> get any non-superficial commanding of science.
Oh you mean like everyone on Social Media who think they understand Science but never actually practiced it once in their lives?
Oh you mean like everyone on Social Media who think they understand Science but never actually practiced it once in their lives?
When I went to my teacher with the experiment, she laughed at me and told me it was absurd, because batteries wouldn't drain that quickly; she was really quite rude and aggressive about it. I'm still not sure what she was thinking; I had to contradict her multiple times and say that my Dad was an electrical engineer several times; she was still skeptical.
I learned while young that people in positions of authority, even when nominally "credentialed" in science, are often completely incompetent, not curious, not open-minded, and are instead arrogant and patronizing. She thought she knew what the answer was and she hadn't seen it before, so she just ridiculed me. This was in one of the best school systems in the country, in one of the best schools in that district.
This would only be surprising if your teacher was a Physics teacher. If you want to be extra charitable a Science teacher. Most people don’t care about it understand the scientific method and it’s a profoundly unnatural way of thinking, much like doing formal logic.
I'm not sure. Physics teachers often have to deal with absolute laws of physics, e.g. "you can't make a perpetual motion machine".
You can't ever demonstrate that something doesn't exist (philosophy of the black swan/inviting disproof by counter-example), so it's challenging for teachers to communicate this as a fact to curious students: the result is sometimes teachers appearing scornful.
One slightly-misunderstood law of conservation and you're suddenly a physics teacher who is scorning the truth.
[1]: https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/01/11/are-experts-real...
That's genuinely a baffling lesson to take from that incident. I mean, your father was the credentialed one, with an engineering degree, and the teacher was the unqualified one who was just a science teacher. Surely the lesson should be the exact opposite?
Some other really weird ones: engineering, design, art, math
And my favorite: programming
I generally find conflating any two of these different things to be problematic enough that "science" is a useless word.
But more how would you go about testing an hypothesis (design of experiments) how do you know if the result are statistically significant? if it’s statistically significant is it enough to say it’s true (light can behave like a particule and like a wave so is it both or neither ...)
But they rarely teach the scientific method.
+1 if you can get your hands on some ammonium dichromate for an even more impressive, but more dangerous demonstration.
These types of "experiments" are less about teaching science, and more about impassioning a love and interest for science.
My goal is not for my kid to learn a subset of chemistry theory from the explanation in a book or some fun experiment.
Instead my goal is for them to understand why the human race now have this knowledge. How did the first chemist came up with the theory, how did they verify the theory was correct ... why do we now believe this is how atoms work.