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Let me tell you a story. It's my first year as a new high school science teacher, and I'm so eager, so excited. I'm pouring myself into my lesson plans, but I'm slowly coming to a horrifying realization: my students just might not be learning anything.
This happens one day. I just assigned my class to read a textbook chapter about my favorite subject in all of biology, viruses, and how they attack. I'm so excited to discuss this with them. I come in and say, "Can somebody please explain the main ideas and why this is so cool?" There's silence. Finally, my favorite student looks me straight in the eye and says, "The reading sucked." Then she clarifies: "You know what, I don't mean that it sucks. I mean that I didn't understand a word of it. It's boring. Who cares? And it sucks." Sympathetic smiles spread throughout the room, and I realized that all of my other students are in the same boat. Maybe they took notes or memorized definitions from the textbook, but not one of them really understood the main ideas. Not one of them could tell me why this stuff is so cool or why it's so important. I was totally clueless and had no idea what to do next.
So the only thing I could think of was to say, "Listen, let me tell you a story." The main characters in the story are bacteria and viruses. These guys are blown up a couple million times, because the real bacteria and viruses are so small we can't see them without a microscope. You might know bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick, but what a lot of people don't know is that viruses can also make bacteria sick.
The story I start telling my kids begins like a horror story. Once upon a time, there's this happy little bacterium. Don't get too attached to him. Maybe he's floating around in your stomach or in some spoiled food somewhere, and all of a sudden he starts to not feel so good. Maybe he ate something bad for lunch, and then things get really horrible as his skin rips apart and he sees a virus coming out from his insides. Then it gets worse when he bursts open and an army of viruses floods out from his insides. Ouch, right? If you're a bacterium and you see this, it's your worst nightmare. But if you're a virus and you see this, you cross those little legs of yours and think, "We rock," because it took a lot of crafty work to infect this bacterium.
So this stuff is not that hard, right? Now all of you understand it. If you've graduated from high school, I can almost guarantee you've seen this information before, but I bet it was presented in a way that didn't exactly stick in your mind. So when my students were first learning this, why did they hate it so much? There were a couple of reasons. First, I can guarantee you their textbooks didn't have horror stories. In the communication of science, there is an obsession with seriousness. It kills me. I'm not kidding. I used to work for an educational publisher, and as a writer I was always told never to use stories or fun, engaging language, because then my work might not be viewed as serious and scientific. God forbid somebody have fun while learning science. So we have a field of science that's all about slime and color changes, check this out, and then, as any good scientist has to have, explosions. But if a textbook seems too much fun, it's somehow unscientific.
Another problem was that the language in their textbook was truly incomprehensible. If we want to summarize the story I told you earlier, we could start by saying something like, "These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium." The way this showed up in the textbook looked like this: "Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium." That's great, perfect for 13-year-olds. But here's the thing: there are plenty of people in science education who would look at this and say there's no way we could ever give that to students, because it contains language that isn't completely accurate. For example, I told you that viruses have DNA. Well, a very tiny fraction of them don't. They have something called RNA instead. A professional science writer would circle that and say it has to go, and we have to change it to something much more technical. After a team of professional science editors went over this really simple explanation, they'd find fault with almost every word I've used, and they'd change anything that wasn't serious enough and anything that wasn't 100% perfect. Then it would be accurate, but completely impossible to understand. This is horrifying.
I keep coming back to the idea of telling a story. Science communication has taken on what I call the tyranny of precision, where you can't just tell a story. Science has become that horrible storyteller we all know, the one who gives us all the details nobody cares about. "I met my friend for lunch the other day, and she was wearing these ugly jeans. I mean, they weren't really jeans, they were more like leggings, but I guess they're actually more like jeggings, but I think..." And you're just like, "Oh my God, what is the point?" Or even worse, science education is becoming like that guy who always says, "Actually." You want to say, "Oh dude, we had to get up in the middle of the night and drive 100 miles in total darkness," and that guy's like, "Actually, it was 87.3 miles," and you're like, "Actually, shut up, I'm just trying to tell a story." Good storytelling is all about emotional connection. We have to convince our audience that what we're talking about matters, but just as important is knowing which details to leave out so the main point still comes across. I'm reminded of what the architect Mies van der Rohe said, and I paraphrase: sometimes you have to lie in order to tell the truth. I think that sentiment is particularly relevant to science education.
I am often disappointed when people think I'm advocating a dumbing down of science, and that's not true at all. I'm currently a PhD student at MIT, and I absolutely understand the importance of detailed, specific scientific communication between experts. But not when we're trying to teach 13-year-olds. If a young learner thinks all viruses have DNA, that's not going to ruin their chances of success in science. But if a young learner can't understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this, that will ruin their chances of success. This needs to stop. I wish the change could come from the institutions at the top that are perpetuating these problems, and I beg and beseech them to just stop it, but I think that's unlikely. We are lucky to have resources like the internet, where we can circumvent these institutions from the bottom up. There's a growing number of online resources dedicated to explaining science in simple, understandable ways. I dream of a Wikipedia-like website that would explain any scientific concept you can think of in simple language any middle schooler could understand. I myself spend most of my free time making science videos that I put on YouTube. I explain chemical equilibrium using analogies to awkward middle school dances, and I talk about fuel cells with stories about boys and girls at a summer camp. The feedback I get is sometimes misspelled and often written in all caps, but nonetheless it's so appreciative, so thankful, and it tells me this is the right way to communicate science.
There's still so much work left to be done. If you're involved with science in any way, I urge you to join me. Pick up a camera, start a blog, whatever, but leave out the seriousness, leave out the jargon, make me laugh, make me care, leave out those annoying details nobody cares about, and just get to the point. How should you start? Why don't you say, "Listen, let me tell you a story"? Thank you.