturalism. But I know enough to not make heinous assumptions about a student’s family and situation. If going to a school and volunteering is more about making yourself look charitable and humble, don’t do it. If you’re doing it because you want to pad your resume, don’t do it. Even if you have to do it for a grade, or for community service, when you enter a school, your only motive should be to help each and every kid in the best way possible.

Controllables

In science we more/less call the controllables “independent variables”. That is, when I set up a biochemical reaction, it’s very discrete and simple. That is:

• I know the exact amount of everything. I know the concentration of DNA to about 50 nanograms (on a bad day!). I know the exact volume to about 1 microliter. This sounds like precise stuff, but these are generally 20 microliter reactions. Regardless, when I run a restriction enzyme reaction, and I run my DNA fragments out on a gel, I can deduce quite a bit of information 99% of the time. (I did get comets, literal comets, on my gel once. No idea there!).
• I control the amount of time it runs.
• I control the temperature it runs at.
• I control the color of my labels. (so important)

In a classroom, not so much. In fact, a classroom can feel so wild and unpredictable it’s hard to tell what counts as independent and dependent variables. And I speak of this not only from volunteering in a metropolitan middle school, but from my experience in a wide variety of university classes. To be certain, I learn more about teaching and education from my physics lecture/discussion/lab than I do about physics.

What helps is to remember that the value is in the people. A lot of rhetoric whines over reading and math, reading and math! As if reading and math are essential for their own sake. As if Reading and Math are grand characters in the universe that are being neglected. It’s easy to forget that reading and math are important because these are skills that people really do need everyday to function. In reading and math, experts see a core set of quantitative and qualitative analytic skills.

That’s not to say science, art, literature, chorus, etc. aren’t important. I’m a huge supporter of these. But when you hear someone say, “I doubt you could get a 10th grader to point out Iraq on a map for me!”.

Who is telling 10th grader’s it is important to be able to do that? No one. No one is telling them why that is important either. The value in education is being able to give our students the tools to navigate and progress this world, but also to give our students the agency for self education. I mean, I’m not entirely certain I could describe in sufficient detail the geography of the middle east. What I can do is easily navigate my resources to educate myself quickly and sufficiently to hold my own in discussion and have meaningful conversations about it.

What can we control about a classroom to facilitate this type of education, in which a student learns how to learn. In which a student is able to easily immerse themself in a foundational set of knowledge that guides them in the future?

If I don’t put in enough water into my biochemical reactions, my glycerol concentration can get too high, and this results in unpredictable DNA cuts. Likewise, we can establish working educational environments that promote students to

• Take the initiative to do their own basic information transfer. There are lots of textbooks that explain simply and eloquently what entropy is and how it applies to unique physical circumstances.
• Set the tone that school, and the classroom, is for learning and not about getting through material to reach standards. This is tough, especially with standardized testing and a premium on grades in some majors.
• Invite discussion on current research models, controversy in the field, and where the future of the field may lay. Synthesis is really important. Having flour in my kitchen is a fundamental but it’s pointless unless I’m making scones out of them. There are scones in every class. That is, every class is likely to be relevant to every student. If you introduce synthesis you introduce mandatory relevance. The human experience is pervasive.
• Be safe and promote safety: physical, mental, and emotional. Kids actually do not recognize most cases of bullying because it’s implicit, and many adults are too shy or scared to step in. A student that gets ridiculed every time he speaks up in class won’t continue to participate if the teacher doesn’t acknowledge the negative behavior.
• See their future and work for it. Discourage complacency and don’t waste your students’ time.

Okay, I could go on and on. There are so many things we can do on a philosophical level, and I’m glad my education in education is helping me with that. The lesson for today is the environment and setting is crucial, particularly what that environment encourages and prevents. Weeeeee!

A Communal Education

What if instead of a million notebooks scattered throughout a lecture hall, students consolidated work. A collection of thoughts, ideas, tips, tricks, mechanisms, references.

Oh wait. That exists already. It’s called wikipedia.

But no Wikipedia page can walk you through a class. A journey into Wikipedia can lead you along many different paths. Which is, in it’s own right, a unique educational foray.

What if students made class wikis, that collected notes and lectures into a coherent project? Would there still be an incentive to go to class? Would this actually inspire a different kind of peer-to-peer collaboration? What happens when peers disagree on the basic information transfer that happens during lecture?? Would this work for a math or physics class as well as it would a history or evolution class?

Would the University frown on this? Once the essence of a class is established in a wiki (not only the information, but the progression, the references, the inside jokes), is there still value inherent in the establishment? How would the public react to this? Would it allow us to compare pedagogical techniques between universities and professors? Would it allow the general public to understand science and become more scientifically literate?

Would students stop taking notes in class and start engaging with the class? Why aren’t universities working on collaborating an easy collection of basic information for us to navigate so that we can skip unnecessary lectures that only function as an audiobook for the text? Would there not be value to a student created collection of knowledge? What will students choose to share and focus on compared to what professors would? How much would this change between Universities?

What would happen if your organic professor required each student to write a blog post about a mechanism? Would it be purely technical, or would you add an aesthetic to make it more accessible? Or would you just add the application of the mechanism in industry and research? This would be such a basic level of synthesis  that it’s embarrassing the University barely does it. And it would teach students to learn how to communicate difficult concepts with everyone.

A wiki would take the concept of your discussion section and make it real, tangible, and alive. Are you willing to try this?

I’m Tired

So here’s what’s going on.

People are filling the streets across the world, inspired by Occupy Wall Street. The Tea Party has invaded the Republican Party, which means that the Presidential race for 2012 won’t be any good. I’m like many liberals, in that I’m fairly upset with Obama recently. But the Republicans are literally unable to put together even a barely feasible candidate. Everyday I turn on the radio as Marketplace churns out another negative economics report on Europe.

Our immigration problem is not being solved, but rather inciting even more racism. Our education problem is not being solved, but rather inciting even more classism. Our civil rights problems is not being solved, but rather inciting even more sexism. As I read the news and listen to the radio, each and every day I feel more and more disconnected from my country. Our politicians try to only help those who no longer need it, under some unspoken rule that tax breaks for the rich will help the poor? It’s embarrassing because people buy it.

After all, what do I do with my day? I solve physics problems after dinner, learn about organic reactions in the morning, and every so often work on cloning new virus strains. I read science fiction in my free time. Campus feels like a bubble, partially isolated from the politics of everyday life everywhere else.

And then I step into the community. Volunteering in a school has been one of the best experiences of my entire time in college. Each new day is a fresh challenge filled with inspiration. That doesn’t mean the work is always easy or necessarily fun, but it is meaningful and challenging.

My commitment, my life, my work, is to them. So that they can lived as I have found a way to live–in awe, in curiosity, in simplicity. So that they can also go out and help those who cannot always help themselves. So that they can become the writers of new fiction, the scientists to eradicate third world diseases, the carpenters of houses for the homeless, and the men and women who create sustainable communities and businesses. So that, if not them, then their children will not have to worry about the cost of higher education. They are the 99%.

The Education (I mean….culture) Crisis of ‘Merica

The word curriculum means something along the lines of “all the courses of study”. It is the full complement of courses offered by an institution. To say something is extra-curricular is somewhat misleading. But it’s what schools call any activity students do under the supervision of school employees (teachers) and that they pay for.

LZ Granderson writes for CNN. His articles are usually pretty intriguing. He’s a gay black family churchgoing man. In his most recent post, he mentions that America isn’t very smart. Because it’s not. Here are some of the statistics he pulls out:

• newly released ACT scores revealed that only one high school graduate in four in the class of 2011 could meet the benchmarks for college readiness in all four core subjects.
• The National Institute for Literacy found that nearly 47% of the Motor City’s adults are functionally illiterate. Not surprisingly, Detroit’s unemployment is near 12%, and the city is the country’s poorest metropolis according to the census.
• Four of our poorest states had four of the lowest ACT composite scores — Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas.

A cursory glance at the most recent aggregation of ACT scores shows that the national average is a dismal 21. Some will tell me that’s because the scores need to reflect a bell curve.

No. No they don’t.

The ACT test is a test for college readiness. If America is full of geniuses, we do not need the ACT score range to look like a bell curve. There are more ways to figure out who to accept to a university and what to do with your life.

LZ properly points out that there is a link between socioeconomic status and level of education, and why that fact leads to the failure of programs like No Child Left Behind.

What does this have to do with extra-curriculars? LZ properly points out our nation is one that is fueled by sports. Football teams have amazing booster clubs and it’s because people love football. I don’t because it’s not particularly exciting and generally involves cold weather; football also is remarkably dangerous, especially considering the amount of safety equipment they wear. Lots of people like blaming football and other extra-curriculars for why students fail—they’re not paying attention to school!

But can life really be only about your books? How dull! What would my life had been if I had not taken the stage with my community theater group? What kind of character would I have if Coach hadn’t taught me how to go from JV to the top of the list not by only improving my technical skills, but serious life skills as well? Quiz bowl taught me to appreciate knowledge and curiosities. Swimming opened gateways for the rest of my life. Forensics allowed me to make new friends I would have never otherwise met.

And if kids are doing bad in high school, why are we not focusing more on elementary school? Provide more incentive to become a teacher and you’ll attract more people, which will allow schools to select for those who will be the best teachers, and not just the smartest students. Valuing education as a culture will probably enrich our extra-curriculars by bringing talent to diverse fields (not just engineering/medicine—we can be more than just an industrial nation!). It’ll also probably get rid of the popularity of football (again, with the injury thing, it’s against common sense). We need to get rid of the idea that school is a rite of passage that’s simply mandated by the government: ergo, something students can simply slide by without performing well. Time for a paradigm shift. (I hate that phrase)

Okay. I really don’t like football. It’s sexist. People die from heat exhaustion all the time. People die early from brain injury, whether it’s a stroke or suicide. Their bodies are wrecked. It’s a sport that is based on how hard men can hit each other and less about smart game play (see: basketball). It’s a huge waste of money, talent, and lives. Go play something a little less ridiculous (see:anything else).