Blog Review: My Public Education

If you're an educator of elementary school students, I recommend you ignore the rest of this blog until you click here and read the contents of My Public Education. It's just...wow.

Okay, if you took the time to read the site, you'll understand what transfixed me. I have so many thoughts and questions. I hope Sabine won't mind if I post them here. First, I must compliment the writing style, which is elegant, clear, and self-effacing. Sabine does not stint in her criticisms of herself or others around her, but she does so in such matter-of-fact prose that the reader just has to sit back and say, "Okay, I guess that's just how it is."

But at the same time, being a spoiled, suburban middle-aged white guy, places like the Calliope Projects anger and disturb me. We don't like to admit or think about the fact that such places exist in America, but they do. These are American kids and adults struggling with an environment of poverty, crime, and violence. They're not "somebody else's problem." I've got customers, neighbors, and peers who are worried about trying to get kids to study STEM subjects when we have teachers and students elsewhere struggling for basic literacy. And so the question becomes, "How does an educator, however, dedicated, teach in such an environment?" Sabine has provided some tantalizing glimpses into her style, as well as others', and I expect she'll share more.

The video hosted by Ice-T (a personal favorite of mine for his acting, not his rapping) was particularly compelling because two of the people shown in it were killed by the time it aired. So again one must wonder what it's like to be a student or a teacher in the midst of this:

While I did have firm rules and consequences which I enforced, to be quite honest, my students weren't phased by them at all. They had lived through much harsher situations out in the world like witnessing drug deals and shootings, so by giving them my textbook punishment, I was really instead rewarding them with the one-on-one attention which they craved.

Where does education factor into all that? Self-discipline? Love? Or, in my self-interested world, space exploration? A lot of folks in white America like to comfort ourselves with movies like Lean on Me or Stand and Deliver--tales of heroic teachers turning minority kids in tough neighborhoods into mathematicians or Harvard-level orators--but the reality is more like what Sabine experienced: teachers of varying skill sets making do with substandard equipment, textbooks, and sometimes educations. Never mind space exploration...or STEM...what the hell do you do to fix school systems where a lot of the graduates end up dead from street violence in a few years? Would bringing space-related materials to these places help? They couldn't hurt. Calliope is more or less within the area Marshall Space Flight Center serves for education purposes...or Johnson Space Center. Is it being served? Are we so rich a society that we can afford luxuries like space exploration and "at risk" schools and students? For how long?

Again: how do we fix this? I want a society that can produce rocket scientists wherever, whenever. But also doctors, teachers, and the other skills. One thing I'd like to hear from Sabine are student outcomes--good and bad. She's no doubt been scrupulous about changing names to protect the innocent and the guilty, and I'd like to know the results of her teaching time in "CP3." At the rate some of our suburban schools are declining, the lessons she learned there might (alas) become very relevant to the rest of the country.

Science Fiction as a Way to Teach Technical Writing

Huzzah! Apparently this blogging thing can be quite a racket if you know what you're doing. I just won a free t-shirt. Darlene, The Science Cheerleader, sent me the following comment:

Hey Bart!Thanks for the terrific posts. Would you kindly summarize one or two "science facts" folks can learn from a great science fiction book? You are, officially, the winner of the Science Cheerleader T-Shirt.

She was responding to my posting below, which suggested that science fiction was an excellent introduction and teaching mechanism for aspiring English majors to find a career in technical writing.

Once upon a time, I created (but didn’t give) a presentation entitled “Everything I Needed to Know About Technical Writing I Learned from Reading Science Fiction.” My basic argument is that:

The SF writer:

• Describes an unfamiliar world
• Creates challenges related to or brought about by real or imagined aspects of science
• Provides solutions to those challenges based on knowledge learned in the environment

The technical communicator:

• Seeks to help the user understand an unfamiliar technology and solve certain problems based on the communicator’s description of that technology

I used typical SF milieus--”Enormous Big Thing” stories, time travel stories, and SF detective stories–as means of teaching technical communicators mental approaches for dealing with completely new topics or technologies. I summed up with:

You might not ever encounter “enormous big things,” time travel, or crimes in space, BUT…

--You can face large mysteries

--You can face documents or processes that need to be placed in chronological order…or some other order that makes sense to the user at the time

--You may experience “crimes” related to human-technology interactions. So…

Read some science fiction today!

I suppose SF has taught me the most about the consequences and the potential impacts of natural phenomena and technology. Consider the following examples.

From Robert A. Heinlein's "Space Jockey":

The Commerce Commission has set the charges for the present three-stage lift from here to the Moon at thirty dollars a pound. Would direct service be cheaper?--a ship designed to blast off from Earth, make an airless landing on the Moon, return and make an atmosphere landing, would be so cluttered up with heavy special equipment used only once in the trip that it could not show a profit at a thousand dollars a pound! Imagine combining a ferry boat, a subway train, and an express elevator--

***
"Mass ratio...under power, the ship lost the weight of fuel burned. The thrust remained constant; the mass it pushed shrank. Getting back to proper position, course, and speed became a complicated problem in the calculus of ballistics."

***

Or these, from Arthur C. Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise:

He had seen that two-century-old film at least fifty times, and there were sections that we had examined frame by frame, until he knew every detail by heart. It was, after all, the most expensive movie footage ever shot, at least in peacetime. It had cost the State of Washington several million dollars a minute...

Vast, slow undulations, meters in amplitude, were sweeping along the entire width of the span, so that the roadway suspended between the piers twisted back and forth like an angry snake. The wind blowing down the canyon was sounding a note far too low for any human ears to detect, as it hit the natural frequency of the beautiful, doomed structure...

There stood the slim (too slim!) and graceful bridge, spanning the canyon. It bore no traffic, but a single car had been abandoned midway by its driver....

Suddenly, the supporting cables snapped, flailing upward like murderous steel whips. Twisting and turning, the roadway pitched into the river, fragments of the structure flying in all directions...In reality, it had lasted perhaps five seconds. At the end of that time, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had earned an inexpungable place in the history of engineering.

***

Once again he was back at the Tacoma Narrows Birdge, but this time in a world of fantasy. There was a ship that had to sail beneath it, on a perfectly regular schedule. Unfortunately, the mast was a meter too tall...

No problem. Just before it was due to arrive, a few heavy trucks would be sent racing across the bridge at intervals carefully calculated to match its resonant frequency. A gentle wave would sweep along the roadway from pier to pier, the crest timed to coincide with the arrival of the ship. And so the masthead would glide beneath, with whole centimeters to spare...

And from Frank Herbert's Dune:

[W]e must start on standy-by water facilities at once. No man is going to hold a club over my head!

"It's a rule of ecology," Kynes said, "that the young Master appears to understand quite well. The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of the system."

"Each bush, each weed you see out there in the erg," she said, "how do you suppose it lives when we leave it? Each is planted most tenderly in its own little pit. The pits are filled with smooth ovals of chromoplastic. Light turns them white...But when Old Father Sun departs, the chromoplastic reverts to transparency in the dark. It cools with extreme rapidity. The surface condenses moisture out of the air. That moisture trickles down to keep our plants alive."

And lastly, from Larry Niven's Ringworld:

He took the holo print and looked into it.

At first it made no sense at all, but he kept looking, waiting for it to resolve. There was a small, intensely white disk that might have been a sun, G0 or K9 or K8, with a shallow chord sliced off along a straight black edge. But the blazing object could not have been a sun. Partially behind it, against a space-black background, was a strip of sky blue. The blue strip was perfectly straight, sharp-edged, solid, and artificial, and wider than the lighted disc.

"Looks like a star with a hoop around it," said Louis. "What is it?"

***

Sometime during these past hours, Louis had found a way to visualize the scale of the Ringworld.

It involved a Mercator projection of the planet Earth--a common, rectangular, classroom wall map--but with the equator drawn to one-to-one scale...But one could draw forty such maps, edge to edge, across the width of the Ringworld.

***

In suchwise, gifted science fiction writers convey a "sense of wonder," either about the nature of the universe, alien artifacts, or humanity's own future creations. Through simple but elegant gifts of prose, writers like Heinlein, Clarke, and Niven entertain, but also teach.