Brandon - when generating your topics for Science is Weird, did you start by selecting from the potential topics Egan listed in Table 4.1 of the book? I saw a lot of familiar topics in there...
Michelle (a friend of the blog, and the mom behind researchparent.com) pointed out something interesting — almost all of the Science is WEIRD topics can be represented as emojis: 🌌, 💧, 🫁, ☁️, 🧫, and 🐌 for the first year, and so on. (All the SiW topics can be seen in the table at the top of this page: scienceisWEIRD.com/everything.)
What I take from this is that learning is often best when we focus on specific things that kids already feel like they understand. So a unit on the abstraction of “waves” isn’t as useful as one on “bread”.
I suspect there are limits to this — that there may be times when it really is better to dive right into abstractions. (Maybe when students are already deep in 👩🔬 Philosophic understanding?)
Fun fact: Michelle's blog is how I learned about Science is Weird last spring. I've been using her Minimalist Math worksheet since the COVID remote school year of 20-21.
FYI, I had a surprisingly negative visceral reaction to this article! I know you love controversy, but I figured I should give you a. heads up rather than do a surprise derailing. :-)
Useful heads up! (Now I'll prepare for a more spicy conversation — AND prepare to lean on the "impossible conversations" moves I'll mention in a post later today...)
Brandon - when generating your topics for Science is Weird, did you start by selecting from the potential topics Egan listed in Table 4.1 of the book? I saw a lot of familiar topics in there...
Actually, it’s a case of convergent evolution!
Michelle (a friend of the blog, and the mom behind researchparent.com) pointed out something interesting — almost all of the Science is WEIRD topics can be represented as emojis: 🌌, 💧, 🫁, ☁️, 🧫, and 🐌 for the first year, and so on. (All the SiW topics can be seen in the table at the top of this page: scienceisWEIRD.com/everything.)
What I take from this is that learning is often best when we focus on specific things that kids already feel like they understand. So a unit on the abstraction of “waves” isn’t as useful as one on “bread”.
I suspect there are limits to this — that there may be times when it really is better to dive right into abstractions. (Maybe when students are already deep in 👩🔬 Philosophic understanding?)
Fun fact: Michelle's blog is how I learned about Science is Weird last spring. I've been using her Minimalist Math worksheet since the COVID remote school year of 20-21.
FYI, I had a surprisingly negative visceral reaction to this article! I know you love controversy, but I figured I should give you a. heads up rather than do a surprise derailing. :-)
Useful heads up! (Now I'll prepare for a more spicy conversation — AND prepare to lean on the "impossible conversations" moves I'll mention in a post later today...)
The link works! Here’s the transparent version:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Shm08gDRkgrSVC_npdPlpQWkg9ubZLaK/view?usp=drivesdk