出生日期英语【优质】tedTyler DeWittHey science teachers make it fun

2021年1月19日发(作者：pick什么意思)
Tyler DeWitt: Hey science teachers -- make it

It's my first year as a new high school science teacher, and I'm so
eager. I'm so excited, I'm pouring myself into my lesson plans. But
I'm slowly coming to this horrifying realization that my students just
might not be learning anything.
This happens one day: I'd just assigned my class to read this textbook
chapter about my favorite subject in all of biology: viruses and how
they attack. And so I'm so excited to discuss this with them, and I
come in and I say,
why this is so cool?
There's silence. Finally, my favorite student, she looks me straight in
the eye, and she says,
She said,
didn't understand a word of it. It's boring. Um, who cares, and it
sucks.
These sympathetic smiles spread all throughout the room now, and I
realize that all of my other students are in the same boat, that maybe
they took notes or they memorized definitions from the textbook, but
not one of them really understood the main ideas. Not one of them
can tell me why this stuff is so cool, why it's so important.
I'm totally clueless. I have no idea what to do next. So the only thing
I can think of is say,
characters in the story are bacteria and viruses. These guys are blown
up a couple million times. The real bacteria and viruses are so small
we can't see them without a microscope, and you guys might know
bacteria and viruses because they both make us sick. But what a lot of
people don't know is that viruses can also make bacteria sick.
Now, the story that I start telling my kids, it starts out like a horror
story.
Once upon a time
there's this happy little bacterium. Don't get
too attached to him. Maybe he's 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 -- Ouch is right! -- 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,
this bacterium. Here's what had to happen. A virus grabbed onto a
bacterium and it slipped its DNA 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. Because, you see, DNA is like a blueprint that tells living
things what to make. So this is kind of like going into a car factory and
replacing the blueprints with blueprints for killer robots. The workers
still come the next day, they do their job, but they're following
different instructions. So replacing the bacteria DNA with virus DNA
turns the bacteria into a factory for making viruses -- that is, until it's
so filled with viruses that it bursts. But that's not the only way that
viruses infect bacteria. Some are much
more crafty
. When a secret
agent virus infects a bacterium, they do a little
espionage
. Here, this
cloaked, secret agent virus is slipping his DNA into the bacterial cell,
but here's the kicker: It doesn't do anything harmful -- not at first.
Instead, it silently slips into the bacteria's own DNA, and it just stays
there like a terrorist sleeper cell, waiting for instructions. And what's
interesting about this is now whenever this bacteria has babies, the
babies also have the virus DNA in them. So now we have a whole
extended bacteria family, filled with virus sleeper cells. They're just
happily living together until a signal happens and -- BAM! -- all of the
DNA pops out. It takes control of these cells, turns them into
virus-making factories, and they all burst, a huge, extended bacteria
family, all dying with viruses spilling out of their guts, the viruses
taking over the bacterium. So now you understand how viruses can
attack cells. There are two ways: On the left is what we call the lytic
way, where the viruses go right in and take over the cells. On the
[right] is the lysogenic way that uses secret agent viruses.


So this stuff is not that hard, right? And now all of you understand it.
But if you've graduated from high school, I can almost guarantee
you've seen this information before. But I bet it was presented in a
way that it didn't exactly stick in your mind.
So when my students were first learning this, why did they hate it so
much? Well, there were a couple of reasons.
First of all, I can guarantee you that their textbooks didn't have secret
agent viruses, and they didn't have horror stories. You know, in the
communication of science there is this obsession 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
and
fun when they're learning science. So we have this field of science
that's all about slime, and color changes. Check this out. And then we
have, of course, as any good scientist has to have, explosions! But if
a textbook seems too much fun, it's somehow unscientific.
Now another problem was that the language in their textbook was
truly incomprehensible. If we want to summarize that story that I told
you earlier, we could start by saying something like,
make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium.
The way this showed up in the textbook, it looked like this:

nucleic acid into a bacterium.
But here's the thing. There are plenty of people in science education
who would look at this and say there's no way that we could ever give
that to students, because it contains some language that isn't
completely accurate. For example, I told you that viruses have DNA.
Well, a very tiny fraction of them don't. They have something called
RNA instead. So a professional science writer would circle that and say,

technical.
this really simple explanation, they'd find fault with almost every word
I've used, and they'd have to change anything that wasn't serious
enough, and they'd have to change everything that wasn't 100
percent perfect. Then it would be accurate, but it would be completely
impossible to understand. This is horrifying.

9:23
You know, I keep talking about this idea of telling a story, and it's like
science communication has taken on this idea of what I call the
tyranny of precision, where you can't just tell a story. It's like science
has become that horrible storyteller that we all know, who gives us all
the details nobody cares about, where you're like,
friend for lunch the other day, and she was wearing these ugly jeans.
I mean, they weren't really jeans, they were more kind of, like,
leggings
, but, like, I guess they're actually kind of more like jeggings,
like, but I think
—

point?
who always says,
had to get up in the middle of the night and drive a hundred miles in
total darkness.
you're like,
Because good storytelling is all about emotional connection. We have
to convince our audience that what we're talking about matters. But
just as important is knowing which details we should leave out so that
the main point still comes across. I'm reminded of what the architect
Mies van der Rohe said, and I paraphrase, when he said that
sometimes you have to lie in order to tell the truth. I think this
sentiment is particularly relevant to science education.
Now, finally, I am 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 detailed, specific scientific communication between
experts, but not when we're trying to teach 13-year-olds. If a young
learner thinks that all viruses have DNA, that's not going to ruin their
chances of success in science. But if a young learner can't understand
anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this,
that will ruin their chances of success.
This needs to stop, and I wish that the change could come from the
institutions at the top that are perpetuating these problems, and I beg
them, I
beseech
them to just stop it. But I think that's unlikely. So we
are so lucky that we have resources like the Internet, where we can
circumvent these institutions from the bottom up. There's a growing
number of online resources that are dedicated to just explaining
science in simple, understandable ways. I dream of a Wikipedia-like
website that would explain any scientific concept you can think of in
simple language any middle schooler can understand. And I myself
spend most of my free time making these science videos that I put on
YouTube. I explain chemical equilibrium using analogies to awkward
middle school dances, and I talk about fuel cells with stories about
boys and girls at a summer camp. The feedback that I get is
sometimes misspelled and it's often written in LOLcats, but
nonetheless it's so appreciative, so thankful that I know this is the
right way we should be communicating science.
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