美国国家公共电台 NPR Tyler DeWitt: How Do We Get Kids Hooked On Science?

 

GUY RAZ, HOST:

It's the TED¹ Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So remember your high school science class? Maybe you had a textbook that sounded something like this.

TYLER DEWITT: Remember that a water molecule³ is polar, with a partial negative charge on the oxygen atom and partial positive charges on the hydrogen atoms...

RAZ: This is Tyler DeWitt.

DEWITT: So, you know, good luck teaching that to 13-year-olds.

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RAZ: Before Tyler got his Ph.D., he taught high school chemistry and biology. And one day, he realized that he just wasn't getting through to his students.

DEWITT: I'm so excited to be describing and teaching my favorite topic in all of biology, which is viruses and bacteria. And I look out at all these students that I'm teaching, and they just have completely blank faces, right? It's like, the joy that I've brought to the subject myself - you know, they're like, where is this coming from? Because we're not finding it in the textbook. And, you know, what you appreciate in this subject is completely not our experience right now.

RAZ: So you had a student - what? - like, raise their hand and say, this is just boring?

DEWITT: Yeah. I was, like, you know, can somebody just kind of explain the general gist⁴ of what you read in the textbook last night? And a student raises her hand. And she's like, yeah, I can tell you the gist. It was boring. It made no sense whatsoever⁵ - totally confusing. It sucked. And why should I care? It was great because, you know, it's that kind of honesty that you only get from young people. That sort of edgy⁶, teenage honesty can be a really good thing. And it was just sort of this wake-up moment for me. I was like, wow.

If your only experience with this is reading the textbook, I can understand why you'd feel that way about this. It's such a shame how many creative, critical-thinking people relatively⁷ rote⁸, dry science education turns off. You know, it's like how many Nobel Prizes, how many cures to cancer, you know, how many solutions to our energy challenges are locked in the minds of people who will never go anywhere near the scientific fields because they were so intimidated⁹ or turned off when they were in formal education? And they thought God, you know, I could never do that. I could never be a scientist.

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RAZ: You know, for most of modern history, humans have taken smaller humans, roughly between the ages of 6 and 17, and we've put them in these institutions to educate them. We call them schools. And that system is pretty much the same wherever you go, practically unchanged for 200 years. Kids sit in a room with a bunch of other kids. They listen to some information. They repeat it a few times and then they go home.

So today on the show, we're going to take a look at ideas about rethinking education - how we might want to change school, from the classroom to the technology available to the way we value teachers and the students they educate, and how all of this could transform education. But for Tyler DeWitt, rethinking education, especially science education, isn't actually all that complicated. It just takes some creativity.

DEWITT: Students really struggle to see how any of what they're learning really applies to their lives, really how science is more than a laundry list of memorized definitions and sort of nonsensical equations.

RAZ: So back when Tyler was teaching about his favorite biology topic - bacteria and viruses - and his students basically told him that it sucked, he decided¹⁰ to change his approach with a story.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

DEWITT: Now the story that I start telling my kids - it starts out like a horror story.

RAZ: Here's Tyler DeWitt on the TED stage.

DEWITT: Once upon a time, there's this happy little bacterium¹¹. Don't get too attached to him. Maybe he is floating around in your stomach or in some spoiled food somewhere. And all of a sudden, he starts to not feel so good. Maybe he ate something bad for lunch. And then things get really horrible as his skin rips apart and he sees a virus coming out from his insides. And then it gets horrible when he bursts open and an army of viruses floods out from his insides. If you see this and you're a bacterium, this is, like, your worst nightmare.

But if you're a virus and you see this, you cross those little legs of yours and you think, we rock because it took a lot of crafty¹² work to infect this bacterium. Here's what had to happen. A virus grabbed onto a bacterium, and it slipped its DNA¹³ into it. The next thing is that virus DNA made stuff that chopped up the bacteria DNA. And now that we've gotten rid of the bacteria DNA, the virus DNA takes control of the cell and it tells it to start making more viruses.

So when my students were first learning this, why did they hate it so much? Well, I can guarantee you that their textbooks didn't have horror stories. You know, in the communication of science, there is this obsession¹⁴ with seriousness. It kills me. I'm not kidding. I used to work for an educational publisher. And as a writer, I was always told never to use stories or fun, engaging language because then my work might not be viewed as serious and scientific. Right? I mean, because God forbid somebody have fun when they're learning science.

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RAZ: I mean, did you face any challenges from people who were like, well, that's just wrong? That's just wrong science. You can't - you can't turn bacteria and a virus into these characters without explaining the this and that and the exceptions and the anomalies, et cetera, et cetera?

DEWITT: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I think that's one of the biggest issues with science education, and with trying to present science in an engaging way, particularly for young people. Science can be a highly technical discipline. And I think practitioners¹⁵ of that discipline will often argue, oh, you could never say this because that's dumbing it down. You know, that's ignoring an exception.

And so there's always this tension between presenting something in an engaging way and then this sort of other side of oh, no, you couldn't possibly say that because it's not completely correct. And that really frustrates¹⁶ me because in science, there is no perfectly¹⁷ correct explanation for anything. At every level of scientific information, we're presenting only part of the story. And we need to understand that we need to present what is relevant and what is accessible for each level of education appropriately.

RAZ: So you - how did that change the way you talked about science?

DEWITT: Yeah, so I realized that relying on textbooks to convey the information just wasn't going to cut it. And so what good teachers do is they look at all of this very highly-formalized information, all these resources, and a lot of what they do is translate it into this vernacular¹⁸ so that young people can, one, get excited about it, two, understand it and three, see how to apply it in a broader sort of cognitive¹⁹ sense.

And then they have to teach the students how to sort of package it back up and present it maybe on state or national assessments²⁰, again, in the sort of highly-formalized, jargon²¹-filled, very dispassionate kind of way.

RAZ: So Tyler took those ideas to YouTube, where he started to make and upload videos all about different kinds of subjects in science.

DEWITT: Where I started teaching all this information, not from a textbook, but in a way that students could understand...

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)

DEWITT: You can remember this because cats have paws, and a cat ion is positive.

...Using simple language...

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)

DEWITT: We could have a mole² of donuts, which would be 602 hexillion donuts.

...Using fun analogies.

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO)

DEWITT: A lot of people get confused by isotopes²². So I want to describe them by starting out with an analogy to cars, OK?

And originally, it was just for my students. And then, students from around the world started watching.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

DEWITT: I'm often so disappointed when people think that I'm advocating a dumbing-down of science. That's not true at all. I'm currently a Ph.D. student at MIT. And I absolutely understand the importance of detailed²³, specific, scientific communication between experts, but not when we're trying to teach 13-year-olds. And I wish that the change could come from the institutions at the top that are perpetuating²⁴ these problems. And I beg them, I beseech²⁵ them to just stop it. But I think that's unlikely.

So we are so lucky that we have resources where we can circumvent²⁶ these institutions from the bottom up. There's a growing number of online resources that are dedicated²⁷ to just explaining science in simple, understandable ways. There's still so much work left to be done, though. And if you're involved with science in any way, I urge you to join me. Pick up a camera, start to write a blog, whatever. But leave out the seriousness. Leave out the jargon. Make me laugh. Make me care. How should you start? Why don't you say listen, let me tell you a story?

RAZ: I mean, that kind of engagement requires a certain level of charisma²⁸ and creativity by the science teacher.

DEWITT: Yeah, I mean, I think it does. I also don't think that all science teachers need to be performers, that they need to be amazingly charismatic, right? I think there are many ways to make science engaging. But it does require that they look beyond just the facts and think more about what the overall purpose of education is and sort of what this broader narrative²⁹ is.

RAZ: You know, it seems to me that the underlying³⁰ idea here isn't necessarily about - just about science. It really is about conveying passion for something that is filled with wonder.

DEWITT: Oh, very much so. There is amazing wonder to be found in every academic subject. I obviously went into science because I think it's amazingly cool how we're able to investigate the wonders of the universe. And so we have this field that's all about just asking and answering these amazing questions. And rarely are we able to convey that excitement and wonder in traditional science education.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: Science educator Tyler DeWitt. He hosts a YouTube channel geared toward helping³¹ high school and college students with chemistry. It's called Science With Tyler DeWitt. By the way, since he gave this talk, Tyler did earn his Ph.D. in microbiology from MIT. You can see his full talk at ted.com. On the show today, Rethinking School. In a moment, what do Finland, Vietnam and Canada all have in common? Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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1 ted   

vt.翻晒，撒，撒开

参考例句：

• The invaders gut ted the village.侵略者把村中财物洗劫一空。
• She often teds the corn when it's sunny.天好的时候她就翻晒玉米。

2 mole   

n.胎块；痣；克分子

参考例句：

• She had a tiny mole on her cheek.她的面颊上有一颗小黑痣。
• The young girl felt very self- conscious about the large mole on her chin.那位年轻姑娘对自己下巴上的一颗大痣感到很不自在。

3 molecule   

n.分子，克分子

参考例句：

• A molecule of water is made up of two atoms of hygrogen and one atom of oxygen.一个水分子是由P妈̬f婘̬ 妈̬成的。
• This gives us the structural formula of the molecule.这种方式给出了分子的结构式。

4 gist   

n.要旨；梗概

参考例句：

• Can you give me the gist of this report?你能告诉我这个报告的要点吗？
• He is quick in grasping the gist of a book.他敏于了解书的要点。

5 whatsoever   

adv.（用于否定句中以加强语气）任何；pron.无论什么

参考例句：

• There's no reason whatsoever to turn down this suggestion.没有任何理由拒绝这个建议。
• All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you,do ye even so to them.你想别人对你怎样，你就怎样对人。

6 edgy   

adj.不安的；易怒的

参考例句：

• She's been a bit edgy lately,waiting for the exam results.她正在等待考试结果，所以最近有些焦躁不安。
• He was nervous and edgy, still chain-smoking.他紧张不安，还在一根接一根地抽着烟。

7 relatively   

adv.比较...地，相对地

参考例句：

• The rabbit is a relatively recent introduction in Australia.兔子是相对较新引入澳大利亚的物种。
• The operation was relatively painless.手术相对来说不痛。

8 rote   

n.死记硬背，生搬硬套

参考例句：

• Learning by rote is discouraged in this school.这所学校不鼓励死记硬背的学习方式。
• He recited the poem by rote.他强记背诵了这首诗。

9 intimidated   

v.恐吓；威胁adj.害怕的；受到威胁的

参考例句：

• We try to make sure children don't feel intimidated on their first day at school. 我们努力确保孩子们在上学的第一天不胆怯。
• The thief intimidated the boy into not telling the police. 这个贼恫吓那男孩使他不敢向警察报告。 来自《简明英汉词典》

10 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

11 bacterium   

n.(pl.)bacteria 细菌

参考例句：

• The bacterium possibly goes in the human body by the mouth.细菌可能通过口进入人体。
• A bacterium is identified as the cause for his duodenal ulcer.一种细菌被断定为造成他十二指肠溃疡的根源。

12 crafty   

adj.狡猾的，诡诈的

参考例句：

• He admired the old man for his crafty plan.他敬佩老者的神机妙算。
• He was an accomplished politician and a crafty autocrat.他是个有造诣的政治家，也是个狡黠的独裁者。

13 DNA   

(缩)deoxyribonucleic acid 脱氧核糖核酸

参考例句：

• DNA is stored in the nucleus of a cell.脱氧核糖核酸储存于细胞的细胞核里。
• Gene mutations are alterations in the DNA code.基因突变是指DNA密码的改变。

14 obsession   

n.困扰，无法摆脱的思想(或情感)

参考例句：

• I was suffering from obsession that my career would be ended.那时的我陷入了我的事业有可能就此终止的困扰当中。
• She would try to forget her obsession with Christopher.她会努力忘记对克里斯托弗的迷恋。

15 practitioners   

n.习艺者，实习者( practitioner的名词复数 )；从业者（尤指医师）

参考例句：

• one of the greatest practitioners of science fiction 最了不起的科幻小说家之一
• The technique is experimental, but the list of its practitioners is growing. 这种技术是试验性的，但是采用它的人正在增加。 来自辞典例句

16 frustrates   

v.使不成功( frustrate的第三人称单数 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧

参考例句：

• What frustrates him is that there's too little money to spend on the project. 使他懊恼的是，可用于这个项目的资金太少。
• His trouble is that he frustrates much easily. 他的毛病是很容易泄气。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

17 perfectly   

adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地

参考例句：

• The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定。
• Everything that we're doing is all perfectly above board.我们做的每件事情都是光明正大的。

18 vernacular   

adj.地方的，用地方语写成的；n.白话；行话；本国语；动植物的俗名

参考例句：

• The house is built in a vernacular style.这房子按当地的风格建筑。
• The traditional Chinese vernacular architecture is an epitome of Chinese traditional culture.中国传统民居建筑可谓中国传统文化的缩影。

19 cognitive   

adj.认知的，认识的，有感知的

参考例句：

• As children grow older,their cognitive processes become sharper.孩子们越长越大，他们的认知过程变得更为敏锐。
• The cognitive psychologist is like the tinker who wants to know how a clock works.认知心理学者倒很像一个需要通晓钟表如何运转的钟表修理匠。

20 assessments   

n.评估( assessment的名词复数 )；评价；（应偿付金额的）估定；（为征税对财产所作的）估价

参考例句：

• He was shrewd in his personal assessments. 他总能对人作出精明的评价。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Surveys show about two-thirds use such assessments, while half employ personality tests. 调查表明，约有三分之二的公司采用了这种测评；而一半的公司则采用工作人员个人品质测试。 来自百科语句

21 jargon   

n.术语，行话

参考例句：

• They will not hear critics with their horrible jargon.他们不愿意听到评论家们那些可怕的行话。
• It is important not to be overawed by the mathematical jargon.要紧的是不要被数学的术语所吓倒.

22 isotopes   

n.同位素；同位素( isotope的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• the many isotopes of carbon 碳的诸多同位素
• Tritium is one of the mildest radioactive isotopes. 氚是最和缓的放射性同位素之一。 来自《简明英汉词典》

23 detailed   

adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的

参考例句：

• He had made a detailed study of the terrain.他对地形作了缜密的研究。
• A detailed list of our publications is available on request.我们的出版物有一份详细的目录备索。

24 perpetuating   

perpetuate的现在进行式

参考例句：

• Revenge leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of violence. 怨怨相报会导致永不休止的暴力。
• It'set out to eradicate heresy, and ended by perpetuating it. 它的目的只是要根除异端邪说，结果却巩固了异端邪说。 来自英汉文学

25 beseech   

v.祈求，恳求

参考例句：

• I beseech you to do this before it is too late.我恳求你做做这件事吧，趁现在还来得及。
• I beseech your favor.我恳求您帮忙。

26 circumvent   

vt.环绕，包围；对…用计取胜，智胜

参考例句：

• Military planners tried to circumvent the treaty.军事策略家们企图绕开这一条约。
• Any action I took to circumvent his scheme was justified.我为斗赢他的如意算盘而采取的任何行动都是正当的。

27 dedicated   

adj.一心一意的；献身的；热诚的

参考例句：

• He dedicated his life to the cause of education.他献身于教育事业。
• His whole energies are dedicated to improve the design.他的全部精力都放在改进这项设计上了。

28 charisma   

n.(大众爱戴的)领袖气质，魅力

参考例句：

• He has enormous charisma. He is a giant of a man.他有超凡的个人魅力，是个伟人。
• I don't have the charisma to pull a crowd this size.我没有那么大的魅力，能吸引这么多人。

29 narrative   

n.叙述，故事；adj.叙事的，故事体的

参考例句：

• He was a writer of great narrative power.他是一位颇有记述能力的作家。
• Neither author was very strong on narrative.两个作者都不是很善于讲故事。

30 underlying   

adj.在下面的，含蓄的，潜在的

参考例句：

• The underlying theme of the novel is very serious.小说隐含的主题是十分严肃的。
• This word has its underlying meaning.这个单词有它潜在的含义。

31 helping   

n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的

参考例句：

• The poor children regularly pony up for a second helping of my hamburger. 那些可怜的孩子们总是要求我把我的汉堡包再给他们一份。
• By doing this, they may at times be helping to restore competition. 这样一来, 他在某些时候,有助于竞争的加强。