Serendipity

Reading a fascinating article called Serendipity is No Accident by Robert Friedel recently reminded me of the importance of teaching students how to think as much as teaching them what to think. Friedel points to the role of serendipity in science as crucial to many of the discoveries made over time. He discusses serendipity as "the insightful use of deduction-the sort of thing that any reader of the detective stories of Arthur Conan Doyle would recognize of Sherlock Holmes, "It's elementary, my dear Watson." He also says, "Insight is every bit as important as the accident. Simply to stumble upon something of value is not serendipity; that requires a mental capacity that goes beyond the obvious." Friedel goes on to categorize different types of serendipity and to explain how it has figured into the history of chemistry.

In an age of rapidly increasing amounts of information, and even more ways to access that information, we know that it's just not possible to know everything. (Not that it ever was for that matter.) For a humorous riff on this, check out A. J. Jacobs' book, The Know It-All: One Man's Humble Quest To Become The Smartest Man in the World. Nevertheless, with all of the talk of teaching students skills rather than content, we all too often fall into the trap of teaching students as if there's a body of knowledge out there that if they can just learn, they will be set. Our education continues to be set up in this way, and we remain fixed in this mode. Make no mistake, we are improving, and the meter that measures content versus skills has moved from where it was, but we still have a way to go.

Don't get me wrong. Students must have the foundational knowledge and the skills to be able to spot a surprise when it occurs. There are some facts that they need to know, and they need to understand that these facts are immutable and crucial. However, they also must learn that these facts are nothing more than the initial set of conditions. As the historian Barbara Tuchman once discussed, the facts of history are like the wood with which a carpenter builds. They are important, but they are nothing without the carpenter shaping them into something. Or as Friedel says, "But the true combination to science....is in making the surprise fit some larger scheme of meaning."

In addition to teaching students how to solve problems and think, we must help them develop what Art Costa refers to as habits of mind. Students must learn to not only be critical and analytical. We must help them be open to insightful deduction. Like the scientists in Friedel's article, they need to prepare for finding one thing when they are looking for something else and they need to be open to finding something by an alternative route than they originally designed. While this may be unsettling and even frightening, we need to challenge students that this is how science has progressed and assure them that not only is this permissible, but it is imperative.

Perhaps one of the most important traits we can teach students is knowledge based humility. One cannot find something if one is not looking, so we must begin by helping them learn what are the possibilities that are out there for them. After they have learned the first principles, they need to be prepared to move on to the next level, and they must be ready to expend energy and to work long hours to get there. Nevertheless, if they don't realize that there are possibilities that they have never envisioned, they will remain closed to the discoveries that their peers will make. To close with one more quotation from Friedel, "The quintessential joy of serendipitous science lies in its capacity to remind us that, as much as we know, we know only a fraction of what is to be known. As the accidents tell us and the sagacity to use them confirms, we do not even truly know what it is we do not know."

An Empathic On Line Community

On Wednesday, May 5th, the New York Times ran an article on a new social networking site called Formspring. (There is a link to the article below.) This site, which can be linked to one's Facebook page and Twitter account, allows one to make comments regarding his/her peers for all to read. As the article highlights, this site allows even greater potential for cyber bullying than sites where people are identified since anyone, including adolescents, can make snide and damaging remarks about other people anonymously and consequently with no repercussions. We know that students have been writing and making biting remarks about others for a long time, and at times, they have scribbled these comments anonymously on sidewalks and bathroom walls. So one might ask if this site is simply another way of doing what they have already done.

In addition, the article notes the temptation for students to read things about themselves even when they wish not to. Much as we find ourselves peering at accidents when we try to look away, these students cannot prevent themselves from reading disparaging comments about themselves when they fully realize that they may be hurt in the process. Here again, we know that students in high school can badger others to "tell me, tell me" what someone said about them when they know full well that they do not want to hear it.

So, what's the difference between what students are experiencing in cyber space and actual space, outside of the medium of the communication. First of all, to quote Marshall McCluhan, the medium is the message. The fact that students are sitting in their bedrooms by themselves or on their Smartphones allows their messages to be nastier and even more degrading; we all know that furiously typing and hitting the send button is much easier than saying something to someone's face. The absence of an immediate and physical recipient enables one to be on the one hand more brazen and on the other hand less responsible. We know this rationally, but we are reminded of it daily as we sit alone disconnected from the content of the messages we write and the people on the other end of them.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the anonymity of sites like Formspring. I remember many years when for the first and only time, I joined in a YouTube thread conversation;in this case, it was regarding a song by Elton John. I made what I thought was a rather innocuous statement about Bernie Taupin's composing the lyrics of a well-known tune only to see the next comment in the thread toward me characterized by profanity and mean-spiritedness. I sat there stunned and wondering if this person, who I did not know, would have said those things to me if we had been in the same room. I realize that this could have been an anomaly, but I have to believe that there are probably many other examples like this.

On the same day that I read the article on Formspring, I spoke with some 8th graders at Crossroads College Prep about this site and the anonymity it offers. As is typical, our students reaffirmed my faith in the good judgement of many adolescents; they were appalled that people would take advantage of this site to trash others. However, for those who use sites like Formspring, the mass audience it offers makes it qualitatively and quantitatively different than merely scrawling something on the bathroom wall. With a snicker and push of a button that will send a message to many more people than merely who will read a comment written someplace, one person can destroy the life of another; this has been seen all too often in the attempted and successful suicides by teenagers across the country, including Missouri.

Both the medium and the message are different, and as educators and as parents, we owe our children lessons in how to live in a cyber world that has a code of ethics and personal responsibility. To allow them free rein in the virtual world is to invite them pain in the physical world. The philosopher and writer Jeremy Rifkin in his new book called The Empathic Civilization points out that with vehicles like Skype, we may be able to create a greater sense of empathy in our children as they learn to relate to others in far off places in ways that they could not before. How wonderful it would be if instead of our new forms of technology causing even more rancor and division they actually brought people together. Wouldn't it be great if our cyber world allowed us, to paraphrase Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, to put on another man's shoes on and walk around in them for a while.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/06formspring.html?scp=1&sq=formspring&st=cse