Linking the wonders of science to the human imagination changes the way we should think about engaging our students…less a matter of the proportions of nature than the outrageous proportions of how we understand these things.  Furthermore, if I am aiming for students to make sense of things, I have found that I cannot live in a house made of right answers.  This may seem a bit bizarre, but perhaps I can explain myself.

There is a tendency to think that as we teach science at each different grade level we are laying a solid foundation and then adding to it carefully, brick by brick.  But I prefer a different construction metaphor, one borrowed from the tale of the three little pigs.  When they are young the idea is to help children build a house reflecting how they understand the world.  We don’t need to clutter it with atoms or chemical formulas, with curious notions like the earth is a planet and the sun is standing still even as we watch it move across the daytime sky.  This will be a house of straw.  It will be tested and like Jesse they will see that their house is wanting, that it was not strong enough.  So we help them build another house.  This one of sticks.  It will be stronger, but still it will be wanting and so they will go on re-building until they make that house of bricks, the house that is still standing so far.  But we should not forget that the modern house of science is a most bizarre house, built not of atoms but of quarks and other curious entities guided by quantum mechanics and relativity and perhaps held together by strings and who knows what else.  It is a house that is a lifetime in coming, a lifetime of building and re-building.  Given the proportions of this house, we realize that we haven’t been teaching the right answers in the first place!  We’ve been letting a curious attachment to a certain manner of wrong answer clutter things.

Stop and think about other areas of school study, like learning how to read.  We may have in mind that our high school graduates will read Shakespeare or Faulkner, but we do not teach children the vocabulary they will need then.  We give them good stories, age-appropriate stories.  We may start with Ezra Jack Keats and move on to Beverly Cleary and after Cleary, there’s Walter Dean Meyers, or perhaps Rudyard Kipling, I loved Kipling.  The point is we nurture their growth as readers.  Let’s do the same in the sciences.