WMS Science Teachers

Students in inquiry often think its “cheating” to go look online for information, or they think I want them to completely disregard information they look up. I don’t think they need to go look up information, but I’m happy if they do. Really, I just want them to treat ideas they read online no differently than they do ideas they hear from class. Those ideas are subject to our scrutiny, to our questioning; and we should concern ourselves with whether those ideas help us to build an explanation, or whether those ideas are merely providing scientific jargon.

The lecture backlash signals an evolving vision of college as participatory exercise. Gone are the days when the professor could recite a textbook in class. The watchword of today is “active learning.” Students are working experiments, solving problems, answering questions — or at least registering an opinion on an interactive “smartboard” with an electronic clicker.

A new biology course had 22 freshmen fan out across campus last fall for dirt samples, from which each student culled a new and heretofore unknown virus. Now, the class has picked one virus for genetic mapping.

Not all the ideas are new. At the University of Maryland College Park, engineering professors eliminated introductory lecture courses in 1991. Since then, students have spent the crucial first year engaged in actual engineering, building swing sets, helicopters and hovercrafts.

The lecture backlash signals an evolving vision of college as participatory exercise. Gone are the days when the professor could recite a textbook in class. The watchword of today is “active learning.” Students are working experiments, solving problems, answering questions — or at least registering an opinion on an interactive “smartboard” with an electronic clicker.

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.