Tyler DeWitt: Hey science teachers -- make it fun

600,383 views ・ 2013-02-05

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