Cramming

I was looking at a quote from Lemke's 2000 paper. "In a larger sense all scientific explanations also belong to the culture of science, a culture that seeks particular kinds of knowledge for particular purposes. The cultures of everyday life also seek knowledge and explanation, but often for quite different purposes; their criteria of validity are also correspondingly different. When we move well outside the orbit of European-derived cultures, or even of middle-class subculture, the nature of what counts as knowledge and what qualifies as explanation may also be startlingly different." She went on to say, "Our goal is science for all, but what does this mean if our particular view of science is too aggressively masculine to sit well with many students' identities? Too narrowly rationalistic to accommodate spiritual longings? Too technicist, abstract, and formalist for a wide range of humanistic, aesthetic, sensualist, and pragmatic dispositions? Must all students love machines, numbers, predictability, and control to be welcome in our construction of what science must be? Do we have to continue to ignore the well-attested and documented (e.g., Wechsler, 1977; Tauber, 1996; John-Steiner, 1985) aesthetic, intuitive, and emotional components of scientific creativity in our teaching methods"?

I took another look at this paper today. And it is even more relevant now than it was when I first read it in 2007. The glazed over look that I see in the eyes of countless students as I peer through the windows of the laboratory doors speak to the disassociation many of them feel when we seek to indoctrinate them into our world. I have to agree that I see much evidence that we are making much of whether the students can "get it" or whether or not they can grasp the material and forgetting the social context of our charge to introduce students to the ideas and communication patterns of scientists. We really are forgetting to ask ourselves what does it mean for the students if they can perform this task or restate this idea? If they can design a model rocket that shoots the highest and travels the fastest, what does that mean within the context of the students' view of themselves and their world?