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This echoes my experience. It wasn't until I was 17 or so that I figured out through independent reading that there actually are ideas in scientific work. Ther

This echoes my experience. It wasn't until I was 17 or so that I figured out through independent reading that there actually are ideas in scientific work. There's this weird kind of fake enthusiasm that always seems to be at the foundation of attempts to get kids "interested in science". Like the adults in charge also don't know what's interesting about it—or they're otherwise not "up for the task" as you say—so they instead just extract a bunch of idea-free surface details from the subject, and prop them up with outsized enthusiasm. The result is a mockery. I was tempted to say at first that most kids can probably sense it—but I don't know if that's actually true: my recollection was that I spent a lot of time being surprised that I didn't find science and math interesting, because that kind of thing was becoming part of my identity already as a 'computer person'. Then at some point when I found actually interesting treatments of scientific subject matter I was mostly left feeling kinda ripped off that I'd been offered this watered down fake version all my life. And what was with the adults trying to convince me it was the real thing?

bonoboTP 7y ago
> There's this weird kind of fake enthusiasm that always seems to be at the foundation of attempts to get kids "interested in science". Like the adults in charge also don't know what's interesting about it It's been discussed a lot how STEM is seen by society as this dry useless thing, that adults can safely joke about the shared experience of how they hated it, got bad grades and have forgotten it all. They'd like to spice it up, but have no idea how. So they say, "kids are visual", make it more exciting and flashy. Put more pictures and colors in the textbooks and write them with goofy fonts... It's basically symptomatic treatment, trying to alleviate the pain of the (so-imagined) "inherently painful" and dry STEM experience. And then there's another, stricter side who's like "don't make it too much fun, let them experience that pain, I had to do it too!". Both are missing the point. I think I wouldn't have become a science-math-computer person if I hadn't had casual conversations with my chemist dad here and there, while driving, while walking. He didn't explicitly teach me this stuff, like let's sit down and learn chemistry, but instilled in me a sense of how abstract bookish stuff is connected to the real world and how it exists even outside the framework of school. It gave me the useful ability to disconnect the teacher from the subjects. Many students like the subjects taught by kind and inspiring teachers and hate those taught by boring or malicious ones. I never studied to please the teacher, but because I wanted to understand. If the teacher was bad, I just read the book or asked my dad who'd often point out misleading simplifications or outright falsehoods in what we were supposed to memorize and recite. Learning that something can be wrong "in the book" was also very helpful. I think there are fundamental problems with the worldview that school instills in students. On a base level people learn to separate real life and school. When someone asks a quiz-like question, it seems to exists in schoolish-bookish universe and the answer is a lookup in school memories. For example, in these street interviews, when people are asked about some everyday, relevant question (e.g. when was World War II), many would answer "I was never good at [school subject X]" (e.g. history class), instead of saying, well grandpa often tells me about those times, it was in his youth, so about 70 years ago (just an illustrative example).
- westoncb 7y ago
  My situation was very similar: I got some kind of sense of what the "real thing" was from my dad who was doing research in cognitive psychology and HCI while I was growing up. That may be an ingredient in what creates perspectives like ours: you have to have some exposure to actual scientific thought processes to get a sense that you're being served something inferior when it comes up. Edit: I guess one thing that was kinda weird about my situation was that my dad's area of research wasn't in the set of mainstream sciences taught in public schools, so the 'official' sciences always remained separate in my mind until much later. Meanwhile I assumed chemistry/physics/biology/math were all just extremely dull.

bonoboTP 7y ago

> There's this weird kind of fake enthusiasm that always seems to be at the foundation of attempts to get kids "interested in science". Like the adults in charge also don't know what's interesting about it It's been discussed a lot how STEM is seen by society as this dry useless thing, that adults can safely joke about the shared experience of how they hated it, got bad grades and have forgotten it all. They'd like to spice it up, but have no idea how. So they say, "kids are visual", make it more exciting and flashy. Put more pictures and colors in the textbooks and write them with goofy fonts... It's basically symptomatic treatment, trying to alleviate the pain of the (so-imagined) "inherently painful" and dry STEM experience. And then there's another, stricter side who's like "don't make it too much fun, let them experience that pain, I had to do it too!". Both are missing the point. I think I wouldn't have become a science-math-computer person if I hadn't had casual conversations with my chemist dad here and there, while driving, while walking. He didn't explicitly teach me this stuff, like let's sit down and learn chemistry, but instilled in me a sense of how abstract bookish stuff is connected to the real world and how it exists even outside the framework of school. It gave me the useful ability to disconnect the teacher from the subjects. Many students like the subjects taught by kind and inspiring teachers and hate those taught by boring or malicious ones. I never studied to please the teacher, but because I wanted to understand. If the teacher was bad, I just read the book or asked my dad who'd often point out misleading simplifications or outright falsehoods in what we were supposed to memorize and recite. Learning that something can be wrong "in the book" was also very helpful. I think there are fundamental problems with the worldview that school instills in students. On a base level people learn to separate real life and school. When someone asks a quiz-like question, it seems to exists in schoolish-bookish universe and the answer is a lookup in school memories. For example, in these street interviews, when people are asked about some everyday, relevant question (e.g. when was World War II), many would answer "I was never good at [school subject X]" (e.g. history class), instead of saying, well grandpa often tells me about those times, it was in his youth, so about 70 years ago (just an illustrative example).

westoncb 7y ago
My situation was very similar: I got some kind of sense of what the "real thing" was from my dad who was doing research in cognitive psychology and HCI while I was growing up. That may be an ingredient in what creates perspectives like ours: you have to have some exposure to actual scientific thought processes to get a sense that you're being served something inferior when it comes up. Edit: I guess one thing that was kinda weird about my situation was that my dad's area of research wasn't in the set of mainstream sciences taught in public schools, so the 'official' sciences always remained separate in my mind until much later. Meanwhile I assumed chemistry/physics/biology/math were all just extremely dull.