It's Okay To Be Smart

pope-daddy-d asked:

A majority of my peers hate science because it’s “boring/complicated”. I will admit, I am no science expert, but I am fascinated by it. Even if I am faced with something that is too complex for me to understand, I still marvle at its complexity and wonder. My question is, how do you feel about the way science is taught here in the States? Do you feel it may be the fault of lack of teacher-student engagement, or are America’s teens just getting dumber every year? (I assume the latter)

I don’t think that America’s teens are getting dumber. They aren’t. We are a more talented, more productive, more advanced society than has ever existed on Earth.
More than that, we still do a bad-ass job of training scientists. In fact, we do too good a job. We have too many of them, according to the people who write articles about those things. The American teenager can do things that the world’s most intelligent person could not have imagined even 200 years ago, like type a message on a tiny hand-held robot machine, use electricity to shoot it to space (or a radio tower), where another teenager would get it, and then they would eat tacos.
This is amazing for two reasons:
That kind of talk would have gotten you thrown in jail by the Church in Galileo’s time.
They had no idea what tacos were 200 years ago.
But the way that our teenagers (and really everyone) are being educated about science is kinda awful. Instead of all the awesome, the beauty, the creativity, the inquisitiveness and the wow that goes along with real science, you’re forced to focus on the dry, the boring, the facts, the memorization. I ask myself more creative questions in a day than most science students ask all year. It’s not all the teachers’ fault. They teach what they are told to, if not forced to, often in very regimented systems.
Real science is about creative inquisition and the excitement of discovery. We’ve taken that and replaced it with fear … fear of boredom.
Time to replace the fear with wonder. That’s how we create a more scientific society. Not by creating more scientists.
Keep spreading the science love to all your friends.

pope-daddy-d asked:

A majority of my peers hate science because it’s “boring/complicated”. I will admit, I am no science expert, but I am fascinated by it. Even if I am faced with something that is too complex for me to understand, I still marvle at its complexity and wonder. My question is, how do you feel about the way science is taught here in the States? Do you feel it may be the fault of lack of teacher-student engagement, or are America’s teens just getting dumber every year? (I assume the latter)

I don’t think that America’s teens are getting dumber. They aren’t. We are a more talented, more productive, more advanced society than has ever existed on Earth.

More than that, we still do a bad-ass job of training scientists. In fact, we do too good a job. We have too many of them, according to the people who write articles about those things. The American teenager can do things that the world’s most intelligent person could not have imagined even 200 years ago, like type a message on a tiny hand-held robot machine, use electricity to shoot it to space (or a radio tower), where another teenager would get it, and then they would eat tacos.

This is amazing for two reasons:

That kind of talk would have gotten you thrown in jail by the Church in Galileo’s time.
They had no idea what tacos were 200 years ago.

But the way that our teenagers (and really everyone) are being educated about science is kinda awful. Instead of all the awesome, the beauty, the creativity, the inquisitiveness and the wow that goes along with real science, you’re forced to focus on the dry, the boring, the facts, the memorization. I ask myself more creative questions in a day than most science students ask all year. It’s not all the teachers’ fault. They teach what they are told to, if not forced to, often in very regimented systems.

Real science is about creative inquisition and the excitement of discovery. We’ve taken that and replaced it with fear … fear of boredom.

Time to replace the fear with wonder. That’s how we create a more scientific society. Not by creating more scientists.

Keep spreading the science love to all your friends.