Tales from the Inner Ring

Emotionally-Disturbed Science

         The great thing I found about a block in the E.D. class, for science, was that the once the basic lesson was done, the students could still act like kids and ask some great questions, even if they were a little off the lesson-plan topic.  Force = mass times acceleration.  Easy enough:  would you rather get hit by your little brother's Big Wheel, or by a bus (assuming the same speed.)?  Math as the language of science.  How big a toaster will blow a fuse?  How come people can stand up buy Lego men can't?  How does the CIA encrypt data?  Why were the Wind Talkers the only people whose code wasn't broke in WWII . . . .
           We even skipped around and ahead in the book.  No real behavior problems, just a little friction to smooth over.
         Then one student:  "Mr. S, do you believe what's in that book.
         "Sure.  Why not?  It's science"
         "But do you believe it?"
         "How can a math sentence lie?"
         I don't know.  But I can't trust the book because it was written by The Man.
          
         I wish these kids could get over this mentality.  It's not like we're running a chocolate factory and trying to squeeze the most work out of them to get the most for ourselves. . . . The problem is that we're teaching without a contract.  Not a teacher-union contract, but a Social Contract.  OK, we're not the first teachers to do so; in the 30s schools trained kids for jobs which didn't exist also.  But this time we created the lack of opportunities ourselves, by exporting the opportunities we [baby boomers and before] enjoyed.  The kids don't see much out there, and if they know they're not headed for the top 10%, it's easy for them to loose faith in what we're doing.  Unless we can somehow convince them that what we're trying to do is make them stronger, that we can't guarantee them a good life, but we can guarantee them a nasty, brutish, and sometimes short existence if they drop out . . .