There is a strong desire to teach by story in classical education. I think when people want to teach by story in science, they imagine they need to be sharing the biography of Isaac Newton, the story of the discovery of x-rays, and so on. And don’t get me wrong here, those may indeed be excellent things to do. (Among other things, it is fascinating to me that Newton, probably the greatest scientist of all time, spent a huge amount of his time on other projects [theology, Royal Mint, etc.] that he considered extremely important, but which by our modern judgment contributed little to history and might have been left to others. And what might that say about how we spend our own time, we who are almost certainly less intelligent than Newton? Anyway.)
But even if you leave all that stuff out, if you are teaching science well at all, you are telling a story. How do you know it’s a story? Well one big tell is that the order in which you read it matters a whole lot. You can’t read a novel by reading chapter 16, then chapter 2, then chapter 7, then chapter 1, it just wouldn’t work very well. You’d be similarly lost trying to read a lot of science textbooks that way. You have to take in the story.
I think most of you know that I’m really a physicist who sometimes plays other types of scientist on TV. I’m teaching a chemistry class in the Fall and have started making my notes for that and, although I know this should be obvious I’m saying it anyway, it is so clear that the book of Physics is the prologue to the book of Chemistry. You’re not going to understand the latter book unless you first read the former. (Or you’re going to be bugging some friend to explain all the parts of the movie you were asleep for.)
Near the start of our textbook the author talks about combustion - and actually, this could be a story all in itself. Let me write it a little silly just to make that clear:
Once upon a time there are a bunch of hydrogen molecules (two hydrogen atoms bonded together) and a bunch of oxygen molecules (two oxygen atoms bonded together) bouncing about, minding their own business, in a room. Then into the room was introduced a FLAME. The now more energetic hydrogen and oxygen molecules slammed into each other with greater ferocity, fast enough to break chemical bonds so that, for a moment, there were unbound hydrogen and oxygen atoms about. But these unbound atoms, of course, attract each other, and so they rushed together and rebound themselves in a new, lower energy state - water, H2O. But this is a lower energy state, so where did all the excess energy go? Into a boom, and a flash, and heat.
Nice little story. And the end of that story, put this whole post into my head actually, calls back into part of the story of Physics, in the principle of conservation of energy. Yeah, the “missing” energy can’t just disappear, we already learned that from the earlier part of the book (Physics), so where does it go? Into a boom, and a flash, and heat.
Science is a story.
THE END
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