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The reluctance of women to enter STEM fields seems to have deep roots — which often don’t disappear even in the face of success. One of Dr. Klawe’s favorite topics is what she calls The Imposter Syndrome. “Even women who get into MIT, and major in engineering,” she says, “often continue to second guess themselves, worrying that success was a mistake. So the first time they get a B on an exam, they switch to a major in the humanities.  Yet males can get all C’s and think they’re doing great. It’s just normal for males to overestimate their success and for women to worry that they don’t deserve to be where they are. That insecurity often haunts them into their professional lives.”

The traditional lecture format is the not the best method for teaching science. Again to draw an analogy with physical education, lectures are of limited use when the subject being taught is an activity.

The competitive model for science education, and for education in general, is poor training for how work is actually accomplished. Corporations compete, athletes compete, politicians compete, but the vast majority of working people have to cooperate if they want to get anything done.

Competitive grading systems discourage recreational interest. This is true in school athletic programs and it is also true for science classes. Just as students who get picked last for sports teams conclude athletics is not for them, students who fail to make the cut in science classes, conclude that they lack the "science gene," and should not even try to understand the subject.

Using a fast-pulsing laser, physicists have recorded the first moments of electrical resistance, the friction that generates heat as electricity travels through circuits.

Physicists knew electrical resistance didn’t kick in the moment a voltage was applied. Electrons experience some freedom before slowing to a crawl and scattering. What wasn’t certain was how quickly they make that transition (illustrated in the animation above, with electrons in blue, “electron holes” left by departing electrons in red, and voltage signified by the green arrow).

I explained that we were building the model we’d be using to predict the behaviour of circuits for the  next two years, and that on tests, I would be evaluating whether they used their model in a well-reasoned way (“You’re going to grade us based on what we say??”  They were astounded).  I cautioned them against rejecting things too quickly, since they would need as much structure as they could get. 

After each presentation, we discuss it and voted on it.  For voting, they used the feedback flashcards I’d made in September.  Green means accept; red means reject; yellow means “I have a question or want something clarified”. 

I never let my students forget that pairing of difficulty with results, because I never forget it. I let them know they are engaged in a sacred task that connects them to millennia of human effort encoded in their genes. If they can fight their way to the truth, the truth will make them free, just as it did for me that day in high school physics.

To engage with the world in search of any kind of Truth is an expression of the search for excellence. That, by its very nature, is desperately difficult. There will always be a price to be paid in time, sweat and tears. We should never sugarcoat that reality.

We want to teach students more than just how to get jobs, we also want to teach them how to live with depth and for purposes that stretch beyond their own immediate interests. We should never forget that connection. If we do, we are in danger of losing more than just the next generation of science majors.

Traditionally, science in the United States has been taught in isolated disciplines such as chemistry, biology and physics without clear connections being made between the subjects. The 8+1 effort encourages K-12 teachers to use the eight science concepts to build understanding within and between their courses as students advance through the grades.

Today's frontiers in science often occur at these disciplinary edges. Aided by the explosion in technology and scientific discoveries, new fields are arising that were hardly imagined a generation ago such as synthetic biology, digital organisms and genomics.