Science teaching issues acknowledged by Astronomer Royal

The new Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Catherine Heymans, is a publicly proactive one for science promotion, and flagged so in her introductory talk to the local society. Jun 22 I have got a good acknowledgement from her to issues in the unjust mishandling of science teaching, raised including from the autism angle. The issue and this result hold for students of any age, schoolkids of course, and adults looking at their options including after suffering as school students.

Should be of interest to all education concerned autism pros. That the publicly proactive Astronomer Royal wants listening to lots of different voices and folks of different skillsets and abilities, as necessary towards solving this issue, and thete is a concern to solve.

This was my raising of it:
Hi I'm an ASE member who saw your talk, as well as chair of local autistic group ELAS.

On the public mission of your new office. I flag up the need to encourage scrutiny of why science teaching fails and what its students present and past found hard or unworkable in it, with a view to changing it. This instead of the endless ritual of urging kids towards science careers, that folks are used to hearing, but that sets kids up for knocks and alienation by its wrong message that any interested and duly working kid can at will get through the education process into science.

This is more than an idea, it's a concern from experience. I was a kid encouraged into a science career ambition by recklessly optimistic adults but had its school teaching utterly botched, by short tempered teaching, a devastating pressure trap from when authority assumes ability, and too many puzzle type questions that we had not been taught all the facts needed to answer.

The trend to find science subjects easy to fail, hence less popular than standard voices wish for, evidences real long-entrenched failings in the courses' approach to teaching it. So, to always see it as the student's failing will not shift that problem. School reformer John Holt wrote of the trick that schools take the credit for successes but pin onto the kids the blame for failures.

It is a discriminatory block to success and destroys chances for folks who may be perfectly able to absorb a subject factually, that there is a sweeping assumption in teaching that a puzzle solving approach is healthy. Questions not quite telling you all you need to answer them, trying to force you to find or guess hidden steps of reasoning, find something you have not been told or taught, before you can answer. Not everyone's mind has that faculty strongly, and there is no popular awareness that you should need that faculty in order to study physical sciences. There needs to be it, to save kids from getting set up to fail.

The public inspired by astronomy assume that sciences can simply be studied factually. That seems common sense to them. But Edinburgh uni's listings for its physics degrees illustrate otherwise: they say a physics degree's value include as evidence of problem solving skill. Idealistic adults encouraging kids into science are unaware that it requires a strength in puzzle solving. They were completely naive about that with me, and it is a faculty I have not got, while teachers naively assumed that a too hastily given gifted label guaranteed I would have it. Modern autism awareness has shown how you can have tantalising islands of ability to absorb facts but not have the puzzle solving faculty.

Setting a work question should carry the responsibility to show that its answer was clearly findable for any student from what they had already been taught, without having to find/deduce an unannounced new leap of insight. Instead of being quick to judge a student unsuitable and dump them, which possibility is always an emotional pressure, suppose they asked frustrated students how findable they had needed the solution to be, to a question they could not solve, or to an integral? They at least might find out how to set the questions sensibly.

Logically it is the same as audience questions after a public lecture, for students to get to question after the reasonable answerability of the work questions set to them.

So astronomy promotion needs 2 changes from how it conventionally has been:
* to promote to educators that they need to reassess that approach and investigate how much avoidable failure at sciences it has caused.
* to make the public realise that career-serious science study in its present form requires this strength at puzzle solving, so should never be promoted to kids without cautioning of that.

Thank you for wanting views!
Maurice Frank

'tis a bit serious innit?

Be angry, be very angry, because a celebrity tells you not to. Be angry because they have a public voice but you have no voice in answer.

Stephen Hawking's interview in the Radio Times (not a mag I've actually bought for a generation): oh no don't be angry because then how will you have any hope in your life, just laugh at yourself instead. The media select in favour of messages like that, to give to audiences whose own lives have been less fortuitous so are less easy to just shrug off with levity. By definition, any celebrity's life has turned out well and they are in no place to give throwaway advice to the rest of us to be accepting. That's what self-deprecating and laughing at your own misfortunes is - accepting, a choice of docility.

Yes this can be said even when the celebrity has had a serious disease for a long time and we as yet have not. Hawking establishes that, if you think about it. He has been wronged by biological chance - big time, besides being lucky still to live so long with it. But he has not been wronged by personal agency, by people choosing to do stupid things to his life and prospects, which they could have chosen not to do. Instead he has had a very successful life despite his physical condition, so he is in a position to be reflective on that and to choose to take life lightly. Not so any of the aspies who have been messed with by school or other youth social services. Not so anyone who has had a life opportunity stolen from us wrongly by the consciously choosing wrong action of jerks.

However physically healthy we are as yet, we have lived in a world where that is chancy and is a shadow over anyone's coping with any loss. If you laugh off a wrong you accept it. If you accept a wrong you do yourself further wrong and give the evil a victory, because you live the life it wrongly gave you instead of the life you justly should have had. Where the hell is your HOPE if you do that?

Folks who have lost careers to achieve struggle against an injustice, if they succeeded in their objective then the anger that defined their lives was clearly a good and a right choice: a right choice for themselves not just for others. Meaning and rebuilding in their life: which is hope. Sometimes though it's not a choice. Sometimes the angry path is also your only survival course of action. Sometimes the folks around you can't yet see that or are fighting against wanting to believe it, making it all harder. I did not lose any career by choosing the survival path of bringing down my teachers. Only such as who still believed the teachers' impractical fantasies thought I did.

Besides, after all the pressuring weight to succeed put on me from quite small childhood by fantasists with irresponsible imaginations, I could never have coped with having a science career like Hawking's: there was too much predecided success in it, when all the sceptical scrutiny by scientists of each other's work goes out of its way to set you up to fail. You can see the tensions and fears of that in The Big Bang Theory, including the episode Hawking himself appeared in, devastating Sheldon by telling him his mathematical theory forged in hard sweat was wrong. The bad way Hawking's ex-wife Jane experienced the peer pressure for atheism and closed minded anti-paranormalism, also shows there is no light hearted dream life in a science career. There could well be moral challenges against toeing institutional lines. There is a dishonest rot at the physics scene's core, which explains why it has been stuck in a rigid rut unable to progress its ideas much for the whole lifetime since quantum physics was discovered.

Does Hawking as a lifelong Labour supporter disagree with the anger of early socialists at unjust life conditions? That was hope in anger. Even properly peaceful civil rights movements were still angry. We owe anger most morally of all to anyone affected by murder: how sick for anyone to take life light heartedly in a world where we know it exists. How dare any of us not live morally serious low mood angry lives just for that reason? Aren't we all safer because angry journalists have gone after major miscarriages of justice? Humour sometimes has a use in getting serious messages across, but it must never replace seriousness. Because ripped-off consumers are angry and share their stories, we can keep trading standards needing to show an effort, and avoid buying beds with wooden dowel joints in the corners that can snap?

It was by anger that I discovered being aspie at all. By retaining my libertarian passion against school, by following all the new awarenesses of causes of school problems. By hating and not following any of pop-psychology's transparently evil propaganda for accepting hurts passively and letting go: that way offered hopeless loss. The aspie scene, all its writing outlets, recognition of my sensory issue and its cause, employment support taking account of it, ELAS, ANS: I got all these much needed good things, condition of life made much more just, THANKS TO STAYING ANGRY.

If I was right to continue the anger against my school that helped to discredit and close it, so was the schoolmate who wrote online here "I left that school an angry person".

Maurice Frank