DEVELOPING STUDENTS' POWERS OF OBSERVATION

A student who has a rich supply of real experiences is easy to teach; a teacher's words are more meaningful and explanations trigger memories and unanswered questions: "Aha, so that is why . . . ."Once a student builds this additional understanding, the student in turn pays closer attention to additional related experiences--actually "sees more." This is why an athlete pays closer attention when you explain muscles or why a farm kid lingers longer in front of a museum display of a hawk. At one time, our school children were experience-rich (about the natural world) and we provided the information that made it all come together. Today we must provide both the information and the experience base to make it meaningful.

Beyond the senses that frame our experiences are three properties of outside experiences that are relied upon to develop an accurate mental map of the world using a scientific "attitude."

INTERACTION--The old teaching machines and their modern computer counterparts claim to be "interactive" based on one property: they provide a different response to the varied student input at the keyboard. But interacting with a real "liver" does not feel or taste or smell or sound like a keyboard and only partly resembles the visual image presented. If there were true interaction, we could fully teach students to drive or swim at a computer terminal. Obviously the bumps of the road, the jerks of the steering wheel, and the buoyancy of the water are essential interactive experiences to driving and swimming.

TEST TRUTHFULNESS--Once we reach out to poke and prod (interact with) the real world, we watch carefully for what happens. We get much additional information about our world this way. But the back of a photo doesn't show you the other side of the liver. And the plastic model does not have live cell structure. But the dissected animal does "test true:" it shows the other side, the microstructures, and anything else you want to ask of it well beyond what the teacher or textbook author ever anticipated. There is nothing more misleading than a fruit fly computer "lab" that gives exact 3:1 offspring from a hybrid cross. Computer "dissections" are also false in their "perfection." A small percentage of humans (and animals) are right-left reversed. A larger number have four instead of two kidneys. Abnormalities are an added bonus in real labs.

REAL CONSEQUENCES--In the real world, if your knowledge is wrong, you suffer the consequences. If you make a driving error, you have a wreck.

If you open your mouth underwater, you cough and sputter. But this does not happen when you use all those abstract "alternatives." Students sheltered by an abstract curriculum not only remember less, they don't worry about the consequences of not knowing. Personally, I am glad that marginally competent drivers have to suffer the consequences of their accidents, for that is the only factor that keeps them on their side of the road. Likewise, our safety during epidemics of contagious diseases relies on a general minimal level of biological and medical understanding in the public at large. And we individually suffer (perhaps die) if we do not know a pain in the lower abdomen may be appendicitis and not a stomachache. Dissections and tours of slaughterhouses and hospitals add the vital dimension of "real consequences" that is desperately lacking in much of U.S. education today.