On Thu, Oct 04, 2018 at 11:16:19AM -0500, David Bapst wrote:
> April, All,
>
> > And yet, people teach first-year algebra every year.
>
> Yes, but... should they? Why do we require students to take algebra?
> Why would we (possibly) require students to take a class on data
> analysis, or (possibly) require that they attend a carpentry workshop?
> Recently I attended a teaching workshop where we were told that we
> needed to communicate to students what they were supposed to be
> learning in each class, and that there was a crisis of transparency
> where students want to know why they are taking the classes they are
> required to take. I think such instructor transparency is extremely
> important, but I think there's also crisis where institutions aren't
> transparent about why degrees requires such-and-such a course. And I
> think part of that is because many academics don't contemplate why
> courses are required or not.
>
[ good stuff elided... ]
>
> I don't know, maybe I'm making up a dichotomy between the exploration
> of a subject versus technical skills that doesn't exist?
>
> But if such a dichotomy is real, than it makes sense for different
> approaches to be ideal for maximizing benefit to the learners -- that
> one pedagogical environment would not be ideal for both. And I think
> that whether that dichotomy exists, or not, has implications for how
> we think about where Carpentries exists in context with longer-term
> courses in higher education.
I think this dichotomy absolutely is real, but it manifests
strangely in pedagogical practice. In an ideal world, you could
teach "critical thinking and problem solving in [field]" on the one hand,
and "skills and best practces on [specific activity relevant to field]"
But you can't *actually* do either of those. The given field's
broad approach to grasping its subject matter and approaching
problems are informed by the field's history, which is contingent
to some degree on the problems that the field faced initially, and
how it solved them. Likewise, it's hard to teach the skills needed
to solve specific problems without admitting that, much of the time,
the reason a particular skill is used in practice is because it's the
one that worked on other problems.
In cartoon form, for example, Physics favors foundational laws and
totalizing models, from which the solutions to important problems can be
derived, because early physicists were trying to figure out ballistics
problems and the solar system and clocks, which share an underlying
stratum of mechanics and gravity. In similarly cartoon form, early
biology confronted a bewildering variety of lifeforms from trees to
insect colonies to charismatic megafauna to humans, Computer science
is more recent, but no less contingent -- I was recently reading a book
about this ("The Great Formal Machinery Works: Theories of Deduction
and Computation at the Origins of the Digital Age", fwiw), and was
reminded that advances in logic and computer science went together --
Godel, Turing, and Russel were contemporaries. (Also, there is such
a thing as "advances in logic")
All of which is to say, you can't teach critical thinking and
problem solving in physics without at least implicitly invoking
ballistics problems.
I think the converse is also true. The skills needed to solve a
specific problem are embedded in the field's broader culture of practice.
Physicists solve rigid-body motion problems with conservation of energy
and momentum, because deriving specific solutions from foundational
principles is the Physics Way, whereas (more cartoony, bio is not my
field) biologists may determine a metabolic pathway in an animal by
finding some biochemical markers they've seen in nearby (in the Linnean
sense) animal, then proposing (and testing) that the new pathway is
analogous to the known one.
So, unable to teach "the field" without examples or "the method" without
the history of the field, what you *actually* do is ... teach first-year
algebra every year. And workshop problem sets in the tutorial sessions.
Algebra is a particular sub-field, but you hope it's exemplary of the
broader mathematical approach, and that students don't get bogged down
in the specifics. The problem sets help hone Algebra-specific skills,
and might not have a lasting impact on students that don't stay in
mathematics, but you do it anyways because it's impossible to just teach
"math".
For the Carpentries, we are of course in a time-constrained
corner at the workshoping-the-specifics end of this spectrum, but
we see the tension in the lessons. We promise learners primarily
that they'll be able to build software tools that will make them
more efficient at wrangling their data and getting results, and
secondarily that the tools will capture some of the capabilities
and allow this efficiency to persist across changes in personnel.
These skills are built on a foundation of computer science, which
has a reductionist philosphy built in -- your data-wrangling task
is made up of smaller tasks, which can be expressed as a sequence,
possibly with some conditionals, and has a functional representation
in terms of code. You live in a Read-Execute-Print loop, and the
E of this REPL is where these tasks happen. The solution to your
problem is the correct identification, aggregation, and sequencing
of sub-tasks, and it manifests in the form of code.
That last bit is our connection to the broader world. We
maybe sometimes don't see it, because it's the water we swim in,
and the vast majority of our learners are on-board with it, so it
generally doesn't need to be mentioned or acknowledged, but it's
still there. Learners who don't grok this will struggle, possibly
stuck on why our approach is so reductionist. Learners who come
to us without an immediate need might wish there was more emphasis on
this, maybe thinking that if we emphasized the principles more, they
could build their own solutions.
-- A.
--
Dr. Andrew C. E. Reid
Physical Scientist, Computer Operations Administrator
Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Mail Stop 8555
Gaithersburg MD 20899 USA
[email protected]
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