Worth reading

Prof. Sherry Turkle’s article, “A Passion for Objects: How science is fueled by an attachment to things”, from the May 30, 2008, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I’m not a Chronicle subscriber, but I do get the weekly Review Newsletter, which gives me a few days to read articles before they get disappeared.

From Prof. Turkle’s article:

Beyond seeking a way to make any object transparent, young people across generations extol the pleasure of materials, of texture, of what one might call the resistance of the “real.” In the early 1990s, the computer scientist Timothy Bickmore’s experiments with lasers, “passing the laser through every substance I could think of (Vaseline on slowly rotating glass was one of the best),” recall the physical exuberance of Richard Feynman’s candy-wrapped light bulbs of a half-century before. For Selby Cull in 2006, geology becomes real through her childhood experience of baking a chocolate meringue: “Basic ingredients heated, separated, and cooled equals planet. To add an atmospheric glaze, add gases from volcanoes and volatile liquids from comets and wait until they react. Then shock them all with bolts of lightning and stand back. Voilà. Organic compounds. How to bake a planet.” Cull’s joyful comments describe the moment of scientific exultation, the famed “Eureka” moment of raw delight.

Science is fueled by passion, a passion that often attaches to the world of objects much as the artist attaches to his paints, the poet to his or her words. Putting children in a rich object world is essential to giving science a chance. Children will make intimate connections, connections they need to construct on their own. At a time when science education is in crisis, giving science its best chance means guiding children to objects they can love.

At present, there is some evidence that we discourage object passions. Parents and teachers are implicitly putting down both science and scientists when they use phrases such as “boys and their toys,” a devaluing commonplace. It discourages both young men and women from expressing their object enthusiasms until they can shape them into polite forms. One of the things that discourages adults from valuing children’s object passions is fear that children will become trapped in objects, that they will come to prefer the company of objects to the company of other children. Indeed, when the world of people is too frightening, children may retreat into the safety of what can be predicted and controlled. This clear vocation should not give objects a bad name. We should ally ourselves with what objects offer: They can make children feel safe, valuable, and part of something larger than themselves.

The pleasures of the scientist are not so different from those of historians who inhabit other times and ways. What scientist and historian have in common is an experience that respects immersion rather than curricular pace. Their shared experience has little in common with lesson plans, accelerated drill and practice, or rapid-fire multiple simulations.

Read the rest here. Prof. Turkle teaches the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Chronicle piece is excerpted from Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, which she edited and which was published this month by MIT Press.

(And sadly, as a nonsubscriber, one new article this week I can’t get for free is this: “Introductory Science Moves Beyond ‘Rocks for Jocks’: James S. Trefil, a professor of physics at George Mason U. [and whom you may know and like very much, as we do, as an author], says science classes for nonmajors should describe the big concepts across disciplines.”  Sounds good.)