We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair.
– President Obama, 2011 State of the Union
Dear Mr. President,
Videos by VICE
In physical education class, students get physical. They run, bounce balls, and hurl insults at each other.
Those who are particularly good at these activities get to compete against students from other schools who are also good at it—and after a scheduled time of running, bouncing balls, and hurling insults, a school is declared a winner, and everybody goes home exhausted.
If you’re really good at, eventually you get paid to pretend that Gatorade leaks out of your eyeballs so long as you continue to run, bounce balls, and hurl insults better than anyone else on the planet.
Not all levels get celebrated, but at all levels, you are practicing physical activity. That’s the point of physical education.
If the argument for science fairs is that they allow kids to practice science, then something is seriously wrong with science education in the States. (And something is seriously wrong.)
Imagine if physical education required students to memorize which muscles fired when for a given activity, like hitting a baseball, before they ever picked up a bat.
Listen, Maria, you got it wrong again! Didn’t you read the text? Did you take notes? Did you hear a word I said? We just talked about it! The pronator teres muscle fires first, then you recruit the brachioradialis! The state exam is only two months away!
Parroting the sequence of muscles used has nothing to do physical education. The physical education teachers would balk at the task. Some might even argue that that would be science.
But it’s not. It’s simply nonsense.
We do a lot of nonsense in science class. We pretend to teach biochemical cycles to children who have never seen a wheat plant. We pretend to teach astronomical units to children who can hardly grasp miles. We pretend to teach light to children who believe they can see in total darkness.
The athletes have some good marketing behind them. If you want to master a sport, Just Do It©. If you want children to learn science, then just do it.
Do science. In school. Come up with ideas, test them, see what happens.
FAIL
Oh, by the way, Mr. President, the winner of the science fair is celebrated—and that’s part of the problem. Good science weaves a trail of failure. If you want to teach science, you need to teach children how to recognize and analyze failure. The best way to do that is to give them room to fail. Lots and lots of room.
I have a few children in class working on their 4th or 5th plant—they have the whole year to get it right. I have a few other children who have managed to grow carrots and peas and beans to fruition, because they figured out what they were doing wrong a little quicker than most of the class.
When prizes are given out for demonstrating how to kill seedlings or slugs, let me know, because my class is full of winners!
How many pounds of fat were added to our collective national buttock on Super Bowl Sunday as we sat around munching on Doritos, downing ale and soda, cheering on men whose words inspire our children to, um, well, do something?
Maybe the problem isn’t that we’re not celebrating science fairs. Maybe the problem is our addiction to celebration.
Pssst: here’s a secret. Kids like science, the real kind, about as much as they like anything else in school. Really. Come visit us some day, Mr. President. We got a room full of dead plants to celebrate. Then taste a carrot or two grown by the same kids who killed a few organisms along the way.
Sincerely,
Michael Doyle
Michael Doyle was very briefly a longshoreman, briefly a lab tech in a booze plant, more recently a pediatrician in the projects, now a high school science teacher. See his blog here
