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Handcuffs on science education

June 3, 2006

Every year, physics teacher David Lapp brings his Korean War era M-1 carbine to school, fires a shot into a block of wood and instructs his students to calculate the velocity of the bullet.

It is a popular experiment at Mill Valley’s Tamalpais High School, where students are exposed to several unique stunts that Lapp performs in his five classes every year to illustrate inertia, velocity and other complex formulae…
- SFGate.com: Physics teacher under fire for gun experiment

We’ll get back to that example in a minute.  It’s part of a larger picture.

This week, two very different bloggers independently wrote about the safety-nanny gutting of science education.

One is a self-described liberal ‘moonbat’, a biology professor at a Northern university.  The other is ex-military, a common-sense libertarian who works in heavy industry in the South, keeping high voltages and enormous machines on the job.  So these two guys don’t exactly run in the same circles.  Have a look at the target they both hit…

Start with a Wired magazine article, Don’t try this at home, about a couple of mail-order DIY science suppliers in New Mexico who found themselves staring down the assault rifles of a SWAT team and a federal investigation.  Under the guise of preventing terrorism, it is increasingly a crime to do any dangerous science on your own.  Rocket hobbyists and firework enthusiasts, take note.

For your reading entertainment…

It’s worth the tour, especially if you are a schoolteacher or administrator.  Just remember, not everything that looks dangerous, is.  And not everything that looks safe, is.  How many causes of teen death are traceable to boredom?  Sometimes danger, like safety, is subtle and reaches beyond the immediate situation.

I’ve read various science-fiction dystopias about a perfectly safe society, all of them claustrophobic and suffocating.  Our brains are at the business end of a billion years of risk-driven evolution.  Can we be completely awake in the absence of all risk?

Updates:


I have been thinking some more about the physics teacher who got in trouble with his annual rifle-shot experiment.  In addition to the physics itself, that lesson folded in several more:

  • Science is real, not just something in books

  • Even quite extreme, invisible phemonena can be analyzed, understood, and predicted scientifically
  • Math is one of the most important tools in the scientific box – some have even said ‘math is science
  • Safety should be conceived in the larger context of the skill and intent of the user, not only the observance of prophylactic rules
  • Corollary to above lesson: intent is a function of character, which can’t be legislated.  Skill is a function of instruction, study, and practice, and confers the freedom to achieve what would be impossible without it.

Another thought: if you have ever worked with teens, you know how hard it is to get them to focus.  If the experiment were constructed so that a baseball hits a bowling ball, many of the students’ attention will be on other things.  But I guarantee that every students’ attention in that room was on. the. experiment.  The’d talk about it later, and think about it.  It’s a priceless educational effect.

Categories: Education
  1. June 5, 2006 at 10:45 | #1

    Guns, the buzz word of the Ultra Liberals. Guns are evil, all people are good.

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