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Aarthi Raju's picture

general discussion

It seems that my comment from three hours ago hasn't gone through, so let me summarize it:

I first questioned the idea that truth is relative. Isn't science a quest for the absolute, incontrovertible laws that govern the world we live in? Doesn't that mean that there is a single answer to each question that is either black or white with no grey area?

Secondly, I discussed how I don't believe Brian Greene gives enough credit to elementary/middle school science teachers. My parents are foreign (from India) and are members of the "lecturing = teaching" society, so whatever I learned as a child was very dry and unimagnative. But school was a different story. When I was in 8th grade, my teacher demonstrated air pressure by placing a marshmallow in a vacuum chamber so we could watch it bubble and expand. And in 3rd grade, we colored and cut out "intestines" from paper so we could see how long the small intestine really is (by the way, it's about 7 meters, and thanks to that demonstration, I've never forgotten it).

And lastly, I discussed that maybe his critique is accurate in terms of high school education. Not just science, but all subjects. We're so focused on our standardized tests (APs, etc) that we can't fit in activities and demonstrations which are interesting, but inevitably time consuming. So maybe we (Haverford and Bryn Mawr) will be better off excluding ourselves from the U.S. News college rankings.

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