Music to My Ears

9/23/07 - 9/29-07
by C. Zaitz

I love music. I’ve studied it, I listen to it, and I play it. I started piano lessons when I was five and after years of practice I can make music that sounds good to my ears. But the sweetest sound I’ve heard in a long time came from a human voice, and it made this music, “My daughter never liked science before, but now she likes it.” This was from a mom I met at Parent’s Night in the girl’s school where I’m teaching.

I’m still flying from hearing those words. There’s nothing that makes an educator feel better about the difficulty of teaching many classes every day, the long hours of correcting labs, grading tests, and crafting lessons, than to hear that they made a difference. It makes me very happy when young teen-aged girls, just entering puberty, are still excited about science. When I hear that the older girls in their later teens are still curious and interested, it makes me feel even better. We often lose girls in science at that age, and I think one reason is that they don’t know why it’s important. But I tell them why. It teaches them how to think. And that takes practice.

The first time you ice skate can be frustrating, as can your first karate lesson, or your first attempt at driving a stick shift. They all require repetitive practice. So does scientific thinking, but many of us don’t naturally tend toward it. We have to practice our thinking, our language, and our ability to reason. We all have habits, but to make science a habit requires the same kind of practice that cooking or playing football does.

So how can we practice scientific thinking? By reading a lot. Scientific questions come from observations and prior knowledge, gathered by humans since they first started painting bison hunts on cave walls. We have to know stuff to ask questions about it. Books and periodicals are important, but we get a lot of information from on-line sources. On-line science news can be convenient, but we run the same risk there that we run by getting our news from TV, and that is getting information from biased or non-reputable sources. Which leads me to the subject of critical thinking.

We should think critically about what we read and hear and see. Critical thinking doesn’t mean to “criticize,” it means to be discerning and evaluate the information we get. If we start with reputable sources, perhaps do a little research before we read, we can avoid wasting our time reading information that is not based in science, meaning based on facts or testable information.

Believing what someone tells us just because they speak the loudest isn’t using sound judgment, and certainly hasn’t done our nation much good in recent history. We can all think for ourselves, and yet sometime we choose not to. Sometimes we buy into other people’s ideas because they sound good to us or fit in with our belief system. I am as guilty of it as anyone, but I know what it takes to think critically and to avoid our personal biases and prejudices: practice, practice, practice. And that’s how you can get to Carnegie Hall, or to Mars!

Until next week, my friends, enjoy the view.