I used to be left at home as a kid with my mum while my dad was out at work and all my siblings were in school. I remember being in a world all my own and looking for things to do to occupy myself. I remember getting an old clock to work again after dismantling it and fiddling with it for awhile.

I also remember the miniature “sail cars” that I used to built from cannibalized toys. The sail would usually just be a piece of paper held upright in place by a stick. Sometimes I would use those plastic windmills or propellers in place of these paper sail to power these sail cars of mine. The wheels would come from dismantled Matchbox Superfast cars, and the chasis of my sail cars would be made from empty boxes. They would be held together by rubber bands or glue.

I had hours of fun building different sail cars and racing one against another on the floor of my apartment house. The wind would come from the direction of the balcony. I would build different configurations to see what will make my sail cars move faster. I would try with paper sails or switch to plastic propellers. I would change the wheels and “chassis” to see which chassis is more stable to support the sail or fan.

Looking back I think those were wonderful learning moments for me. I was faced with a problem and had to solve it through some creative thinking. I don’t think I had learned about “center of gravity” but I knew it intuitively through trying to get a stable sail car. I learned something about “harnessing the energy of the wind” even though such words perhaps didn’t exist in my vocabulary. “Creativity” wasn’t a word to me either.

I learned science without a textbook. I explored things. I explored ideas. I learned to be creative through play. I was learning as learning should be done. It was fun and natural, and very importantly, meaningful. Meaningful without having to memorize definitions of concepts like “wind power” or “energy”.

Parents and teachers can do a lot to encourage such curiosity among by providing them with opportunities with do-it-yourself projects. Give them a free reign. Don’t even designate these DIY projects as a “Science project” or a “Mathematics Project”. Don’t attach labels to them. You may  insist that their project must not have electronic parts. Leave it to the kids to share something that interest them. Do you think learning in schools can be like this? For parents, it is a great way to wean your kids off the computers and video games.

I am currently reading Bill Bryson‘s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. It is a funny and wacky look at Science and other human discoveries. Such books are not new and I do enjoy reading them despite my Humanities background. What I do remember when I first started reading such books was why was my experience with senior high school, Science such a boring one? I remember feeling uninspired when learning about Newton, about light or Planck’s constant and others. I didn’t see much meaning in what was taught and I suspect that if I had asked why I had to learn all these, the answer would be “because it is in the examinations, stupid!”

It got so bad that when I had a chance to go to the university, I went to the Arts Faculty and studied History and Political Science among others. It was after I left the university (the learning wasn’t very universal then…still is?), that I started reading again about Science. I read books about evolution, physics and general science topics. I even read about the history and philosophy of science. I found them fascinating because the authors were writing in a very fascinating way. Reading them, you felt that Science was a human endeavor with heroes and villains, and humor too, as Bryson has shown.

It is not just about rote-learning. It is not just about knowing how to calculate and getting the correct answer to an examination question. I wanted to know more because it was interesting and it was interesting because a context was given to the information that was there. When the context is given it made more sense or meaning for the learner. At the end of the day, knowledge is about making sense or meaning of the information that one receives.

It is perhaps for this reason that Neil Postman, argued in his book “The End of Education”, that it is important for schools to teach narratives. Teaching and learning has to go beyond the mechanics of passing the examinations. Much of the disconnect that happens in schools today is mainly because of this mechanical approach to school and “learning“. Students and teachers are cut off from the “story” of knowledge. That story is very much a human story. When the teaching and learning is cut off from the human story, school becomes a dehumanizing experience.

“Students don’t need to know what an endoplasmic reticulum is…Bad tests are forcing a trivialization of science education and drive most students away from science. Real science is exciting. It’s completely different from these textbooks,”

- Bruce Alberts, editor of the journal Science and former president of the National Academies of Science

In case some of you think I am in the mood  to bash science teachers, please bear with me because I have also lined up some thing about History teachers. I am actually concerned about good teaching. Teaching that not only is logical from a pedagogical point of view but also fun and inspiring.

The quotation above is taken from an article about the meaninglessness of science teaching in many schools today, and I dare say the same is happening in Singapore. The examination-centered approach to teaching any subject will usually mean teachers clinging to the textbooks an focusing on only what will appear in the examinations. While this approach can breed “success” academically, but the kind of success it leads to is at best of a cynical nature.

To quote Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman:

“We’re not doing well. Meaningless testing is a bad thing. If we want scientific literacy, then we want teachers to teach the beauty of science, the fun in it, the humor in it, and to bring examples of modern science into the classroom.”

It is when a wonderful subject like science gets reduced to nothing more than just a high stakes Trivial Pursuit game, that it becomes boring and puts off the very students that teachers want to inspire an interest in science. There is no time for inspiration when acing the examinations is the goal. The goal of passing an examination well is definitely not akin to the goal of the pursuit of science.

The effect of high stakes testing is perhaps summed up by Michael Baldwin, a biology teacher at Hanna High School in Brownsville and president of the Science Teachers Association of Texas:

“So maybe a month before the test, or even as early as December, instead of teaching physics class, the teachers are reviewing biology and chemistry… It puts huge pressure on teachers to abandon their curriculum. The students pass the TAKS test, but then don’t have enough physics for a proper foundation in college.”

This is familiar for most of us in Singapore who have already undergone or is still undergoing the local education system. The only difference is that perhaps in Singapore the examination preparation routine starts even earlier. It starts from Day One of school because the examinations is the curriculum.

I also came across this blog, Primary to Secondary Subjects. It is a very interesting commentary of a parent’s experience with science teaching among others. When I read the blog and saw the examples given by the blogger, I wonder if it was just honest mistakes, or perhaps, worse from the teaching point of view, the teachers’ inability to grasp scientific concepts. I can’t help feeling that the teacher displays the kind of thinking that shows that he is a product of the Trivial Pursuit approach to education in Singapore. Some of the examples shown there border on the ridiculous. Is this the much-vaunted science education of Singapore? Have fun reading the blog because otherwise you will pull your hair out in despair.

Addendum:
I found this post. I think it is worth reading for anyone interested in Science education. See this link.