What a great conversation on Monday’s post “How and Why I Don’t Know Science.” Thanks to the kindness of the WordPress editor, the post was Freshly Pressed, so my story about high school science class got a lot of readers, both new and old friends.
As an aside, being Freshly Pressed is such a wonderful phenomenon. When I first started this blog, a guest post about “Lake Erie” by my good and long-time friend Wilma Kahn was Freshly Pressed. Wilma had a lively discussion that went on for quite some time. It’s so much fun talking to bloggers. Ever notice that other bloggers can be smarter and more interesting than some other people in your life ;)? Just sayin’.
Back to Monday’s post. Because I talked about giving up studying science over the thought of dissecting a cat, a lot of the discussion that’s still ongoing has been about animal dissection, animal issues, and science pedagogy. All subjects wide open for debate. All subjects which stir strong emotions in readers.
I know where I stand on those issues, as is evidenced in the piece. Where I am confused is where I stand on science and learning science at my age.
Science makes me feel stupid, and I hate feeling stupid. That’s why I long ago “liked” that page on Facebook called I Fucking Love Science (a catchy name, but one I find a little embarrassing). If you’re on Facebook and haven’t yet liked this page, run to your Facebook account and do so. It provides interesting scientific facts in bite-sized pieces. You can see a life-sized model of a blue whale heart, pictures of the penis-head fish, and other goodies. You can learn that Mars has boron which might be crucial for the formation of life.
Although I will admit to being a lifelong student, I have no intention of making myself go to school again for science. Somehow I don’t see myself in front of the Bunsen burner.
In the comments for Monday’s post, Lauren at From Screen to Words suggested a Youtube website called Crash Course. I plan to spend some time over there.
Recently my parents gave me a video course, which I haven’ t watched yet. It’s called Science and Religion and is produced by The Teaching Company. It sounds similar to the pseudo-science class I took in college–a course about science, but not science. I looked up the course offerings, and they have a lot of actual science courses. Maybe I’ll start with this freebie and then move on to the hard stuff like Physics and Our Universe, Understanding the Human Body (no dissection worries here), Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists, and best yet, Joy of Science.
I’ve given myself a lot of challenges in the past few years: write a memoir, write a play with my daughter, put together a poetry manuscript, keep up the blogs, and other non-writing challenges such as the diet that is staring me in the face. I’m going to add “learn more science” to my daily to do list and see how much science I can cram in this old brain. I’ll try the video courses. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go back to my old How and Why Book filled with science experiments for children. That might be my speed.
The Joys Of Scientific Experimentation (Photo credit: spike55151)
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- How and Why I Don’ t Know Science (writersite.org)
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- Bill Nye the Science Guy to give a talk at WWDC 2013 (tuaw.com)