Sonnet—To Science
Edgar Allen Poe
Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?
While Walt Whitman's writings express admiration for the open-mindedness and willingness to suspend judgement that are hallmarks of the best scientists (See What is Science?), Poe's narrator responds to another aspect of science, the findings that sometimes conflict with cherished or comforting beliefs. Poe's images suggest woodland spirits torn from their pastoral homes and replaced with the "dull realities" of scientific findings. For the poet particularly, these spirits personify vital forces that evoke mystery and wonder.
In a strict scientific view, Diana, the Hamadryad, Naiads, and elves are not physical beings whose existence we can agree on, whose dimensions we can measure, whose metabolisms we can study. So what do their roles become if we don't believe that they are material beings? Are they therefore of no use or importance? Despite Poe's lament, poets are still writing about these woodland spirits.
Whitman treats science again in this often-quoted poem.
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proof, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured
with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
It is always dangerous to assume that the narrator of a poem is the poet herself or himself. After all, a poet (or any story teller) might write from numerous points of view, and might create a poetic character who describes a situation from a more moving point of view than that of the poet or storyteller—for example, a deceased person might narrate the events of their own death, as in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," by Ambrose Bierce (read it at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/375).
So it makes sense to ask: Is the viewpoint of the narrator of "Astronomer" compatible with the viewpoints of Whitman in the interview, and of the narrator of "Song of Myself"? (Both are quoted in "What is Science?") This narrator sounds, at first thought, more like the one in Poe's poem. But is it?
In my former life as a biochemistry teacher, I handed out copies of this poem at the end of our study of enzyme kinetics, the mathematics that describes what a scientist can learn about enzyme-promoted reactions by measuring their rates under various conditions. If the spirit moved me, I would read it aloud to the class, particularly if I could see that the students were “tired and sick” of the subject, and hoping we would shortly turn from mathematical concerns, with symbolic E's and P's, to some "real" enzymes, "real" substrates, and some at least visually concrete models of enzyme action. Perhaps, I was guessing, they have had enough, for now, of my reducing all of biology to the Michaelis-Menten equation, a snippet of algebra that describes the simplest of enzyme models. At such a time, they might well heed the poet's invitation to simply go out and look in wonder at some natural object, and see that the beauty accessible to naive wonder is still there.
In my view, when you have achieved a new, deeper understanding of some aspect of the natural world, such as the chemistry that produces the colors of autumn leaves, the beauty certainly is still there, but now it runs deeper, engaging imagination as well as perception. A chemist’s world is populated not only with easily perceived objects, but also with imagined atoms, molecules, equations, and reaction pathways, all congruent with the perceived world, insofar as scientific progress allows it. Congruence is a pretty thing, and the wider its expanse, and the finer the fit, the prettier.
So I am not content with one common and superficially plausible interpretation of this poem: that the narrator rejects objective analysis of natural processes. The narrator is curious; after all, he or she attended the lecture. And most interpreters of Whitman’s poetry do not accuse him of being hostile to science. Even if tired and sick of the Astronomer's presentation, if our narrator understood even a bit of it, there is now more to see in the stars than there was before the lecture.
To me, part of the beauty of scientific knowledge is that is opens a window on the unseen world, and the seen world no longer looks the same. The world of our immediate senses is not reduced to "nothing but" the analytical model. Instead, it is enriched by containing the imagined model within its outer beauty. What we see, after a deeper enlightenment, encompasses the fruits of analysis, and thus is larger, not smaller, for being analyzed. The student can look with new respect at sky, leaf, or insect, recognizing that their outward intricacy is not superficial, but that they are intricate and beautiful at every level of observation or analysis. (1)
Are there any passive ways to learn?
It has not escaped my notice that the poem can also be taken to advocate active, rather than passive, approaches to learning. Looking at stars is a powerful way to motivate interest in, and to teach, astronomy. Recently, I ran into this poem again, in a collection of poetry for daily reading. At first, I thought I was being given a day off from deciphering a new poem, but then I decided to read it as if I had never seen it before. Maybe, I thought, I will find something new.
What struck me on this new reading was the passive nature of the narrator’s experience in the lecture hall. When “I heard” when figures “were ranged before me”, when “I was shown” illustrations. The satisfying last three lines, which resolve the essential tension of the poem, are all in active voice.
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
On this reading, I felt anew the suggestion that active engagement with a subject is preferable to passive listening. I believe that good teachers know this instinctively, and put it to use by finding ways to engage students actively in their education. And good teachers have done so since long before Confucius said, “What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.”
New and not so new
When I first began teaching, in the early 1970s, I was immediately wheeled off to conferences about alternative teaching methods, most of which were simply (and admirably) methods of engaging students in thoughtful action, rather than in just listening in class, or repeating strict procedures to achieve well-known outcomes in lab (such as measuring the volume of one mole of an ideal gas).
When I was a rookie, something called “self-paced learning” was the new rage, while “inquiry-centered learning” was the cat’s pajamas for lab courses. Since then, the pages of science education journals have featured, in no particular order, “active learning,” “student-centered learning,” “peer-led learning”, “peer-led team learning,” and “group learning,” to name a few. (Note the absence of the word “teaching,” which has sometimes been tantamount to profanity in education circles.) Each method seems to return, with a catchy new name, about every ten years, and each is trotted out as brand new on every apparition. These heroic new measures are not usually compared with, or set against, each other, but instead are intended to dispatch once and for all the black-whiskered villains of “lecture” and “cookbook lab.”
With each iteration of _____ (fill in the blank) versus lecture, proponents have increased their efforts to convince us that their method rigorously follow the tenets of “learning theory,” and to show us quantitatively that their pet method is “better” than the dreaded lecture. Data-collection methods range from simply asking the students (guess what they say), to dividing them into class sections that we might call experimentals (the new method) and controls (lecture, taught, I am afraid, by the instructors who are most resistant to change), and then comparing students’ initial and final knowledge or skill, as judged by some sort of standard exams, or worse, by student self-reporting. The resulting data is presented with gleeful QEDs. To a research scientist, such data is wholly unconvincing.
The motivation for these efforts is admirable. Something is certainly going wrong in science education, if we judge by comparisons of math and science exam performance in the U.S. with that in almost any other country. And we are right to try anything that appears to help our students learn more and faster. But a deadly aspect of these discussions is their almost total concentration on education methods, while the subject is an afterthought, if a thought at all. The unquestioned assumption is that if we find the right methods, our students will learn. Whitman’s narrator would certainly “soon unaccountable become tired and sick” at science-education meetings, after a few reports on the effects of new teaching methods. These results are most often presented, by the way, as lectures.
I am also suspicious about the supposed pervasiveness of that villain, the lecture. I was part of four different chemistry departments, in colleges small and large, private and public, and I was never surrounded by colleagues whose teaching methods were limited to the stereotyped lecture. Even when I think way back to my undergraduate years, I don’t recall many teachers who simply lectured as if we were not there. Each had her or his own ways of engaging us—without clickers or game-show devices—in thinking about and talking about the subject, even if their main method was simply to inspire or require us to go home and read or solve problems, powerful tools for active learning.
In my fondest classroom memories, methods were transparent, and the subject is my primary memory—along with the best jokes. I believe that the dreaded lecture often is a straw icon, set up to fall easily at the first blow from the latest method. On the other hand, over the years, from my own teachers, from colleagues, and from visiting speakers, I have heard some terrific lectures: clear, vivid, powerful, inspiring. Lectures, in skilled hands, can teach as well as other methods.
Perhaps what Whitman’s narrator failed to find in the astronomy lecture, but what I remember from my best teachers, was passion. When students praise a teacher, they don’t usually mention teaching methods (unless the instructor has made too big a deal of them). Instead, students talk about attributes like enthusiasm, knowledge of the subject, clarity of explanations, respect for students, and vividness of examples—oh, and quality of jokes. I suspect that if class activities inspire curiosity and love of the subject, and provide motivation to go back to the library and work a bunch of problems, then learning will occur, whatever the method.
Theories of education
Practically everyone has a philosophy of education. Here is mine. It comes in two parts. (2)
There are no good teaching philosophies. Not one of them is really adequate to the task. Not one of them grows from, nor do teachers have, adequate understanding of truth, of knowledge, of communication, of how we think, of how we learn. They haven't the foundation of data, nor the reliable laws, to formulate a sensible theory of this discipline called education, despite the confident pronouncements of learning theorists. Any teaching philosophy, whatever its form, is a guess.
There are no bad teaching philosophies. Fortunately, humans are inherently prodigious and natural learners, and given some reason to learn, such as interest, they cannot be stopped. No educational plan—if executed with enthusiasm; with deep understanding of, and profound love for, the specific area of learning, and for learning itself; with sensitivity toward, and concern for, students and their plight; with the willingness to in fact be a student—no educational philosophy carried forth in this manner can possibly fail.
Learning is active, by definition, whether it occurs by listening or doing. Students will learn—with the aid, or despite the ineptness, of their teachers—and like the narrator who heard the learned astronomer, students will see the stars anew.
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(1) The poem A Deeper Grandeur is in a similar vein.
(2) This philosophy is mentioned briefly in Laws of Education. (Another more cynical law: If you give exams, they will learn.)
