Sunday, June 28, 2020
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Week 4 is in the books, with the month of June close on its heels. This is the part of summer in Michigan where the air starts to get just a bit thicker, and the brave souls who traverse the surrounding woodland trails will find the insects to be just a bit more vicious. At the same time, the sunsets tend to be pretty spectacular out in the country, and fireflies put on a show in the evenings… so take the good with the bad I suppose, and keep both in perspective.
Here’s where we’re at. Work has certainly kept me busy, and now that we interns have a few weeks under our belts, we’re starting to see more direct assignments from staff. The nature of the work has stayed similar, a lot of note-taking and reports, but more of it now is geared specifically towards webinars and hearings that are directly relevant to the Science Committee.
In tandem with the committee work, I’ve been thinking a lot about science communication recently. A few of my peers in the physics department at Pomona host a ‘peer-mentoring’ summer reading group on the weekends where students and professors across disciplines get together and discuss pedagogy in our classes, TA sessions, and departments. Last week’s session focused on the type of language we use in our classrooms, specifically relating to how we balance jargon and more casual language when discussing and explaining complex subjects. I think many of us are generally of the opinion that the more training an individual has in a given field, the easier it is for them to break down complex topics into non-technical language. An ‘expert’ might be the most qualified to use the jargony buzzwords, but they may also be the best people to help the introductory student reach the revered “aha” moment by using everyday language. While this likely varies among individual instructors, it kind of makes sense -- those experts generally know what they’re talking about enough to make accessible analogies when appropriate. At the same time, this is much easier said than done. It’s redundant to say complex topics are complex because they can’t be simply explained, but in some sense this is the objective for a student developing an initial understanding in a new area.
I would venture to guess that most people in physics, or really any subject with a healthy amount of jargon, have had an experience listening to a talk or lecture where it kind of feels like you’re slipping while water-skiing (if you haven’t been water-skiing, it’s not a great feeling). You’re able to keep up at first, and then you hear a word you don’t really understand and your grip starts to slip. Throw in a differential equation and you slip a little more, and pretty soon the equations on the board just turn into gibberish and you’re totally upended with your skis sticking out of the water. Our discussion last week centered on developing strategies for educators to help students avoid this unpleasantry, especially for teaching assistants helping fellow students. We surmised that it’s important to find the balance between making a concept accessible from the very beginning while also incorporating the more technical terms along the way that are probably necessary to advance in the subject matter. For example, it’s probably difficult to talk about special relativity without distinguishing between coordinate time, proper time and the spacetime interval, but having understandable (or at least sufficiently understandable) definitions for each needs to be step one. And having educators ask leading questions and asking students to explain their reasoning can mitigate the risk of building additional material on top of a shaky foundation. This isn’t a novel concept by any means, but I think it can be especially important for teaching assistants, especially at the undergraduate level, to be aware of this balance, and be watchful when a student starts to slip. To build on the mediocre-at-best water skiing analogy, this is why it’s important to always have someone in the back of the boat, watching the skier to see if they have any trouble.
In a broader sense, I do think this idea of balancing between technical and non-technical language is pertinent in our current pandemic circumstances. How do we convince people about the severity of COVID-19 and the nature of SARS-CoV-2 as states reopen and case numbers rise, without bombarding them with microbiology terms that go over most of our heads? Talking exclusively about ACE-2 receptors and spike proteins probably isn’t a great way to go, but I think we’ve also seen the dangers of oversimplifying complex processes in diagnostics and therapeutics that give rise to “science by press-release.” I don’t have an answer here; I think most can agree that accurate scientific messaging is critical, but the ways to do so effectively are still being worked out. I’ve attached some links below that I think are pretty good examples of conveying important and interesting science through mostly non-technical terms. One is from ‘Minute Physics’ on the physics behind N95 masks that I found really cool, and the other is more a comical example explaining the structure of the Saturn V rocket in the 1,000 most common English words. Until next week, stay safe, stay cool (emotionally and physically), and hey, talk about some science.
Physics of N95 Masks - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAdanPfQdCA
Saturn V in 1,000 most common words - https://xkcd.com/1133/
Paul McKinley