Life of a Lab Rat

An interesting piece in the Grauniad last week (I know, I know, I'm sorry - I go to work, see an interesting article, try to remember it and the witticisms that spring to mind, finally come home on the mind-numbingly over-crowded Inner West line, have some dinner, the Younger Pawn is running around with a duvet cover on her head and making 'woo woo' noises and by then I've completely forgotten what I wanted to say) about the whole 'we're all doomed' thing.

(One reason I'm linking to it now is because I'm honestly not sure if any of my Australian readership read the Grauniard, possibly the last bastion of halfway decent professional reporting in the UK.)

Only biology is safe and, as everybody knows, biology is science for girls.

Emma Brockes begins with "It is presumably never easy being a physics teacher, what with physics being, you know, hard, unlike geography or needlework" and continues in pretty much the same vein. She recaps the startling statistics relating to dwindling 'hard science' student numbers before offering, as part of the reason for this, the tired perception that

physics and chemistry are boring, prohibitively hard, too abstract and too male, in a spoddy, won't-get-a-girlfriend kind of way that appeals to neither sex. Just lean back for a moment and see what images the following words bring to mind: series and parallel circuits; resistors; capacitator; magnetic flux density; voltage graphs. It is enough to have you reaching for your asthma inhaler. (The fact that the universal reader to whom I imagine I am addressing these words is, in my mind, an arts graduate, is also part of the problem.)

It turns out that there are moves to increase appeal without compromising content. And Daniel Sandford Smith, the education manager at the Institute of Physics, is a man after my own heart, or at least my kidneys, when he is reported as saying that there are two parts of the problem, "one, about producing new scientists, and the other, about producing scientific literacy for all".

However, there are dire warnings against the 'trendification' of science in schools and the CBI's call for 'inspirational' teachers, which again are spot on. Because, let's face it, it is not just physics teachers who are boring, uninspirational and irrelevant.

[S]cience is under-covered in the press because most journalists are arts graduates

But what really interested me was the argument that "with a tiny bit of aptitude, science is actually less hard work than arts subjects because you don't have to read so many long books". In other words, "If you grasp the fundamental principles, applying them is not that difficult", which is part of my contention that science is not about 'facts' (and see recent comments on a similar argument over the teaching of [Australian] history).

I have decided that I like Sanford Smith. I bet he gets all the girls aswoon, too:

"In some ways," says Sanford Smith in a small voice, "you shouldn't have to work that hard to make physics exciting, because ... " - he pauses, on the edge of the great unmentionable - "it is exciting. You just need to know enough about it."