Mystery In The Classroom | Nobel winner addresses education summit to encourage changes in the way science is taught
Solving mysteries has drawn people since the dawn of time. After all that’s probably how the wheel was developed and put to use.
Excitement about mysteries in the natural world around him drew Craig Mello to science. The University of Massachusetts Medical School professor eventually went on to win the Nobel Prize along with Andrew Z. Fire of Stanford University for the discovery of RNAi, a mechanism in cells that can silence genes. It is hoped that RNAi can be used to treat or cure diseases by silencing certain genes.
Mello told an audience of Massachusetts school teachers at the University of Massachusetts Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Initiative, or STEM Summit in Sturbridge, that teaching science in its traditional method should change.
“The way we teach is more the history of science instead of doing science itself,” he said. “Mysteries are important.”
Not Too Far From The Tree
Mello has a daughter in the third grade and she has never expressed an interest in becoming a scientist, despite knowing a lot about what her father does. That is until this year when her teacher had the class watch as cocoons turned into butterflies, including one that was taken over by flies and hatched, of course, a fly, and analyzing and studying what happened.
That’s the big challenge: getting kids interested in those mysteries, and firing them up so they want to know the unknown and identify the unidentified.
Teachers, state education officials, colleges and companies that regularly hire math, science or engineering graduates all want to see that challenge met.
Intel Corp. — which has major operations in Hudson — is just one company that is trying to help find ways to meet it. It plans to give out $120 million over 10 years to programs that help get kids interested in math and science.
The company’s foundation will fund the Society for Science & the Public Engineering Fair, which runs the Intel Science Talent Search and Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
But that will be a continuation of what it is already doing, according to Rob Richardson, Intel’s education manager, who is based at the company’s Hudson plant.
The company also knows that to get students interested in math and science, teachers have to be comfortable teaching those subjects. Intel provided seed money to Fredericka Solomon, who specializes in project-based learning in Worcester East Middle School classrooms.
She and other teachers from Marlborough and Hopkinton developed a 40-hour, 3-credit class for teachers to learn how to engage their students through inquiry-based learning. And there are those important mysteries again.
In The Classroom
Intel has helped develop another course for elementary and middle school teachers, where they cover mathematics itself, making sure they really understand the concepts and how it works. It’s taught by Catherine Roberts, a College of the Holy Cross mathematics professor, who is paired with a teaching professor.
Roberts has enjoyed her experiences so much that she is trying to convince other professors to get involved in teaching it, to help make a difference in mathematics in America at the local level.
As she pointed out, many elementary school teachers have the bulk of their training in reading, not mathematics. When they’re stronger in math and confident about the different ways to reach an answer instead of using memorized rules or only what the textbook calls for, then they’re better teachers and the students get more knowledge.
Another mystery is how to help teachers have the right combination of factors, that magic, so they can help kids become interested in knowing the unknown. Mitchell Chester, the state commissioner of the Department of Education, summed it up best.
“Give me people with the right enthusiasm and the knowledge base,” he said, and the ability to relate very obscure information. Chester added that helping teachers is in part what the state’s STEM program is all about.
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