|
||||||||
|
An Afternoon in the Lab Sparks Young Scientist
By Robin Lucas "Someday it may happen," I read aloud, "Someday man may go to the moon!" My fourth-grade class at Mabscott Elementary School erupted with laughter. It was 1981—12 years after Neil Armstrong stepped out of Apollo 11 to make a giant leap for mankind. My classmates and I had grown up watching images of spacesuit-clad astronauts frolicking on the eerie lunar surface. We couldn't imagine a time when people actually doubted the feasibility of space travel. Yet there it was in black and white. Even as I snickered, I felt let down. For the first time, I realized that my science textbook, whose boldfaced words and definitions I had dutifully committed to memory, was, in fact, a relic. My feelings about science textbooks—and science classes in general—steadily worsened in the years that followed. Everything seemed ridiculously out of date, dull, and strangely disconnected from my own experiences. I remember sitting in class at my junior high school nearly comatose, reciting that standard biology catechism: "kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species." Who cares? I wondered. School DazeI still wonder about that today. So a few months ago when 12-year-old Emily complained to me about her boring science class at school, I knew exactly where she was coming from. Emily's father had asked her to spend just one afternoon in a biology lab at Harvard Medical School, hoping to rekindle her interest in science.At the beginning of her visit, she seemed hesitant, but the members of my lab were determined to show her just how exciting science could be. We taught her to pipette. We had her perform simple experiments. We showed her bacteria on agar plates and under the microscope. We explained our projects. Slowly, I noticed her eyes brighten. Looking through the microscope, she seemed genuinely interested in the bacteria that were swimming and tumbling below. This was no textbook—these were real live organisms. We told her about our experiments, some of which were happening right before her eyes. She started asking questions about our work—good ones. I began to see why Emily's dad wanted to ensure that she stay interested in science. She had a real knack for it. As I watched her grow more and more engrossed in spite of herself, it occurred to me that my own interest in science originated with just these types of experiences. Living ScienceI'll never forget the day that my high school anatomy teacher, Mrs. Newcomb, arranged for our class to visit a gross anatomy lab at a nearby medical school. Looking at pictures of human organs in a textbook could never compare to actually holding a brain, examining the blackened lungs of a smoker who died of cancer, or unraveling the seemingly endless coils of intestines in a human body.I also remember dozens of demonstrations performed by my eminently patient physics teacher, Mr. Doman. "If you decrease pressure while keeping temperature constant, you can get water to boil!" he told us. "I don't believe it," I retorted. He reminded me of the formulas in our textbook that proved what he was saying. I remained skeptical. It was only when he placed water in a vacuum and made it boil that I finally believed. It must have been exasperating for him, but he never tired of proving these basic truths to me. Sadly, such experiences in the classroom were all too few. Most of the time, "learning science" was just an endless cycle of memorizing and regurgitating a mass of irrelevant trivia. Little or no thought was required, and we were expected to accept everything as absolute truth without doing any experiments ourselves. Even in lab courses, there always seemed to be a "correct" answer that everyone was supposed to arrive at while doing lame, so-called experiments. Only when I came to graduate school did I realize that research could be exciting and fun. Suddenly, science became a series of puzzles that could be solved by conducting well-planned experiments and carefully recording and analyzing their outcomes. There were no answers in the back of the book to compare my conclusions with. I was on my own. As I struggled to design appropriate experiments and think critically about my findings, I wondered how I had gotten all the way to graduate school without learning how to think like a scientist. I can't really blame my teachers. As the daughter of a public school teacher, I know they work too hard for too little pay with classes that are much too large. Certainly, there are innovative techniques for teaching children science. But in a class like my mother's where behavioral problems make group activities impossible and more than one fourth of the students must take Ritalin just to sit down and be quiet, such methods seem impractical. More Barriers to LearningFurthermore, many teachers have no special training in science and feel insecure when venturing beyond the confines of their trusted textbooks. Besides, most standardized tests reward memorization over creative thought and critical analysis and, unfortunately, teachers are often "graded" according to their students' test scores. Thus, to teach science as it really deserves to be taught, the public education system would have to undergo drastic reforms.Meanwhile, bright and talented students like Emily get turned off to science ... perhaps forever. Who knows if a Mr. Doman or a Mrs. Newcomb will change their minds? Not long after Emily's visit, I ran into her dad who was pleased to tell me that his daughter actually seemed interested in a science article she'd read in the morning newspaper. He cautiously concluded that the few hours she'd spent with our lab members had done some good. That same day I received an e-mail message from Emily herself. She wrote that her perspective on science had changed and that she was "now more open to different possibilities concerning work in the field." I hope this new perspective will help her enjoy science in spite of her boring classes at school. After all, science needs all the Emilys it can get. —Robin Lucas is an HMS graduate student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences microbiology program. |
