QUOTE:
"My advice to a high school student interested in science as a career would be to forget all the stuff they tell you in the textbooks about the answers. My advice to a high school sophomore or junior considering a career in science would be to close the science textbook for a minute and forget all the answers that their texts purport to be telling them.What you should steep yourself in is the ignorance, in what we don't know.
What is fascinating about science is to define the questions.
When we teach science in the high schools we try to teach people all the answers. Well, that's the answers to old dusty questions.
What we should be teaching people is how to ask good new questions. It is a tremendous art to ask good questions. To look at a situation and see that there is something going on and articulate clearly what is it that you want to know about that. To be willing to risk and to explore.
I'm sorry in a way that we don't capture it in the high school textbooks, high school curriculum, because we have to impart knowledge. But in fact it is ignorance that drives us. If we had knowledge about everything there would be no point in going into science.
And so what we have to do is convey our tremendous excitement about our ignorance, the wonderful potential of ignorance, and then we have to teach people how it is that you take raw ignorance and turn it into processed ignorance, and processed ignorance, well-defined ignorance, well-asked questions that we don't know the answer to, that's the root of experiment. It is processed ignorance, carefully constructed ignorance, and apply it to the situations.
I think kids interested in science should look around the world and start asking questions. And don't worry so much about all the facts that are in the books. Ask questions."
- Professor Eric Lander, Professor of 7.012 (Introductory Biology), Director of the Broad Institute, Co-Chair of Obama's President's Council on Science and Technology.
I think the above quote is very relevant to our generation. It's important to remember that exams aren't everything, and that life is truly about discovery rather than learning... not just in science but in all other aspects as well, I think :] anyway good luck to everyone for their exams
4 comments:
i think that in a way, exams take away all of our desire to learn anything.. i mean, how often do we hear people say, "do we need to know this?" or "if it's not in the exam then don't tell me about it"
so yeah. good thing to remember =)
@kim: exactly. btw how was calc :]
that's a cool quote, and makes me wonder about how you discover new things. If things have all been done before, how on earth do you come up with something completely new that's never been done and is completely revolutionary if you don't know what it is? Other people did it- but the problems were a bit more obvious then, ie the need for lightbulbs etc.
And yeah, another thing that annoys me is how we seem to only learn just so that we can use the info in exams and then go to uni and get nice jobs and get a house in the suburbs, la de da. I want to LEARN things so that I KNOW stuff, not be taught things so I can pass an exam.
It also annoys me how they don't teach you anything after exams, which just proves that the stuff you learn in the year is only for exams anyway. Last year we learned about biochem after exams and it was really interesting. We didn't have to, but we did because we had to be at school, and it was interesting. So yeah.
Anyway tl;dr haha
somewhat long, but did read. yeah I agree with you. but then you think about how back then, the need for lightbulbs wasn't that obvious. they already had candles. I think there are plenty of opportunities to invent stuff in our world, we just can't see it cuz we're so used to the limitations we already have :]
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