HAVE YOU EVER MET THE STUDENT DESCRIBED?
verne Rockcastle

of Cornell University, a giant of a scholar and a good friend, penned some interesting prose in the Jan l975 issue of Science and Children. I've edited it just a smidgen ... but the meaning is intact.

the non-investigation
Readers of S&C might be interested in a letter that I recently sent to an all-too-typical student. He seemed to resent my request that he engage in some honest-to-gosh investigations on his own -- investigations that he considered beneath his dignity, but which I suspected he had never made, and didn't know what interactions and outcomes were involved -- and he also resented my request that his reports of those investigations be thorough & written in as near perfect style and completeness as possible.

He wanted to do a superficial job, a superficial report. I wrote him a letter, and I got a really good product from him. A product of which he was proud, and one that I could use as evidence for assessing his ability.

to a student this is just a note reaction to our chat this afternoon. First, I am grateful for your having waited to share your thoughts with me ... someone whose views are so divergent from your own ...

now let me share a few more comments about my own position .. to begin, let me say ... I differ from the position of many students on many things ... but after teaching 25 years in a variety of settings ... I have developed the conviction that people often give the impression of knowing more than they really do ... and try to BS their way thru life ...

perhaps this is because thruout the educational system something less than completeness or one's best has been accepted as satisfactory.

I am sick and tired of saying, "yes, that'll do," when in fact, it WON'T do. I am tired of having an auto mechanic work on my car and not fixing the 'bug' he was paid to exterminate.

I am tired of having something I purchased failed to work because someone was careless with his output.

I am tired of having to read trashy articles in journals because the author didnÕt think before he wrote.

In short ...

I am fed up with shoddy thinking, workmanship, and performance. What can I do about this state of affairs?

To begin, I cannot let my students cheat on time ... their most valuable commodity that can be used to improve themselves.

I can help them by sharing some of the little things I have stumbled upon during the years ... little discoveries and little wonders and little hypotheses.

In sharing, perhaps I can persuade some people to look a little more closely to question a little more ...

To find a lot in a little and thus make teaching and living more exciting more interesting and more efficient.

Then maybe they will not have to stumble as much as I did ... altho some stumbling is enjoyable because it leads to learning ... and an error-free life is boring: nothing dared, nothing failed, nothing learned.

Maybe I can promote genuine scientific investigating at the level of the student so that he can somehow grasp the thrill of genuine discovery. Very little of what we learned in science was learned thru our own discovery. It was simply told to us. And we ... simply believe it. We never questioned "these facts" -- nor wondered about the processes by which they were discovered.

With the passage of time I have grown to appreciate what there is to know in life. There have been times when I had to really dig into and examine something until it became part and parcel of my intellectual fabric. Of course, I have forgotten a lot of things. I am still woefully ignorant ... in so many areas of science. But at least I know how to find out some things. I have learned to scrape, wrestle with ideas and dig for new ideas. How can you ever teach science if you've never really wrestled with a problem and felt confused and angry that you can't find the answer?

Not because you are going to be graded ... but simply because you WANT to know ... and be a little more aware of some tiny facet of life on earth.

Amid all the mediocrity that surrounds me, there is hope for perfection in a fewthings. Can I point out these to students and hope they come up with a perfect foto or paragraph or lesson or something ? Just the processes of achieving perfection ... no matter how tiny ... should be exciting for them, and give them confidence they can do other things in their life to the best of their abilities.

I hate to think that some of my students are the ones in the future who will write the book filled with errors ... not fix the car properly ... mess up the order at the department store ... because they never knew how to do something well ... or that they had the ability to do so.

And certainly I don't want them teaching science in a shoddy manner because they think it doesn't matter. It does. 6/16f/95