Sanitizing Science

Teaching science is an inherently different activity from doing science. At least it is so today under the auspices of ‘mass education’, a phrase I heard in my younger days as a student but is hardly ever used today. Is this because almost all education ‘systems’ today inherently assume efficiently getting students up-to-speed on the basics? We don’t require students to re-discover scientific truths and theories. It would be painstakingly slow as they muddle their way through a morass of knowledge. No, what we do is package the knowledge in relatively quick and digestible chunks so they can potentially consume and internalize this knowledge.

 

I refer to this as “sanitizing science” – to borrow the phrase from John Ziman’s Real Science, a thoughtful meditation on the relationship between science and society. This sanitizing comes in two aspects: (1) We clean things up. Most of the messiness of science is not discussed. We present “just the facts”, leaving out human and social foibles. We sanitize the story. (2) We preserve the sanity of ourselves and our students. By packaging the story efficiently, we avoid the potential insanity of the strangeness of science and the nuttiness of the scientific endeavor. We normalize science. We’ve done such a good job with packaging, that science has come to be seen as the bedrock of knowledge – the uber-normal. That’s certainly the story for the past couple of centuries. And even now, with ‘backlash’ against scientific authority, the establishment paints the rebellion as a minority, abnormal view.

 

Secondary school science education has done this so successfully, that my students come to my introductory chemistry courses primed to “get the right answer”. Ambiguity frustrates them. It’s inefficient and messy. Some of the academically strongest students are the most resistant to the ambiguity. They’ve become very efficient at training their sights on the right answer that yields a high score on their exams. My college-level chemistry classes aren’t vastly different in one sense – there’s still a canon to be learned and while some ambiguity is introduced, what we ‘cover’ in class is still well-sanitized and streamlined – especially at the introductory level courses which serve as pre-requisites to more advanced courses. Chemistry education is very hierarchical in structure.

 

I try my best to convey to students that science is strange – with its highly constrained processes and its (often) surprising results. What we understand scientifically is to some extent far removed from the practical and useful folk-science way of understanding and interacting with the natural world. In general chemistry, we encounter this very quickly when discussing the structure of the atom with its massive yet tiny (in size) nucleus surrounded by a cloud of electrons we can’t quite pinpoint. Several such stories are sprinkled throughout the semester, but I still spend most of our class time streamlining the scientific knowledge I want the students to acquire. It’s still mostly sanitized, for good or ill, to maintain the efficiency of the process within the ‘system’ (where I’m purposefully evoking the industrial factory metaphor).

 

Do I hark to the medieval days of apprenticeship? No thank you. Even my graduate school experience didn’t have that feel. My research/thesis adviser would make interesting suggestions here and there, but for the most part I was left to my own devices to make headway on my research projects. That being said, teaching at a liberal arts college with only undergraduates often results in an apprenticeship model of sorts being applied to undergraduate research. I don’t have many students so I meet with each one individually every week. I perform a process and they mimic it. Then they get practice on their own repeating the process over and over again for different starting “materials and molecules”. I pose questions to get them to take increasing ownership of the project and to help them think like scientists. I’m deliberate in doing this. (Looking back, I’m not sure my graduate adviser did this, but I learned a lot from observing and listening to him – and it has clearly influenced some of my own idiosyncracies as a faculty member.)

 

Efficiency in education isn’t necessarily a bad thing – although it can be. From the perspective of advancing scientific knowledge, I see it as mostly a good thing. It’s hard to stand on the shoulders of giants if it takes you an entire lifetime just to claw your way up to their shoulders. By sanitizing and repackaging the core knowledge that allows one to (hopefully) build on that foundation, and then quickly reach the frontier, we can learn new things we didn’t know before. It would be nice if I had fewer students to teach so I could give more individual time to each – but that’s unlikely to become a reality soon, unless I start my own boutique outfit that’s aimed at a niche population of ‘elites’ willing to pay the money for their children to be educated in such an environment. A part of me finds this idea attractive, but another part of me desires to spend my time in ‘mass education’ and have a broader impact (narrowly construed).

 

Sanitizing science will continue to be part of my practice, but I hope to do it more thoughtfully. Over the years I have slowly ditched textbook materials for my own. I’ve rearranged material, cut some things from the canon, and introduced other things that were traditionally considered peripheral and left out. But I still find myself constrained by the system that I’m part of, and so this progression (if it even constitutes ‘progress’) moves along slowly, in fits and starts. Little changes here and there punctuated by the occasional overhaul. My own sanity is also at stake.