Origin stories (in science & math)

The third in the Egan Pattern Language

(A quick note — this Saturday, we’ll be doing our first-ever book club, on the essay “A Mathematician’s Lament”, and open to all paid subscribers. A quick registration form that actually works this time is at the very bottom of this post.)

1. A problem

In schools, we often treat content as obvious, but everything we teach in science and math began as a thrilling human discovery. When we reduce these discoveries to naked information, we pretend students are isolated atoms; this isn’t how humans have ever understood themselves, or ever learned.

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2. Basic plan

Oftentimes (but not always), introduce big ideas in science and math by including the wild stories of the people who discovered (or created) those ideas.

Sometimes this can be done quickly. For some information, it’s enough just to give a sense that the content didn’t originate in a textbook factory, but was spawned from the mind of a fellow human. For these things, it can be enough to…

• mention a name

• show an illustration of the person

• share some interesting tidbit about their life

At other times this will be done in more depth. For the most central ideas, we can go into the story of that person’s discovery (or creation). For this, we can… 

• tell something of their childhood, and how they emotionally understood the world

• communicate their sense that something was off

• prompt our students to figure out how the details really fit together

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3. What you might see

If you walk into the classroom, you might spot a teacher telling a story to students, even though it’s time for math class. Talking to students, you might find that most of them are as conversant with the exploits of Georg Cantor, Marie Curie, & John Snow as they are of Taylor Swift, Elon Musk, and LeBron James.

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4. Why?

Too often, we misconstrue what an academic curriculum is. 

Every four-year-old trying to learn the alphabet is in a similar position to the ancient Greeks, squinting at Phoenician squiggles. Every middle-school student trying to understand natural selection is in a similar position to a young Charles Darwin, pouring over his notebooks on his return from his journey around the world. Every high schooler trying to understand quadratic equations stands in a similar spot to Muhammad ibn al-Khwarizmi, working in Baghdad in the Islamic Golden Age.¹

That is to say: the K–12 content isn’t “information”, it’s history congealed. To learn something is to re-enact what the original content creators did. When we understand this, we unlock interest — these people’s stories are fascinating. We unlock understanding — random data that we previously tried to blindly memorize suddenly pops into meaning — oh, THAT’S why he called it al-jebra! We unlock connection — we feel that we’re not alone in this; we’re surrounded by a great host of adventurers. On occasion, we learn to see some of them in us.

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5. Egan’s insight

Where do we see this in the human experience?

Over the millennia, humans learned by grafting themselves into their group’s imagined past. We do it still: academics are part of anthropology. Scholarship is a type of culture, and cultures tell the stories of their heroes and villains.

♪♬ We tell the story of our elders in a never-ending chain… ♫♩

A geneticist, for example, can tell you the story of James Watson breaking news of the discovery of DNA to his waitress: “We’ve just discovered the secret of life”. They can also tell you the gossip about his personal life: arrogant and confrontational, and mired in political controversy. A logician can tell you Bertrand Russell’s doomed quest to discover the foundation of mathematics, and his reaction to reading Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.

Egan realized that these human connections are load-bearing to real human understanding. The curriculum is people. 

How might this build different kinds of understanding?

Weekly reminder: At the heart of Egan’s understanding of education is the notion that, for humans, certain practices and formats of information are special. Egan calls them “tools”, because throughout history, cultures have used them to pass themselves down. He groups them into five “toolkits” — SOMATIC (🤸‍♀️), MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️), ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️), PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬), and IRONIC (😏).

Well.

This is all a way of grounding science and math (typically treated as PHILOSOPHIC pursuits) in MYTHIC tools like 🧙‍♂️STORIES — ones that have already been told a hundred times. Less obviously, iconic stories usually center on a 🧙‍♂️VIVID MENTAL IMAGE: think Newton and the apple, Archimedes jumping out of the bathtub, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin growing accidentally in his lab as he returned from vacation, Nikola Tesla’s sudden vision of a rotating magnetic field as he was walking in the park, reciting lines from “Faust” with a friend.²

All of this hammers home the ROMANTIC sense of 🦹‍♂️HEROES and 🦹‍♂️HUMANIZING KNOWLEDGE (which in my ACX book review I called “gossip”), and often links up students’ 🦹‍♂️IDEALS with those of the original discoverers, especially when that ideal is 👩‍🔬THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH.

IRONICALLY (and also just ironically), seeing knowledge as coming from stories makes us skeptical that these are “true” in the simple “I trust the science” way: we begin to 😏APPRECIATE AMBIGUITY, and seek out more perspectives, more diverse opinions.

But the ultimate goal of this, I suspect, is SOMATIC: before we care about theory, we care about 🤸‍♀️ATTACHMENT. And this is a way to attach ourselves imaginatively to the long story of scientific and mathematical discovery.

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6. This might be especially useful for…

Obviously, this is good for the sort of students who are more interested in people than they are in things. And this is probably most people.

Source. Right now, math and science are in a lot of people’s red zones.

Less obviously, this is also better for thing-oriented, Aspie-adjacent STEM-heads! This means more time spent on science & math; it also means that neurodiverse classrooms³ can become cultures in which a love of science & math is shared. This might be useful for making those nerds feel fully welcomed.

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7. How could this go wrong?

The tales of these interesting people become boring stories of cardboard heroes

This would be bad. 

Instead of making the concepts easier to understand, stories just distract from ‘em

This, too, would be bad!

Teachers assume kids have to memorize every name or story, and turn joy into pain

Some names really are worth learning (and frankly you, as an education-interested adult, probably know a bunch of them already). But most aren’t.⁴

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8. Classroom setup

How might the physical classroom environment support this?

On the walls, we memorialize these people. There are too many of these discoverers to try to memorialize all of them, but illustrations of some of the most important ones should hang on the classroom wall. The illustrations should be attractive, and capture some interesting details of the person that help distinguish them — their clothing (which is especially helpful in differentiating people in different ages and geographies), their hair and facial characteristics, and perhaps some props (e.g. Newton holding on apple).

We might want to stock classrooms with some useful popular books on the history of science and math, both for teacher reference and for students to enjoy.

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9. Similar stuff (others are doing)

Who’s teaching ideas through stories?

My hunch is that the classical education people do this the best. Flipping through Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well-Trained Mind, you see a lot of books about the lives of scientists and mathematicians. At the college level, the Great Books programs (e.g. St. John’s) actually have you learn science and math by reading the original writings of people like Aristotle, Galileo, and Einstein.

I’ve long been entranced by the science curriculum developed by David Harriman at the Van Damme Academy,⁵ which promises to take high school (and middle school?) students through the original thinking of the people who created modern science.

And there’s the wonderful book series Thinking Mathematics by the wonderful James Tanton, which is how I learned that trigonometry began as an attempt to measure height of the stars as they moved around the flat Earth.⁶

I have an interesting hunch about these: the better they are at explaining ideas, they worse they get at storytelling. (The exception to this is Thinking Mathematics; I can’t speak for David Harriman’s curriculum. Speaking of which, Harriman’s is expensive, but if anyone wants me to review it, feel free to buy me a copy; I’ll send it back to you afterwards, and maybe purchase another copy for myself.)

Bah! The better the story is, the richer the conceptual understanding can become. This is one of those situations where Egan’s approach can unify approaches that have too long been split.

Who’s hanging portraits on walls?

You also see something like this in Roman Catholicism. I’m a regular at a local Catholic coffeeshop; on one wall are photographs of saints in the 20th century. There’s no better way I can think to remind visitors of the values of the café, and to invite conversations about what those values really mean.

Obviously, this isn’t only a Catholic thing — Buddhist temples will have picture of bodhisattvas, and some Jewish households will have photos of particularly revered rabbis. I’ve read that in the 1930s, it was common to find framed photos of FDR on the walls of many Democratic houses. Feels like a fairly common human impulse…

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10. Open questions

What about when we don’t know who, exactly, figured this stuff out?

This is the case with a lot of elementary school math. What I usually did, teaching math, was to learn as much as I could, then create a hypothetical story of where, for example, the “%” symbol might have come from. Anyone else have ideas?

From 0 to 10, how nit-picky should we be on details?

Do we have to get every detail right? Do we pass along known myths?⁷ I think there’s a wise balance to be struck here.

What should we call these people?

I’ve kept writing “the people who discovered/invented the ideas”, but that’s a mouthful. We could refer to them as “the innovators”, or “the original content creators”.

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11. What small steps could we take toward this, now?

List sources

The first (and easiest) step would be to list out sources of great stories.

For science, Joy Hakim’s The Story of Science series (Aristotle Leads the Way, Newton at the Center, and Einstein Adds a New Dimension) are a great place to start. Because they’re in textbook-y form (but better than 99% of other textbooks, don’t worry) they don’t try to give emotionally compelling stories, but they cover so many stories, and connect those together in the bigger picture.⁸

Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and The Body: A Guide for Occupants only cover scientific knowledge from the 1600s on, but they showcase his powerful storytelling abilities.

For math, there’s the aforementioned Thinking Mathematics series by James Tanton. (Notably, Tanton is also the author of The Encyclopedia of Mathematics, which has a strong historical focus. Also notably, Tanton is the wacky teacher who created Exploding Dots, and is the man that the AI tutor Synthesis.com is based on. Dude knows his pedagogy.)

In math, there are a lot of false origin stories — the book The Cult of Pythagoras: Maths and Myths looks into some of them.

Wanna suggest others? Put ‘em in the comments!

[Edit: HOLY CRAP CHECK THE COMMENTS.]

Connect sources to content

But to make this maximally useful, it’s not enough to list sources of stories — they need to be put in a publicly-accessible Google doc and linked to the relevant academic content. (So, for example, there should be a heading for “fractions”, and a heading for “percents”, and a heading for “integrals”…) To do that, we need a backbone for science and math.

For science, the natural choice should be the Next Generation Science Standards, but blech they’re much too broad to be of use.⁹ I’m happy to let the list of lesson topics I’ve made for Science is WEIRD serve as a first draft of this. (If anyone wants to start compiling this, I’m happy to pay upwards of a hundred bucks if you can link stories to every lesson in the first year. I’ll share it with families, and we’ll put it up for free on this substack.)

For math, we need a list o’ content topics by grade. I’m not sure where to grab this from — the more universal, the better. I’m open to ideas.

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12. Related patterns

Bad stories are terrible. To make good storytelling easy, we should instruct Simple Storytelling Structures° to teachers, and have them teach it to students.

Origin stories can help students devise the answers to Boss Questions° (in math) and Science Riddles° (in, you guessed it, science). Students should draw pictures of these people in their DIY Textbooks°.

Origin stories zoom into one individual or group; to capture the fuller flavor, we need to back these up with an exciting Spiral History° approach to world cultures. And as mentioned, the most important innovators can be put on a Wall of Saints°;¹⁰ they can also be put on our Big History Timelines°. 

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Afterword: Going full-meta, here

These are loooooooong

This is the third pattern; it’s longer than the second, which was longer than the first. Soon, these patterns will be infinitely long, and no one will be able to read them!

😳

I’m hopeful to start making these shorter; I’m not quite sure how. If you tell me what you particularly like, I’ll make sure to not chop its head off.

Is there any pattern you want sooner…

…rather than later? Eventually, there’ll be more than a hundred of these. (And then, a book!) (Maybe. Promising something makes it less likely.) I’m working ahead on these, but if

1. I’ve mentioned a pattern that would be useful for you now, or

2. there’s a general topic you’d like to see explored (e.g. writing, literature, classroom management, spaced repetition, school lunches…),

lemme know in the comments. I might move it up in the hopper.

Know an expert?

Do you know someone (or a community) who’s really into the history of math and science? They might be able to suggest some great resources. Point ‘em here, and I can give them a free week’s subscription.

And again a reminder that this Saturday —

Saturday, December 16, 2023
6pm Eastern / 3pm Pacific / 11pm Universal Time

— we’ll be celebrating our inaugural live “book” club. It’ll be for paid subscribers only. (If you feel you have a perspective to add, but can’t afford the $5 for the monthly subscription, lemme know, and I’ll specially send you the link.)

We’ll be reading the short intellectually wrenching essay “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart. I recommend reading it regardless of whether you come to the discussion.

The last time I linked to the sign-up form, Google ate it. (Then Google and I wrestled. Then Google won.) I believe I’ve done better this time. To get the link (if you’re a paid subscriber), just click the button below — I’m looking forward to a rich exchange of ideas!

1. And every parent trying to remember what exactly makes something a “reptile” to look smart in front of his 11-year-old is in the same position as Carolus Linnaeus who, it turns out, really didn’t understand much about reptiles.

2. And this may be the most relatable story of Nikola Tesla.

3. And by “neurodiverse classrooms”, I mean “classrooms that contain normies, too”.

4. The least important origin story, the learnéd chroniclers tell, is that of John Venn, who invented Venn Diagrams. John Venn was English. John Venn lived in the 1800s. John Venn invented Venn Diagrams. You now know all of the interesting things there are to know about John Venn.

5. The Van Damme Academy, located in Viejo, California, is the only school I know of driven by an explicitly Objectivist, Ayn-Rand-oriented view of education. I am not an Ayn Randian. This school, nevertheless, makes me so excited.

6. How did you learn about it?

7. Thanks to Oz Nova at CS Primer for pressing me on this recently.

8. Oh, wow, she has a new series coming out on the history of biology. To the Bat-Book-Mobile!

9. I hate these standards.

10. Is that title too provocative? The trouble is I love it.