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Somewhat related - I posed this question to my 4th grade science teacher. She was quick to shoot me down, and I'll never forget it.

by tcfunk 9y ago

inetknght 9y ago
There are a lot of people who shoot down science questions. In my experience, my questions have frequently (!) yielded results different from the normal. Now, as an adult entering middle agedness, I think less of such people and actively disassociate myself from them.
knightofmars 9y ago
I'm not saying the following is what happened in your situation. As an anecdotal insight, I have friends who are K thru 8 school teachers teachers and they have to be extremely careful with this type of question. The reason is religion, specifically Christian religion. If they misstep and posit a view that contradicts a child's parent's religious views then they are, best case scenario, going to hear about it or, worst case scenario, going to have parents form a group whose sole purpose is ousting the teacher from the school. From my soap box, the religious self-policing, to me, is one of the more disconcerting aspects of the education system in the United States. As a personal observation, if a parent is worried that a single teacher providing an intentionally unbiased perspective on a philosophical topic is going to challenge a child's beliefs to the point where it overcomes a family's and church's indoctrination then it isn't the new perspective that's the problem. To this day I believe that "core curriculum" should include logic and philosophy with an emphasis greater than all other topics.
- nkrisc 9y ago
  Critical thinking is the greatest threat to religious indoctrination as it relies on the acceptance of teachings as fact from authorities at face-value without question. If a child learns to be skeptical and questioning, they'll never learn to believe something that can't be supported given the currently available evidence, or may very well be contradicted by it.
  - smdz 9y ago
    Critical thinking is good - but kids can ask questions that are very difficult to answer (but we think of those as common knowledge) For example: This question > Why is 1+0 = 1 and not 10 Attempt to find an answer will generate more questions and it is a journey down the rabbit hole. Sometimes you don't want to do that. And upto high-school I learnt things that were based on assumptions that I kept questioning. Internet brought be some peace in my college years. Unfortunately, nowadays internet is also filled with fake/wrong/hoax/biased stuff.
    - pmalynin 9y ago
      Because zero is an additive identity. Might as well teach your kid number theory.
      - platz 9y ago
        > rabbit hole
        pmalynin 9y ago
        But why not go down a rabbit hole with a child, I feel it could be a wonderful experience that will challenge your beliefs and that of the kid. I don't really get the fascination with ignoring these type of questions: "Dad why is the sky blue" - "Eat your ice cream Timmy".
        platz 9y ago
        because child has to get homework done to go to bed or because sibling spilled some milk and there is no time to teach number theory to toddler who is trying to understand 1 + 0
        nkrisc 9y ago
        "That's an excellent question. Ask me again tomorrow."
tmahle 9y ago
That's a shame! I've had the privilege of having and hearing many great discussions with scientists and their answer is almost always quite humble on this, but perhaps requires a bit of lateral thinking to arrive at. The idea is that yes, life could take forms we haven't thought of or forms that are extremely different from the life we see on Earth, but two things stop that from being studied as much as we might hope given how fundamentally interesting the concept is. First, we simply don't have evidence for such life, so we can't say that it does exist. We also can't say that it doesn't, and certainly not that it couldn't, but those are topics that make for good science fiction rather than incredibly fruitful topics for scientific inquiry. With that said there's certainly some really interesting stuff going on all the same! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology That leads to the second thing that's stopping it from being a heavily studied topic, which is that it's currently getting crowded out by the search for conventional life that happens to not be on Earth. The argument here goes 'yes, life elsewhere might not look like life here, but we know a heck of a lot more about life here than we do about how other, highly different life forms could work, so it makes more sense to focus our study on life that looks like the greater 'us' of earth-bound life.' I've really enjoyed the discussions I've had on this topic, so I hope this was interesting to you. Sorry your teacher acted like a jerk!

Somewhat related - I posed this question to my 4th grade science teacher. She was quick to shoot me down, and I'll never forget it.

by tcfunk 9y ago

Somewhat related - I posed this question to my 4th grade science teacher. She was quick to shoot me down, and I'll never forget it.

inetknght 9y ago

There are a lot of people who shoot down science questions. In my experience, my questions have frequently (!) yielded results different from the normal. Now, as an adult entering middle agedness, I think less of such people and actively disassociate myself from them.

knightofmars 9y ago

I'm not saying the following is what happened in your situation. As an anecdotal insight, I have friends who are K thru 8 school teachers teachers and they have to be extremely careful with this type of question. The reason is religion, specifically Christian religion. If they misstep and posit a view that contradicts a child's parent's religious views then they are, best case scenario, going to hear about it or, worst case scenario, going to have parents form a group whose sole purpose is ousting the teacher from the school. From my soap box, the religious self-policing, to me, is one of the more disconcerting aspects of the education system in the United States. As a personal observation, if a parent is worried that a single teacher providing an intentionally unbiased perspective on a philosophical topic is going to challenge a child's beliefs to the point where it overcomes a family's and church's indoctrination then it isn't the new perspective that's the problem. To this day I believe that "core curriculum" should include logic and philosophy with an emphasis greater than all other topics.

nkrisc 9y ago
Critical thinking is the greatest threat to religious indoctrination as it relies on the acceptance of teachings as fact from authorities at face-value without question. If a child learns to be skeptical and questioning, they'll never learn to believe something that can't be supported given the currently available evidence, or may very well be contradicted by it.
- smdz 9y ago
  Critical thinking is good - but kids can ask questions that are very difficult to answer (but we think of those as common knowledge) For example: This question > Why is 1+0 = 1 and not 10 Attempt to find an answer will generate more questions and it is a journey down the rabbit hole. Sometimes you don't want to do that. And upto high-school I learnt things that were based on assumptions that I kept questioning. Internet brought be some peace in my college years. Unfortunately, nowadays internet is also filled with fake/wrong/hoax/biased stuff.
  - pmalynin 9y ago
    Because zero is an additive identity. Might as well teach your kid number theory.
    - platz 9y ago
      > rabbit hole
      - pmalynin 9y ago
        But why not go down a rabbit hole with a child, I feel it could be a wonderful experience that will challenge your beliefs and that of the kid. I don't really get the fascination with ignoring these type of questions: "Dad why is the sky blue" - "Eat your ice cream Timmy".
        platz 9y ago
        because child has to get homework done to go to bed or because sibling spilled some milk and there is no time to teach number theory to toddler who is trying to understand 1 + 0
        nkrisc 9y ago
        "That's an excellent question. Ask me again tomorrow."

tmahle 9y ago

That's a shame! I've had the privilege of having and hearing many great discussions with scientists and their answer is almost always quite humble on this, but perhaps requires a bit of lateral thinking to arrive at. The idea is that yes, life could take forms we haven't thought of or forms that are extremely different from the life we see on Earth, but two things stop that from being studied as much as we might hope given how fundamentally interesting the concept is. First, we simply don't have evidence for such life, so we can't say that it does exist. We also can't say that it doesn't, and certainly not that it couldn't, but those are topics that make for good science fiction rather than incredibly fruitful topics for scientific inquiry. With that said there's certainly some really interesting stuff going on all the same! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenobiology That leads to the second thing that's stopping it from being a heavily studied topic, which is that it's currently getting crowded out by the search for conventional life that happens to not be on Earth. The argument here goes 'yes, life elsewhere might not look like life here, but we know a heck of a lot more about life here than we do about how other, highly different life forms could work, so it makes more sense to focus our study on life that looks like the greater 'us' of earth-bound life.' I've really enjoyed the discussions I've had on this topic, so I hope this was interesting to you. Sorry your teacher acted like a jerk!