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The Bell Jar
- University Press of New England
- Chapter
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p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p thebelljar Once, years ago, when I was teaching a section in my human biology course on what is knowable and whether absolute knowledge is possible, I made reference to Einstein, who early on met with formidable skepticism about his theory of relativity. Then I cross-referenced Galileo, who suffered drastic consequences for an idea (the earth revolves around the sun) that directly contradicted the accepted wisdom of the time (that the earth was the center of the solar system). My students, for the most part, were familiar with the names Einstein and Galileo, but around these points of light the area methodologies 160 p m e t h o d o l o g i e s of darkness was vast, as evidenced by the hand that went up with the following comment/question: “I don’t understand. Why didn’t Einstein and Galileo just get together and join forces to fight the people who were against them?” If anything is missing from undergraduate science teaching, it is a historical context. Science is rife with concepts, processes, and (unpronounceable) terminology that have, over the years, driven masses of potential science majors to the warmer and more navigable waters of the college of education. Let’s face it, science has its own language and must have its own language, for two reasons: one, it describes very specific, complex, and esoteric processes; and two, science, being a global pursuit, benefits from a vocabulary that transcends international boundaries. (Felis domesticus is Felis domesticus whether the kitty cat is romping about a front yard in Passaic, New Jersey, or reclining on a carpet in the Casbah.) But it is also fair to say that one can get hung up on the vocabulary , the language, of science, to the point where the path of least resistance is to abandon it, embracing, instead, the staid predictability of a business curriculum, where everything has a welcome habit of adding up. This is where history comes in. Language only works well when it is, somehow, tied together. When we speak, we don’t simply emit random words—we line them up in meaningful sentences. And this is exactly the problem with traditional approaches to science teaching: students are tasked with memorizing batteries of disjointed terms and concepts that don’t seem to bear upon one another. A little history would provide a narrative that would have some impact and, like any good story, make sense. Let’s talk about the cell. Students in beginning biology courses are normally given a list of structures and functions—nucleus: control center; ribosomes: make rna; Golgi apparatus: packages proteins, etc. It is plain that a professor’s simply enumerating such a list [3.236.111.234] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:41 GMT) The Bell Jar p 161 is not really teaching, but dictation. And the student’s ability to memorize the list and reproduce it when prompted by a test is not really learning, but, with apologies to Pavlov, mental salivation. Perhaps this is one reason why the concept of evolution is a recurring hot potato in American schools. When stated as a factoid (“Humans are descended from lower orders of animals,” or something similar) without preamble or some discussion of how the concept, well, evolved over time, I can see where it might strike some students as offensive or wrong-headed, because it would seem to turn everything they know about “Creation” on its noggin. But what if natural selection—the most well established and widely supported theory of evolution—were taught as part of a continuum of historical thought by famous personalities on how living things came to be and how they have changed over time? Then the conversation might begin with Aristotle, who believed—rightly, most scientists now concur—that all life originated in the sea. From there the individuals who dealt with evolution (before the term even existed) can be lined up like a string of pearls, detailing a truly human grasping after the truth of the matter. When Darwin is presented to students at first blush as the “father of evolution” or some other such simplification, this does justice to neither Darwin nor the concept at stake. The problem is that, by tossing Darwin out like a live grenade, it does two harms: it labels a man a prophet, and it disrespects science as a process, frequently slow...