After a quick week’s transition time, I’m now teaching the same 8th grade Physics course that I taught last year, when I made this post, in which I “came out” as an anti-materialist to the whole internet! :) I love teaching about water and air in 8th grade Physics in Waldorf schools, and working with two such fundamental and mysterious substances like water and air always takes me a little bit further in my own work toward an anti-materialistic approach to science teaching in general.
My disagreement with materialism is a quiet one, but one which I’m determined to keep repeating, to make sure that anyone else who has reservations about an entirely materialistic approach understands that they’re not alone! While I do think there are more and more cracks in what Charles Eisenstein calls the Story of the Separate Self, the materialistic juggernaut is still largely dominant, intact, and steamrolling over us all and our God-given senses when it can.
A little story to illustrate what I mean: I recently substituted in a science classroom at a very nice school here in my town. The classes of mostly 6th graders that I worked with that day were lovely, typical kids. They had, I think, a pretty usual spread of propensities, abilities and attention. Our assignment for the day was to complete a reading packet with follow-up questions introducing convection, conduction, and radiation, the so-called “three modes of heat transfer” in nature. Since this was a subject I’ve spent a lot of time teaching and pondering, I couldn’t help doing some teaching while we read the packet together. However, I had my work cut out for me, because the language of the packet was, to my anti-materialist sensibilities, truly a horrible mishmash.
The sentence describing conduction, for example, was something like this: “Conduction is when higher temperature vibrating solid atoms or molecules transfer heat energy through their vibrations to adjacent atoms and molecules.” I got lots of (very honest) confusion about these sentences, so I asked the class: did they know what was meant by atoms or molecules? A few of the more forthright students said they’d heard the words, but they had no idea what they meant. Right. But how can you blame them for being lost?!
Read that sentence about conduction again and ask yourself, how many of those words (even if you understood something about their meaning) are referring only to abstract models and not to anything connected to one’s real experience?
I understand very well the atomic theory and kinetic theory of heat transfer to which the above sentence is referring. However, just to have some fun, let’s play with it like a 6th grader might in their mind. “Conduction” is a word that is also used when referring to trains and music and means something like “to lead and to follow” (a couple students did ask me if it had anything to do with trains). And what the heck does “vibrating” have to do with anything warming up or cooling down? This seems like another musical analogy. There is nothing visibly vibrating when something warm is put into contact with something cooler. Following the meaning that the word “conduction” evokes, we might as well think of heat as bunch of trains that leave the “hot place” station and follows the “train tracks of conductive heat transfer”; or alternatively, we could think of heating as the ringing of a bell in a certain location, that then causes a ripple effect in a field of bells that are rung in succession in an ever-expanding ring.
And, “heat energy” is a completely mysterious thing that even Richard Feynmann, the eminent physicist, admitted that we can do calculations about, but which no one really understands. This is something that I wrote about here. . so how in the name of all that is sensible can any sixth grader make heads or tails out of this??
(I want to interject here that the teacher whose class I was filling in for is a friend of mine and, I'm quite certain, a good science teacher. None of this is meant as a criticism of her, or of science teachers everywhere. Those are the people I’d most like to reach with posts like this!)
Given what I said about trains and bells, and continuing to be playful in order to make my point, the above sentence could just as well (but not more clearly) be written as: “Heat energy conduction is like the ringing of a bell that resounds and causes nearby bells to ring, and they in turn ring bells further out, until the ringing has spread as far as it can, and all are ringing evenly.” Or, alternatively, we could say "The trains of heat energy leave the station from the hottest place and travel out in all available directions all at the same time, all at the speed that the paths in each direction allow.”
Both of these alternative descriptions seem like pretty awkward analogies, and I'm not recommending them, but here is my point: they are just as bad as the original one. Let me repeat: “atoms and molecules” are no better than “trains and bells”, and possibly worse, since most kids at least have experience with trains and bells!
We have got to stop teaching atoms and molecules to kids, especially when they are just starting to gather scientific experience and understanding. I know this flies in the face of every single thing currently written about good science education today. This is what I was saying about the juggernaut. Whoever wrote that worksheet was bound and determined to describe conduction using atoms and molecules right from the start, because they believed that atoms and molecules are the objective reality and must be taught immediately so as to make sure that the kids have the “most correct” scientific understanding. The deep irony of this situation is that most kids don’t learn anything except how to regurgitate meaningless words, and they don’t gather any experience with the physical world, either.
Seeing what they had to work with, I told the kids, “Place your hand on the tabletop and hold it there for 20 seconds. The table initially feels cool, but then less so as you leave your hand there. Now, remove your hand and feel the spot on the table where your hand just was. It's warmer than the rest of the tabletop. Feel your hand that was on the table: it feels cooler. That's conduction.”
My general sense was that plenty of kids “got” that simple exercise. However, they still had to answer the questions on the worksheet, which were all about, you guessed it, atoms and molecules. So what I had showed them in 20 seconds and made sense, had no connection to what they had to do to complete the assignment.
If science teaching isn't just going to be an indoctrination into meaningless words that simply refer to trains, bells, atoms and molecules, we need to start with human experience and use words that stem from that experience.
Here's my alternative description of conduction. See what you think: Conduction is when something warm comes in contact with something cooler. The warmer thing cools and the cooler thing warms until they have evened each other out (are at the same temperature).
This description of conduction can get you very far in understanding thermal physics. No atoms or molecules needed. I repeat, no atoms or molecules are needed to understand thermal physics at an introductory level, and even at a very high level.
You might ask, “Then when are you going to introduce them to atoms and molecules?” My answer is: “When their own work and thinking about science requires them to take it further into abstraction; or when they hear about it and get curious and ask me about them.”
In the air and water physics course that I'm teaching now, I plan to address the fact that water is often called “H2O”. Aha! you might say, now you have to talk about atoms and molecules. Nope, I don’t. I have set up a nifty hydrolysis device with a plastic cup, two tacks, a couple test tubes, and a battery. It’s quite easy to apply an electric current to water and generate hydrogen and oxygen gas, and then show the kids that you get twice as much hydrogen as oxygen by this method. Thus, “H2 - O”.
Then you might also ask: Ok, when will a science student reach the point that they must learn about atoms and molecules? My answer: “I have no idea because everybody is different. And many people may never get to that point; and if they never learn about atoms and molecules, but have a grounding in physical experience and practice with explanation that is grounded in their actual senses, they will be fine. And more than fine, they may even be much better off than their counterparts who had “atoms and molecules” drilled into them from a young age, and are simply regurgitating words.
And, again, you might ask me: What will you tell them when they've advanced enough to recognize abstract thinking when they see it, and want to know what atoms and molecules are? I will say, “The ideas of atoms and molecules are just that, ideas; they are abstract models that allow us to explain certain aspects of the behavior of the physical world in certain situations; but they are not objectively true outside of the context in which those ideas were developed. They are limited models (as all models are) that apply only in those situations in which the models were worked out in the first place, which is essentially the laboratory, the fission reactor and the cyclotron. At an even deeper level, my recent posting about Projective Geometry, in particular this post should hint to you that even the mathematical basis for the equations of physics that underlie atomic theory carry their own point-centered bias!
The great hubris of science today compels science teachers and science students alike to bow at the altar of atoms and molecules. I have no problem with atomic and molecular theory, put in its proper place. But, it’s hard to keep from getting a little testy when I have worksheets like this to contend with. I know that we can do better. And doing better is exactly what I am trying to do through my own teaching of water and air science. I hope to share some more of what I’m doing and how I’m doing it with you soon!
Photo by Shaouraav Shreshtha on Unsplash
I love your approach! In 8th grade I was lucky enough to participate in an intense hands on science class where we did experiments to understand what was happening. (thanks, Mr. Meisner!)
I hope you made such a great a
impact on your students that they remember you 55 years later!
Your description of conduction was perfectly appropriate for that age group (and for us old foggies). 😜