Learning Science: Ep2 Transcript
Episode 2: “Learning in the Classroom”
NICK: Hello there, and welcome back to another episode of the Learning Science Podcast. I’m Nick.
HARRISON: And I’m Harrison.
N: And for this episode, we’re “kicking it old school,” as they say.
[BELL SOUND]
N: You know, I never had a bell at my high school, but I’ve seen so many TV shows and movies that have that exact sound effect in them that I understand in my bones that I’m supposed to pay attention when I hear that. It’s sort of baked into this universal consciousness that we all have, I think, about what it means to be a high school student.
H: I would have expected that pretty much every single American high school would have had a bell. I had a bell in high school, I had one in middle school, and every time I heard it it was like, either you have to leave class and start making your way to your next class, or it meant that your next class started. How did your school function without a bell? Because, for us, it was a way to make sure everyone was where they were supposed to be, on time.
N: Yeah, I don’t know. That makes sense that it would be that way, and I never really thought too hard about the fact that we didn’t have one. There’s just a trust that students are going to make it to their classroom on time, and if they don’t, the natural consequence is: well, you’re not in class. You didn’t make it. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.
H: I think that’s a very interesting point, because now that I think of it, in college, we don’t have a bell. And I just kind of realized that that was a thing. Which makes me wonder: do you think the bell represents something more? Like, something about treating school as not a place of learning, but a place to force people to… I’m not sure what’s the best way of phrasing this, but I guess it’s not really a place where you’re lucky to be but kind of a place where you’re forced to be.
[BELL SOUND]
N: Yeah, I’m sure that there’s something to that. You know, a lot of the way that I think we tend to conceptualize the idea of “the classroom” or “school” probably comes from popular culture and media and the movies that we see about high school students and the kinds of feelings that they have - it’s either, it seems to me, the Mean Girls version of what high school is, where it’s this cut-throat social game that you have to play, and there are people who are miserable and people who are kind of top-dog and all of those fun dynamics that play out, and then there’s the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or The Breakfast Club version, where it’s like, the students are here to sit and learn and the teachers give the information and everyone’s kin of miserable.
H: That’s a really good point that you bring up. And while we’re talking about the classroom experience, which is going to be the main topic of discussion for this episode, I think the classroom experience is something that a lot of students may or may not take for granted just because of the way that it’s presented in popular culture.
N: Totally, and there’s this idea that so much of the information that’s taught, students kind of accept that it’s information they’re probably never going to use, that they just have to know it. The most concrete, boiled down version of that that I’ve seen is that whole meme about “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”
[THE MITOCHONDRIA IS THE POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL]
N: This is a phrase that I think everyone who has been in a life science or biology class knows as the truth, but really, how useful is that knowledge to somebody who isn’t a biologist or a doctor or someone who works directly with mitochondria? So, like I talked about before, it’s this social, communal unconscious that we all have these ideas that are sort of baked into our subconscious that are so connected to school because of how universal that experience is.
H: But even though we tend to think of the classroom experience as a relatively ubiquitous one, there are so many clashing factors, subtle differences, and nuances to the process of learning in the classroom.
N: Right. It’s very important to address that high school graduation rates in the United States vary a lot depending on things like socioeconomic status, geographic location, whether you went to a public or private school, and also so many personal factors like how well you got along with your classmates and teachers, whether you had to work a part-time job in addition to school, what kind of extracurricular activities you had access to. The list goes on and on.
H: Right, and historically, there are even traceable differences in how subject material, especially in science, was taught in the classroom over time. So historians of science education tend to agree that there are two major shifts that have occurred in the American tradition of science learning in the classroom over the past few centuries.
N: So the first shift that we’re talking about happened over the course of a few decades, from around 1880 to 1920, depending on who you ask. This is when critics of the lecture/demonstration model of science learning became particularly passionate about reforming science education into the laboratory model.
H: So just to be clear, that isn’t to say that science lectures were completely done away with, or that they’re even frowned upon in academic circles. It’s just that the idea of just simply presenting information to passive students and hoping that they would memorize facts and recite them back the next day - it was really examined in a very critical way on a large scale.
N: That’s right, and as we’ll hear from our interviewee in just a couple of minutes - 100 years later, today, this is still a matter of ongoing debate among science teaching communities.
H: The second shift that we mentioned is actually a more recent one that some educational theorists think is still ongoing. This one just involves the acknowledgement that different students have different learning styles. So some students like to learn visually, some auditorily, some kinesthetically. And the principal idea that each student learns in a slightly different way has become a more common topic of discussion.
N: So today, in 2020, not only are we aware of differences in educational experience between different groups - socioeconomic groups, racial groups, geographic groups, religion - we know that even on the individual level, no two students learn science (or really anything) in the exact same way. So the big question for this episode is: how do we reconcile this enormous variety with all of that homogeneity that we were talking about earlier?
H: From what we found, a lot of the universality that we think of is linked to the concept of standardized testing.
N: There are all kinds of standardized tests out there, and I’m sure that if you’re listening to this podcast you have probably taken some form of a standardized test - which just, by definition, means that it’s standardized, so everybody has to learn the same material - in an ideal world, it’s like an equal playing field for everyone. Of course, in practice, it doesn’t work out that way, and we can talk about all of those differences. One of the most common standardized tests that people take are the AP exams. If you’re not familiar with AP tests - I think there are probably a couple dozen different AP tests at this point, in different subjects from chemistry to macroeconomics to music theory to a number of different foreign languages and history and things like that. Each exam is scored on a scale from 1 to 5, and whatever score you get on that test - some colleges will take that as college credit, and this program has been around since the 1950s, since 1956, and it’s grown an incredible amount. So just looking at some of these numbers… the number of participating high schools started off as just 104 and now it’s almost 23,000 high schools. In the 1950s, a little over 1000 American students took AP exams, and then last year, almost 3 million took them.
H: Wow.
N: With these numbers in mind, it’s kind of easy to see how tempting it might be for teachers of these classes to “teach for the test” as opposed to teaching for the sake of learning. And this is one of the pitfalls with standardized testing: it’s very easy to slip into the lecture/demonstration model that we were talking about where there’s just a list of facts that you need to memorize and then regurgitate the day that you take the exam. This is a delicate balance that teachers have to try and strike, because we know, from a lot of research, that the lecture/demonstration model is really not effective, and people don’t tend to retain that information really well.
H: The whole curriculum is not really focused on any sort of hands-on, or interactive, learning style. And while that does work for some students, for other students, it definitely isn’t going to work. Like we said earlier, some students like to learn visually, some students like to learn auditorily, some kinesthetically, etc. So I feel like having a very standardized curriculum for these exams and classes isn’t necessarily a good thing. But at the same time AP is technically supposed to be the equivalent of a college course, and it’s taught in high school. You know, it could be a great thing - it allows students to advance to higher levels more quickly. But at the same time, because you mentioned that so many schools are in this program now, and that’s putting so much pressure on the students to learn this, it’s kind of worrying that a lot of students feel like they’re forced to go to this advanced stage of the AP program where the curriculum is so regimented - it might not fit their best style of learning. While Nick and I are both intimately familiar with the AP program, we thought it would be a better idea to chat with someone who knows it even better than us: an AP science teacher.
N: So we sat down with Paraluman Stice-Durkin, a teacher of chemistry and AP environmental science from my alma mater, Punahou School, in Honolulu, Hawaii. So let’s take a listen.
[TRANSITION]
PARALUMEN: This is my 29th year as a high school teacher. I teach AP environmental science. I have taught physics and chemistry at various different levels, and the one thing that I’ve taught almost every year is chemistry: General chemistry, college prep, basic stuff, but actually kind of sweet - it’s really fun for me to do chemistry. APES was added on I think about ten years ago. That’s been a little more current, slightly older students, so I kind of like to do both. In the AP family, you guys are probably familiar with most of those courses which are very curriculum-generated and kind of dictated by the College Board, so AP feels… we try to make it personal. The way that we can do that is, we offer it for a full year, but it’s actually a semester. What that offers us is a little more leeway. Because we have almost an extra semester to play around, to help kids find meaning, to add in cool videos. And it gives kids who are dabbling in AP a chance to be successful. I like it for that. So we get a wide range, and I think that’s also a nice learning opportunity for students.
H: I was wondering what you thought of the whole idea that the College Board gets to determine a national curriculum that’s very standardized.
P: I don’t really like it, actually. I like when teachers who are delivering the curriculum have a little more control, but I think things are changing, boys. I think we see so many - even this year - how many schools are not taking SAT scores… I’m not sure if this is going to last.
H: On that topic I wanted to ask what you think about general testing processes. Like, do you prefer open-notes?
P: I don’t think the definition-type, or even multiple choice questions are very useful at all, except for understanding memorization which, to me, is not learning. So I definitely prefer giving more essay questions, more open-notes questions, and allowing students to show what they know by applying is really the only way. I always say, I don’t really want the answer - the answer itself. You know chemistry and stoichiometry do not go well with multiple choice, so it’s not all about that. It’s about everything else - another component of that is working through the more content-based multiple choice questions. If you really want to cheat, this is your hayday, right? One of the biggest controls of that is a time limit, as we’ve said. Communication can’t happen that quickly. If you’re really super clueless, you won’t get through it. We can’t waste a good pandemic on having no change. So basically, don’t waste this chance to really examine what we do and look at it as an opportunity to say “oh.” Like, with the SATs. “Do we really need the SATs?” Or if we survive this year and we say “No SATs in our admissions process,” maybe other schools will follow. The main thing that I would want educators and students to think about is this: how has the pandemic heightened our values in education - what we want out of education? Let’s really use this to look at how we see thinking and learning, and try to make some changes. And the best time to make changes is in a time like this, where everything’s a go. Let’s just go for it. Look how quickly we came up with a vaccine! All this time, all those other things… were they really useful? Or really necessary? That’s another perfect example. It makes you question some of the things that we’ve always done. And education is no exception to all of the ways that we’re questioning the things that we’ve been doing in our lives. And it gives us an interesting lens to look at some of our practices through, for sure.
N: Even ten years ago, if the coronavirus pandemic had happened, if it was COVID-09 instead of COVID-19...
H: Oh, goodness.
N: … I think it’s probably safe to say that a lot of the learning process in this country, and all over the world, may have come to a complete standstill. There are students who are going to be suffering because of this. But it’s still an incredible testament to how far technology and the Internet has advanced in the past decade that we’re able to even continue the learning process virtually at all.
H: Alright, Nick. I think that is going to be the end of this episode. But make sure you tune in for the next episode, where we will have Daniel and I talking about YouTube as a possible platform, in the future, for education. So we hope to see you all then.