Ah, the woes of technical difficulties! I am bursting with ideas here and, after facing computer obstacles and idea obstacles, I'm finally getting to posting on this blog. I wanted to start out by marking down some impressions I had from the very first day. One this first day the participants discussed teaching methods use in their classrooms and the kinds of interactions supported therein. Sam, who was participating in the discussion, shared her experience teaching modern physics at the University of Colorado (this was part of a very rich discussion I plan to talk about in another post). With Sam's mention of modern physics, the teachers meandered down a tangent that has proved to be a recurring theme this week: physics content knowledge insecurity.
In this episode the teachers talk about parents and students asking questions about topics in abstract and modern physics. The teachers seem uncomfortable being asked questions that they do no necessarily have answers to. They identify as teachers not physicists, and as a result take on a very negative view towards interacting with pop-science topics.
Jim - Was it, um, Richard Feynman... he was giving a lecture series that year. And this is a really loose memory out of it
Don - You say Feynman?
Jim - Feynman yeah. And some woman in the audiance asked him well, Feynman, how can you, I know this is all great stuff for scientists but how would you, how could you, explain this to, um, quantum physics to the general public so that we can understand it. And he said "ma'am no one understands quantum mechanics."
Tim - I'm not going to explain quantum mechanics to... At parent night I've always got some parent that is an engineer saying "what do you think about this?" I really don't, you know? Dark energy? I don't think about that, I've read about it, its interesting. And string theory. I don't teach that. And I'm not a physicists, I'm a teacher. Planetary geology and I'm a very good carpenter.
Jim - Teach the student the tools so they can go out and investigate it.
Don - Yeah the Discovery Channel is one of my biggest enemys. Because, well, there's always some student coming in talking about some type of... oh guess what I saw on the... they come to me as if I know the answer for it. And I look at... I say I've no idea what, translational, you know, synergy is... Um ok?
Jim - People on the Discover Channel have a lot more training and have studied this a lot deeper than I ever had...
Don - And then they look at me like "you don't know this?" I don't watch television.
This is really intriguing, Jessica. I was thinking yesterday about what, if any, separation there is between 'teacher' and 'classroom researcher.' When Rachel gave her talk in the afternoon and asked the teachers to notice which conceptual metaphors the students were using in the "leaves in the street" episode, I felt like in some small way we were asking the teachers to "think like us." (I don't mean that sentence to have any negative undertones or connotations - I actually feel good about asking them to do this at the moment.) And I wondered what role the teachers thought we were asking them to take on.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you feel that there is some resistance on the teachers' part to "think like physicists" or "act like physicists" or "know the stuff that physicists do." I wonder how teachers feel if/when they perceive us to be asking them to "think like physics education researchers."
Hi Jessica! This is a really fascinating clip. Thanks for sharing it! I was wondering if you could elaborate on what in the video of the teacher's dialogue led you to feel that the teachers were sharing "anxiety" of being asked about technical questions of modern physics.
ReplyDeleteWhen I watched this, I kind of got a sort of different impression, especially from Jim's comment about how they "teach students the tools so they can go investigate it" and "no one understands quantum mechanics." I thought it seemed like they (Jim & Tim) were pretty comfortable with their knowledge of Discovery Channel string theory type stuff, especially when Jim adds: "People on the Discover Channel have a lot more training and have studied this a lot deeper than I ever had. . . if they can't come up with an answer. . ." I saw Tim's chuckling in the end as a sign that he thinks its funny that his students are surprised he can't just answer their questions about this stuff. . . .
What do you think?
Like Virginia, I also did not see "anxiety" in this clip. All three of them are laughing throughout the discussion, and I have a sense that they are comfortable with (perhaps even proud of?) their lack of knowledge of esoteric physics content. They are comfortable and confident in their identity and ability as *teachers*, and find it funny that students and parents would expect them to have knowledge that think belongs to *physicists*.
ReplyDeleteIt feels like the kind of conversation I can imagine myself having about how someone might expect me to understand how a car engine works or how to do my taxes because I have a PhD in physics. I don't understand these things, but I don't feel any anxiety about it, because I know that there's no reason I should and that there are other things I do understand. And I find it funny sometimes when people misinterpret my job so badly.
On the other hand, this is a group of men, and men often express anxiety differently than women. So I could imagine making an argument that they actually are feeling a lot of anxiety and are covering it up by laughing. I don't actually believe this, but I think you could make an argument.
This whole discussion points to a broader issue that there are a lot of ways to interpret a piece of video, and one needs to be very cautious about doing so. Saying someone is feeling anxiety is an interpretation, and while we can definitely make interpretations in research, we need to (eventually) back them up with strong arguments. But there's nothing wrong with throwing out interpretations at this early stage of the research, and seeing how they land with other people. That's what the blog is for!
When I was studying stellar spectroscopy, people would often want to talk to me about whether Mars was up in the night sky for viewing or if I did work with astrology. I felt, just like Sam described, amused (I think this is a great word for what the teachers were displaying) that my work was so misunderstood. I wonder if this discussion was more an agreement of how misunderstood a physics teacher's position and job can be as well. It seemed like all the teachers shared a common experience where parents or students assumed that the teacher knew all of physics because he taught it. I wonder where this disconnect comes from and why it exists? Is it because physics teachers in the past have pretended to understand everything? :)
ReplyDeleteBeing completely honest, as a teacher, I have experienced these same situations and I feel somehow inadequate when I do not know to what phenomenon the student is referring, even though I know there is no way I could know all of physics. I don't ever lie about it, but I feel like the surface level information out there is something that I should try to have as a teacher, and yet I am always surprised by what my students tell me! I feel like students will always hear more than we can keep up with - and that Virginia's pick of Jim's comment above is so true! He is right on that our job description is not to know everything, but to give them the tools so they can go learn more than we ever did.
Along another line, I think that the discovery channel, although awesome, can be hugely distracting and doesn't paint an accurate picture of what scientists do day to day. Is it unfair to show amazing pictures of the Orion Nebula, and describe how scientists "study" it while listening to powerful sounding music and using huge generalizations? Does this give students a false sense of what research is like? Where are the pictures of the cinder blocks, hole-in-the-wall offices with post-docs crunching away at their computers, writing grants, papers, and analyzing data quietly? (Of course, there is bound to be a poster taped to the wall of the Orion Nebula somewhere!) Sometimes I feel like there should be a bit more "Discovery Channel" excitement in our classes, and a bit more "reality" in the discovery channel. :)
OK, Abby's post reminds me of another thing that is important in these conversations when people misinterpret my work and make assumptions about what I know, which is the *status* of the kind of thing they think I do compared to the status of the kind of thing I actually do. My reaction when someone expects me to know string theory is not the same as my reaction when someone expects me to know astrology. In both cases I am "amused" by the discrepancy between their ideas about my job and the reality, but in the first case I think they've overestimated my abilities and in the second case I think they've underestimated my abilities. I have to admit that I feel a bit superior when explaining why I don't know anything about astrology. While I don't feel "anxiety" about not knowing string theory, I do feel less smart and a bit deferential. I think the teachers in this conversation were having a string theory moment, not an astrology moment.
ReplyDeleteThat leads into another issue, which is whether they think there is value to the thing their students are asking about, regardless of whether they know the answers or not. I feel rather dismissive when people ask me about astrology, because I don't value it. Some physicists want to encourage their students to ponder string theory, while others think it's a waste of time. (For me, it depends on the day.) I think part of what Jessica was reacting to was that she loves it when her students ask her about this stuff, because she values it highly, and Don's comment about the Discovery Channel suggested that he did not value it. Some of Jim's comments (e.g. "Teach the student the tools so they can go out and investigate it") suggest that he *does* value it, although in a very different way than Jessica values it in her classroom. I think all three of them have slightly different ways of valuing and/or not valuing these kinds of questions, and it is not at all obvious to me how to characterize them.