The Three-Legged Woman and Other Excursions in Teaching

Please Hold the Morphine

183 That’s when I learned how hard Jeff had really worked. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t have my own tape recorder, but there’s one in my dad’s old truck out in the woods. So at night I go out there, start it up, and sit and listen to the tapes.” The image of Jeff huddled in a pickup, deep in the dark and snow of the Maine woods, listening to my voice, totally unmanned me. If not for the tapes, I might never have known how seriously Jeff took his education. They also allowed me to touch this earnest student in a way my written comments never could. For his part, Jeff’s final report was a bang-up job and he got his B minus for the course. That was fifteen years ago. I’m still doing the tapes, but the service they provide my students pales against the insights they occasionally yield into how truly good-hearted and deserving many of these people are. In a profession that can too easily become routine, that’s an idea that should be cast in bronze, or at least recorded on cassette. o p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p pleaseholdthemorphine A colleague of mine from a neighboring college once paid me a visit for the sole purpose of expressing his despondency over his inability to teach his students the metric system. “I can’t do it anymore,” he lamented. “I can’t even bring the words, ‘there are ten millimeters in a centimeter,’ to my lips.” But he stopped short of crying. He had come to the right person. I knew exactly what he was talking about. In the sciences, there are some concepts so fundamental that they simply cannot be dispensed with or glossed 184 p m e t h o d o l o g i e s over, as they are key to a general and correct understanding of the subject as a whole. But there is also tremendous frustration in teaching such simple concepts. The metric system is one of these. It was developed by Gabriel Mouton, abbot of St. Paul’s, Lyon, France, in 1670. Do the foreign origins of this system have anything to do with American resistance to it? Is it any comfort that we are in the company of Myanmar and a few other backwaters that have not adopted it? Because the metric system is essential to scientific measurements , it must not only be introduced early on, in the primary grades, but thereafter drummed in repeatedly, until its units are as familiar as inches and miles. The problem is that the United States has only grudgingly moved toward the use of this system, even in the sciences, if one can believe such a thing. The result of this dual system (English and metric) can be catastrophic (and embarrassing). In 1999 nasa’s $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter was lost because the manufacturer (Lockheed) had used English measurements but nasa transmitted the commands in metric units. The spacecraft is now believed to be orbiting the sun, recording, perhaps, the only weather data possible: hot, very hot. While elementary school children accept the metric system at face value—the way they accept everything that is new to them —college students who have not been exposed to it, or who have forgotten the little they may have been taught in the early grades, are a different story. There seems to be a defensive wall against learning it, or an assumption that it is astoundingly complicated and therefore hopeless. In my own course, I try to treat the metric system as a language, taking pains to use it in common discourse. When a student is looking at a specimen through a microscope, I ask, “How many micrometers long do you think it is?” When we go outside to set up quadrants in a grassy field for plant population studies, I tell them, “Be sure your quadrants are five meters on a side.” And yet I always have the sneaking feeling that they are regarding me as a pretender, or a character Please Hold the Morphine p 185 from Star Trek announcing the distance to a Klingon warship. For my part, I sense that they are surreptitiously converting meters to feet, just to hedge their bets. “There are ten millimeters in...