Psst – Hey Students: Science is Sexy
Monday, 1 December 2008 Clay Burell 
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From the “Telling My Students What I Wish My High School Teachers had Told Me” Department:
Science is downright sexy. It struck me last week as I watched the following video on CNN about scientist Carl Hodges, of the Seawater Foundation, which I promptly found online, bookmarked on Diigo, and noted:
Use rising oceans from global warming to reduce greenhouse gases and create food and green jobs? Scientists are the sexiest saviors in the world.
Watch the video, and ask yourself how, when a science career can lead to a lifestyle at once enjoyable, profitable, and socially valuable, students today are lukewarm about pursuing careers in science:
Embedding problems! Click the image to view the video on CNN.
I’d chew off my left arm to live life like Carl Hodges. Yet, when I try to get students to see the beauty and the excitement of where science careers can lead, they look at me like I’m trying to sell them an 8-track car stereo.
The explanation for this, as usual, has to lie in part on how schools all-too-often teach science: linear, memorized, non-contextual units covering what science knows, garbage in, garbage out, with little to no focus on the more exciting stuff – those challenges science has yet to meet.
Injecting case studies of scientists like Hodges into classroom discussions might tip students more toward science. Emphasizing the creativity and lateral thinking of Hodges’ connections of global warming, rising seas, food and fresh water shortages, and desertification, and the beauty of his transforming a cause of global crisis into a possible solution for it – this bit of sexiness may seduce more students to become the future scientists who might save us, down the road, in different ways.
(And if you have your own “sexy scientist” heroes – or science teachers – do us a favor and drop them in comments 
)
- One for the Science Teachers: A New Crop of Sci-Tubes
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No. 1 — December 1st, 2008 at 5:32 am
1. wow. you’re back, and with a vengeance.
2. you would laugh so hard after writing this post if you knew how often i refer to science as “sexy” in class. good stuff.
3. isn’t Hodges great? his speaking manner inspires confidence. for every one of him we have… we can change a good chunk of earth for the better. we need more folks who are able to “think laterally”, as you so nicely put it.
4. i so terribly look forward to the next four years. i have been so angry inside for the past eight years. science has been effectively squashed. and honestly, i don’t even need to specify disciplines and examples. i could win here by simply asking for responses citing examples of how real science was allowed a national voice of any kind during the past decade.
5. in 1999, in my little corner of the world, i took a big step toward aligning science with sexy when i created a marine biology course that features eight days of on-site field study aboard sailboats along the barrier reef of andros island in the bahamas.
at the time, i really had no idea it would quickly turn into a pipeline to grad school and even a couple of PhD enrollments in so little time. i honestly didn’t think that would happen from Missouri. our “1.0″ site that closed in ’04: http://www.stjoeh2o.org our five-month-old 2.0 site: http://stjoeh2o.ning.com
6. the sad thing is that it took something as “sexy” as this program proposal to push a project this out-of-the-box from concept to reality- considering all of the liability involved. essentially, we had to skip across a continent to engage in something like this. in reality, many of my kids can sight identify all of the parrotfish on a caribbean coral reef before they can name ten birds that might visit the feeder out the dining room window.
my approach was that, if swinging for the fences would win this one game, then swing i would. however, i wish i could be given the latitude to develop such a out-of-bounds program that focuses on getting kids out of the classroom and connected to the natural world they walk past every day.
apparently, that’s just not as sexy.
7. honestly, i watched the video prior to reading the rest of the post, and i began to wonder if the reporter had anything to do with the title. not that most folks would have argued.
i like your approach to this. i hope more discussion is to follow. don’t just read, reply…..
sean
Sean Nashs last blog post..Your ideal writing space?
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 1st, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Sean,
Re: 4: I hear you. I just watched Obama’s video message to the Governors’ Conference on Climate Change (on your H2O Ning site, btw, which is impressive), and when he so flatly and firmly stated, “Denial is no longer an option,” all for that moment was right in my world.
Re: 6: That’s an amazing-looking program you designed. If you ever need a deck-hand, let me know. (Yes, I’m jealous.)
Now let’s move on to our friend Mr. D….
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No. 2 — December 1st, 2008 at 7:43 am
Being an old scientist is a wonderful life, especially if one’s youthful years lands you a tenured position somewhere, or you have a nice place in an organization with some political pull.
Technology is seductive. Science is seductive, too, but in a far more subtle way than you might imagine from a CNN piece.
Still, getting there involves a tremendous amount of work in fields now dominated by industry. Not saying Carl Hodges isn’t doing wonderful work. Just saying that the student who wants to get there still has a lot of hoops to hop through, and not all of them are a result of lousy science programs in public education.
I am working my arse off the next few weeks trying to get my low level freshmen involved with chemistry beyond the jam-it-in, spit-it-out rote that passes for science.
Quite a few are not developmentally ready for it. Most do not “get” what science even means, and videos like this continue to glorify technology, confusing it with science.
So long as we are lumping together children who cannot or will not get science with the few children who will be inspired enough to go on to true research, we will get mediocre results in public schools.
There are quite a few bright kids in my classes–my number one goal for a bright kid is not to kill her interest in science; if it has been dulled, I’d like to re-ignite it.
What I don’t want to do, however, is make students believe science is sexy in the way, say, an NBA basketball career might be.
Busting one’s butt during your most productive years in a lab requires a huge dose of intrinsic rewards or a psychotic belief that you will win the Nobel Prize.
I sound like I am ranting, and after I digest this a bit, I may return to it. Still, what needs to happen in high school and earlier is not making the end goal the reward. The reward is in the process, in the understanding, in the universe we create within ourselves, which is, after all, the only universe any of us can ever know.
Michael Doyles last blog post..Wasting time on the beach
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No. 3 — December 1st, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Michael, you know I’m president of your fan club, but I think your comment misses more than a few marks (and maybe that’s as much my fault as yours, but then again maybe it ain’t).
I’ll skip defending CNN (or any media that inspires me with science, applied or theoretical), and mention quickly that my admiration for this man’s work doesn’t imply a lack of consciousness or admiration for more “subtle” examples – though I do want to say that Hodges’ work seems to have its fair share of subtlety.
Re: the “tremendous work” of “getting there,” that’s a given, isn’t it? My point is that, for the brightest and most motivated students, applying themselves to science can be at least as rewarding – both as process and as goal – as applying themselves to a business or finance or basketball career. Grand success in any field requires busting your tail, and my argument here is that students don’t see enough examples of what such tail-busting can lead to in the field of science (scientists themselves bemoan their poor PR skills), while they see all too many Michael Jordans and Donald Trumps in the media to idolize. That’s why I think spotlighting people like Hodges – not as the norm any more than Jordan or Trump are norms, but as the possible exception – isn’t a bad idea, and is a good one. Again, I wasn’t only being flip with that “Telling Students What I Wish My Teachers had Told Me Department” line.
Nietzsche wrote somewhere – I looked for it this morning when writing this post, to no avail – that one of the best uses of biography is to inspire the young with models they may emulate. That’s one function we old folks can perform better than the young. And a CNN clip of 8 multimedia minutes may be a superior form of biography for this ADD era, compared to a book or a (blech) sidebar in a textbook about some dead scientist. I fantasize I’d populate a Ning or wiki with a weekly “sexy scientist” video embed just to pound through the realization that many living, breathing, defecating scientists today are doing remarkable things – whether in labs or on Mexican coastlines – and that they were once freshman knuckleheads just like the students are.
I didn’t say “all” are the result of lousy science programs. I consciously said “partly” and “all-too-often,” as a nod to exceptions and other factors. I’ll take some Hershey’s Kisses with your apology for that one
“Confusing technology with science”? That “lateral thinking” I mention required Hodges to understand the carbon cycle, rising seas, botany (?) (in his knowledge of the crop that would work best in his plan), and much more science. That he applies that scientific knowledge with technology detracts from nothing, as far as I can see. And technology is science too.
I already touched on process and goal, as you (not I) put it. A tinkerer’s love of figuring out how to do cool stuff – to “have fun doing good,” as a blog title I love puts it – is all about process. The goals are byproducts along the path. And thank goodness for them, too.
Alrighty, Doyle, straighten me out. I love it when we tangle. (And I dearly hope one day we can hook up around a fire between a sunset and a sunrise, and talk, joke, shutthehellup, and/or sing the whole night through.)
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Clay Burell Reply:
December 1st, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Michael, a bit of synchronicity for you: My Quotiki sidebar widget just threw this Japanese proverb at me:
Seems very a propos to the “process/goal” bit we’re wrangling over
(I really must stop the winking. Reminds me of Sarah Palin. *shudder*)
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Michael Doyle Reply:
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:00 am
This is my second attempt. The first one was full of love and Hershey’s kisses.
And I never meant to imply that you (of all people) do not grasp subtleties. You’d die without subtleties.
“Once more into the breach….”
I am a cranky fart, and, I hope, entertaining enough to be tolerable. A few points:
1) Carl Hodges is a technologist, and a good one. He may even be a wonderful scientist, but the work featured on CNN was not science. His project would work well at Epcot (or even the Biosphere Project), but it does not involve a whole lot of science.
2) Do I think showing his life in class could spark a few students? Yep, and I might do that yet, but I am a bit cynical of its effect. I was blessed with a live feed from Antarctica with one of the very few friends I have (Joe Mastroianni), and my kids yawned.
Technology doesn’t faze them.
3) Galileo, on the other hand, or a young Einstein, or Jean Henri Fabre, these were people with great imagination, a wonderful command of the language, and a joie de vivre that shone through their work. My best thinkers in school have a shot at creating new worlds, not trying to fix technological problems with large scale technologies that are poorly understood.
4) Hodges’ work does not require a whole lot of lateral thinking, and despite his glib response to the (um, rather sexy) journalist, pumping sea water onto once arable lands is not without risk. (His response? In 23 years, no harm done. Twenty-three years. If he believes that’s an adequate response–and I bet he doesn’t, it’s just a sound bite for the journalists–then he’s a dangerous man.)
5) Science is sexy, in every sense of the word–it takes us places we can only imagine and then cannot remember, it’s messy and juicy and involves flow, it ultimately proves irrational, and it makes us feel one with the universe at its finest moments.
6) Sean Nash’s course in the Bahamas sounds sexy (and would be even sexier if the island was Gynous instead of Andros, but that’s my bias showing again). Galileo describing the motion of the Jovian moons is earth-moving, and written for dolts like me (and my students); Einstein’s ability to explain what flowed through his head is mind-blowing.
Michael Doyles last blog post..One problem with drug screening
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No. 4 — December 1st, 2008 at 2:30 pm
I think that’s part of the issue though, is that all fields do an incredible amount of effort to get to the top, just as science does. However, other fields are approachable. Sure, it takes a lot of effort to be the CEO of a major company. However, that’s not what students see as the immediate success of business. You can just as well start a small business or be a middling in some corporation. Almost all fields have a similar trait: it takes a lot to be at the top, but students are confronted by plenty of examples where people are doing fine in the middle/bottom.
In contrast, science is all about the “top” – especially when it comes to students. Students don’t interact with or know about scientists on a day to day basis. Instead, contact with scientists is only through the “greats” on a very distant and impersonal level (through a textbook). Thus, students believe all scientists have to put in the same amount of effort as Galileo or others. Obviously, this isn’t true. However, students can’t grasp the idea of a career in science since almost nobody they will meet in their life will have such a career. I certainly think that interest in science would be boosted if scientists interacted with the community (and schools) more.
I for one, will always be a technology guy rather than a science guy. From my experience, a large part of science is the meta-science – methodology, titles, academia, etc… – rather than the actual research/science. This is perfectly understandable (and in many ways necessary) because research is only as valuable as its credibility. In contrast, technology is the exact opposite. Almost everything is based upon raw talent and effort, rather than other factors. I also couldn’t stand the amount of academia most science requires…
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No. 5 — December 2nd, 2008 at 12:51 am
@Clay & Michael – Can I be fan club secretary? Please? Too many interesting items here to not really dive in fully with you two hooligans. However, considering the fact that I may have a baby born here in a matter of hours, I will have to take a rain check on this one. Play nice and give me lots of fun thoughts to shoot at.
BTW- Michael… I really think Clay is using a more contemporary alternative definition of the word (not going to use it and risk Clay’s spam filter hell). Think of it less in terms of gametes, fleshbumps and peacock feathers.. and more along the lines of… merely sleek and appealing. No?
@Morgante – “However, students can’t grasp the idea of a career in science since almost nobody they will meet in their life will have such a career.”
I beg to differ here. If this is occurring, then this is teacher error. Seriously. If we can’t provide a vehicle for our kids to interface with professionals at all levels in the field, then we are missing out in a big way.
We must, at the very least, bring our former students back (or better yet- KEEP THEM in the fold via professional uses of social networking) to talk to our current students. Our Ning sites are so young, and yet they are already providing a vehicle for this very thing.
If kids don’t see that relatively “normal” folks can and do perform the work of science, then they will tag everything scientific with Einstein’s face. Charming ol’ lad, but nowhere near the norm.
Wish us luck…
Sean Nashs last blog post..Where are the seeds in an orange?
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No. 6 — December 2nd, 2008 at 3:27 am
@Sean: I completely agree that it *is* a problem with teaching if teachers don’t reach out to show students realistic and legitimate examples of a field. Unfortunately, I’m afraid this is all too common in elementary and secondary science classrooms. Far too many students think of a scientist and can only imagine Einstein. It definitely is the responsibility of teachers to reach out, but unfortunately far too many are shirking their duty.
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No. 7 — December 2nd, 2008 at 8:37 am
A word to the wise.
Do not go back to review the video with only a few words left to post.
Yes, Clay, it had the requisite apologies. I need to get a beer.
Michael Doyles last blog post..One problem with drug screening
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